GQ commerce writer Gerald Ortiz, who believes many swim trunks suffer from garish colors and patterns, appreciates that Stone Island takes “the more difficult route of stripping away the extraneous details and focuses on materials.” The fabric is solid,” he says, “but far from boring thanks to the luxe feel and the mesmerizing metallic sheen.”
Best Resort-Ready Swim Trunks: Todd Snyder Seersucker Montauk Swim Trunk
Fabric: 44% Polyamide, 25% Cotton, 25% Polyester, 6% Lyocell | Sizes: XS-XXL | Liner: Mesh liner
Todd Snyder’s pull-on surf short—like many things Todd Snyder—is a luxe upgrade on a classic, in this time, the regular board short or “baggie.” It’s ideal for sweltering vacations, thanks to its quick-drying, lightweight Portuguese seersucker that also simply feels incredibly nice to run your hands over. Never one to scrimp on the details, Todd Snyder has also included an elastic drawstring waist, fine mesh liner, a self-draining back pocket, and a key holder to help you keep your car or room key secure even while hitting the surf. These 5-inch shorts hit around the mid-thigh, but Todd also makes them in a longer 7-inch.
Best Swim Trunks for Watersports: Outerknown Apex Trunks by Kelly Slater
Fabric: 89% recycled polyester, 6% recycled spandex, 5% spandex | Inseam: 9 inches | Sizes: 28-38 | Liner: No liner
The headline of Outerknown’s Apex trunk is right in its name: It was developed and tested by 11-time world surfing champ Kelly Slater. But you don’t have to be a wave enthusiast to appreciate the fact that the stretchy performance fabric is made from 100% post-consumer waste. Given that these linerless shorts are designed with water sports in mind, you also get stitch-free seams to reduce unnecessary chafing that would happen otherwise.
“I didn’t do any extreme water sports in these, but I could see why a surfer would love them—they’re quite stretchy and don’t restrict your movement,” Chin says. He also adds that he prefers a shorter inseam on his swim trunks, but the overall look is perfectly fine.
More Swim Trunks We Love
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
How We Make These Picks
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.
We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.
Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you. (Read more about GQ’s testing process here.)