Linen pants and the wrinkle question

Twenty pieces of ours have linen in the title. None of them is linen. All twenty are 70% rayon and 30% linen, and that changes what you should expect from the crease, the wash and the drape.

Say the honest part first. We put the word linen in the title of five cuts, and in every one of them linen is the minority fibre. The fabric field on the page reads 70% Rayon, 30% Linen, and that is the whole of it. There is no pure linen anywhere in what we make.

This is ordinary at these prices and it still catches people out, because the two fabrics behave differently in the hand. Flax is stiff and has almost no elastic recovery: bend it and it stays bent, which is where the famous linen crease comes from. Rayon is limp and heavy. A cloth that is mostly rayon falls in soft folds rather than snapping into sharp creases, and it hangs closer to the leg than flax would.

What you actually get from 30% linen

Enough texture to read as linen in a photograph and across a room. Some of the dry, cool hand. Less of the breathability, because rayon does not move air the way flax does, and that is the part people notice in real heat. If you came looking for a fabric that gets better every summer for a decade, this blend is not it, and we would rather you knew that from a page than from the parcel.

The same blend, written two ways

Our own listings cannot agree on the word order. Fifteen of these pages say 70% Rayon, 30% Linen. The other five say 30% Linen, 70% Rayon. Same cloth, same mill, two different sentences, and we have printed both here exactly as they stand rather than tidying them into one. The fabric table on our fabric notes page shows them as two separate rows for that reason.

Washing, and the one cut that says do not

Four of the five cuts carry the same instruction: gentle machine wash or hand wash at 104F, hang to dry, no tumble dryer, no bleach, steam iron. The fifth, our smocked waist palazzo pants, says Dry Clean Only on the label. Same fibre content as the others, different care instruction, and we have no explanation to offer beyond the fact that it is what the label says.

Rayon is the reason the dryer is off the table. It loses a good deal of its strength when wet and it is heat sensitive, so a hot tumble is how a pair of ankle length trousers turns into a pair of cropped ones and never turns back. Wet weight is also why hanging beats draping over a rail: give it a hanger and let gravity work in one direction.

About the drawstring

Most of these run on a drawstring or a smocked elastic back. That is convenient, and it also means the waist band in the size table is a starting point rather than a hard limit. If your waist sits between two of our sizes, the tie gives you somewhere to go. The hip column is the one to check instead, and on these cuts it is measuring the trousers, not you.