I have a rule about swimwear, which is that I don't buy any more of it. I break that rule for Hunza G roughly once a year, and I have never once regretted it.

If you've never gone down the rabbit hole: the label started life in 1984 as Hunza, founded by Peter Meadows, and it became genuinely famous in 1990 when Julia Roberts wore that electric blue cut-out mini dress in Pretty Woman. Then it went quiet for over two decades. Georgiana Huddart, who grew up watching her mother wear a pink version of the crinkle fabric, tracked Meadows down and relaunched the brand with him in 2015. She'd been buying up vintage crinkle in Leeds charity shops since she was eighteen. That's the kind of origin story you can't manufacture.

What she rebuilt it around is the Original Crinkle, an ultra-stretch knit that is the entire reason the one-size fit works. It's still made in Britain on circular knitting looms with thousands of hand-calibrated needles, and every metre gets held up to the light and checked by a technician before it's dyed and cut. Nine million stitches go into a single swimsuit. You can feel that when you put one on.

The one-size thing sounds like a gimmick until you own one. The fabric contracts and expands, so it holds without squeezing, and it doesn't have the sad stretched-out phase most swimwear hits by August. The brand's own argument for it is that a suit should survive your body changing, through pregnancy, through a decade, through whatever, and it means you're not rebuying every season because a number on a label stopped applying.

That's also, quietly, the sustainability case. It's not a marketing panel about recycled bottles. It's a garment engineered to be bought once. Hunza G's main dyeing facility treats its wastewater back to drinking-water quality and runs on 86% renewable electricity, and the brand signed on to the Science Based Targets initiative alongside Net-A-Porter in 2023. But the part that convinces me is that I still wear the one I bought years ago, and it looks like the one I bought last month.

The cotton-terry pieces are the sleeper hit and the reason this edit works for closing out summer rather than starting it. Shorts and a polo over a suit is the entire late-August uniform: lunch, the drive home, the airport. It's also the easiest way to stretch swimwear into September without looking like you're still on holiday.

My honest picks: the Phoebe rope-strap bikini, for obvious and slightly vain reasons, and a black square-neck one-piece, which is the single most useful thing in my suitcase. If you're buying one Hunza G, buy the one you'd wear on a boat, at a hotel pool, and under a shirt in a city in September. That's the one that earns it.

Everything here is live across Net-A-Porter, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and REVOLVE, so it's worth checking a couple of them. Colourways sell through at different speeds depending on the retailer, and the shade you want is often sitting at the one you didn't check.