Comfort that keeps up with the adventure.

Why we're making them

Some parents cut the lining out.

Most children's swim shorts have a mesh liner sewn inside. It's the part that rubs. It traps sand, it drags on wet skin, and it's the reason a lot of children won't keep their shorts on past lunchtime.

There are guides online teaching parents how to cut it out. That's not a gap in the market so much as a queue of people already solving the problem themselves.

"He has chafing issues in most clothes, but swim trunks are the worst culprit." A parent, in a public review of a children's swim short

So we're not putting one in. The comfort comes from the absence of a liner, a close cut and flat seams — not from added length. A loose short slides against skin; a fitted single layer moves with the leg.

Why swim shorts have mesh liners — where they came from, why they cause trouble, and what to look for instead. Useful whoever you buy from.

What we're making

Two panels, an elastic waistband, two hems.

That's the whole garment. It's a deliberately simple thing to make, and every part we've left out is a part that could rub.

Layers

One. No liner, no mesh, no gusset.

Cut

Close-fitting short boxer length, from a garment we measured rather than guessed at.

Waist

25 mm enclosed elastic. No drawcord — nothing to catch or knot.

Sizes

2–4 through 11–12, five sizes.

Fabric

Recycled polyester and elastane. We're specifying certified recycled content and asking every factory for the chain-of-custody paperwork to prove it.

We're in sampling now. There are no photographs on this page because the garment doesn't exist yet, and we'd rather show you the real thing than a render.

The prints

Eight drawn. Four will make it.

Children choose swimwear by the print — every parent knows this and most brands design as though they don't. These are what we're choosing between. The people on the list get the vote.

Shown flat, at roughly the scale they'd print. Two of these we drew ourselves.

Something we found

You can't see blue swimwear under water.

While choosing prints, we modelled how each one would look on a child a metre or two down — in a pool, and in British open water. The differences were larger than we expected, and they run counter to what most children's swimwear is actually made in.

Saturated pink and orange stay legible. Pale creams read as sunlight and foam. Blue — the single most common colour in children's swimwear — is close to invisible, because it is the colour of the water it's in.

Swimwear colour is not a safety device. It doesn't prevent drowning and it doesn't replace supervision. What a high-visibility colour does is shorten the time it takes an adult who is already looking to find a child under the surface.

Read the full findings — what we tested, what we found, and how to judge any swimsuit you already own.

Join the list

We're a long way from launch and we'd rather build this in the open. If you've cut a liner out yourself, we'd genuinely like to hear about it.