Spring is Just Around the Corner

Regular readers are likely to recall that heavy linen has the advantage of rumpling when its lighter relations crease, and that is why the heavy stuff is preferable for tailored clothing. The best for that purpose has been 14 ounce/420 gram cloth from either Holland & Sherry or Scabal (I believe London's W. Bill has some as well but I have never taken the time to check). And that is why scepticism abounded when H&S introduced its Shannon Linen book last Spring: beautiful cloth but the weight is only 10 ounces/300 grams. The world needed more suiting quality linen as the older H&S Emerald Isle book is sold out of several colors, but surely not that light. And then I thought of caps.


The thing about the construction of caps is that they have an inner structure that does most of the heavy lifting, so the cloth cover does not necessarily have to be heavy. So off went a couple of half meter pieces of the Shannon Linen to Lawrence & Foster for an experiment. The photos show the results in light blue and brown respectively. A man might not want a suit from the stuff but the caps look and feel much like caps made from the 14 ounce cloth.

Unfortunately for any intentions of wearing them in season, L&F apparently closed for the month of August, and then misplaced the material for a couple of weeks after they came back to work. That meant the caps arrived a month too late.

Of course, spring is just around the corner.