LONDON — Orlebar Brown’s customers may spend their days swanning around glamorous resorts, sipping aperitivi on Capri or dipping into the azure waters of the Aegean, but the brand itself has been working hard, and fighting for its share in a difficult luxury market.
Revenue at the Chanel-owned brand has been growing 20 percent year-on-year, and more store openings and collaborations are planned for the next six months. But those results have been hard-won.
The brand returned to Pitti Uomo last June, and attended the Italian fair again earlier this month to showcase the breadth of its offer, and to drive home its positioning as a “tailoring and resort” brand that makes smart, off-duty clothes for the international traveler.
The spring collection, which lands in-store on Sunday, reflects that easy lifestyle and versatility. There are colorful knits, stripes, seersucker fabrics, jackets with bohemian flair and a lineup of light-touch tailored pieces.
The brand has also introduced relaxed, draw cord swim shorts that are available in three lengths. The latter are meant to be a casual counterpart to Orlebar Brown’s original tailored Bulldog trunks.
A look from the new Orlebar Brown campaign.
The accompanying campaign was photographed in Majorca by Jason Hetherington.
Trevor Hardy, Orlebar Brown’s chief marketing officer, said the mood of the collection reflects the “noise, spectacle, novelty and adventure of the fairground,” while the team chose Majorca for its “transportive, outdoorsy” and hot-weather feel.
While there may be lots of images poolside, and by the sea, Hardy emphasized that Orlebar Brown’s offer is only 25 to 30 percent swimwear, despite it having made its name with the flat-front, fitted Bulldog trunks.
“Although we were founded as a swimwear brand, our direction of travel is much more in the ready-to-wear world, and our biggest growth categories are trousers and shirts,” said Hardy.
“Our aim is to dress men for the good life — not just for the beach or the pool — but for all manner of off-duty living, whether it’s weekends or holidays away,” he added.
Establishing credibility in the ready-to-wear space hasn’t always been easy, but Chanel is behind the brand every step of the way, Hardy said.
“The beauty of Chanel is that they’re generational thinkers. It’s not just ‘How are we doing this year?’ but about going on a five-year journey to establish the credibility and permission to sell cashmere, merino, fine knitwear and and tailoring. We’ve certainly got the customer for it, and we’re really excited about the growth from those categories over the next couple of years,” he added.
Off-duty tailoring from the spring 2026 Orlebar Brown collection.
Orlebar Brown, which has more than 40 direct stores and 250 third-party locations worldwide, has an ambitious retail rollout program.
It recently opened in Monaco and plans to plant its flag at Brentwood Country Mart in Los Angeles and enlarge its unit in SoHo, New York, which will reopen in April.
It plans to open a store in Majorca, a further one in Ibiza, and its first unit in Capri. He said the brand had been looking for the ideal location in Capri for at least 10 years.
It is also expanding into multibrand stores at hotels and resorts including Raffles, Mandarin Oriental and One&Only Resorts.
He said the strategy for the store openings is to follow the customer on holiday. Orlebar Brown, he added, does not want to become a traditional menswear brand, or dress anyone for the office or formal occasions.
A look from the new Orlebar Brown collection.
“The origins of the company were swim shorts designed in the style of a man’s tailored trouser, and that fusion of tailoring and resort is something we want to retain. But we don’t want to be doing clothes you go to work in,” he said.
“We want to fuse the language of Savile Row and Jermyn Street with craft and the essence of holiday. That’s going to be our zone,” he added.
Orlebar Brown’s journey hasn’t always been smooth. Under Chanel, it found early success with knitwear and polos, but outerwear flopped. “It didn’t get a good reception, so we retreated back into more ‘transitional’ wardrobing,” said Hardy.
The brand has an ongoing partnership with the James Bond film franchise, now owned by Amazon, and is creating digital and physical products for a video game that’s set to be released in May about the Bond “origin story.”
Hardy said James Bond loomed large on founder Adam Brown’s original mood board, “so it’s been part of the brand since its founding, and we do have a cohort of customers who love everything that Bond does. Some of them even feel that they are James Bond,” he said.
