Last week, we celebrated summer with our friends at Orlebar Brown and special guests at El Chiringuito Ibiza, the beachside restaurant and event space in Ibiza. And it got us thinking. About lazy days spent lounging by bodies of water. Which, rather appropriately, is where Orlebar Brown itself first began…

In February 2005, Adam Brown was sat by a hotel pool in Rajasthan. He noticed that all the women looked great in their array of swimming costumes. The men, well, less so. And when lunch was served that day, Brown decided it would have been so much more convenient if, instead of going to his room to change, he’d been wearing a smart pair of swim shorts he could lunch in.

When he returned home, Brown discovered no such thing existed. So, he and a friend decided to create one. Despite no experience of clothing or the fashion industry, they spent 18 months creating a tailored approach to swim shorts with a unique fit and finish, drawn from the pattern of a traditional suit trouser.

In November 2006, Brown sold his first pair of Orlebar Brown shorts to a friend in Starbucks on Kensington High Street. It wasn’t long before the range of four styles in five colours and four lengths began to catch on. Four years later, Orlebar Brown came off the beach and out of the pool with its first T-shirts and polo shirts.

In 2011, when MR PORTER was founded, Orlebar Brown was one of the 72 brands we launched with. A year later, Daniel Craig wore a pair of sky-blue Setter shorts in Skyfall. This was a stroke of luck. In 2018, Orlebar Brown was acquired by Chanel. Another stroke of luck.

When Brown thinks back, just a few years, to when he did a “start your own business” course, manufactured 1,000 pairs of shorts with no business plan and worked out of a storage unit in west London, what has happened since doesn’t seem possible. Yet a picture taker who wasn’t a photographer, who became a clothes maker who wasn’t a designer, who became an entrepreneur who wasn’t a businessman, who founded a brand and sold it to Chanel, is a story with a happy outcome.

Isn’t that just what you want when you’re lying on a beach?