The linen to bring to the Bahamas is light, long-fibre cloth whose garments move easily between very different islands in a single week: the town and resorts of New Providence, the pink sand of Harbour Island, the boats of the Exumas. Pieter Petros makes its collection by hand in Dubai and Belgium, much of it in certified Belgian linen, with seashell buttons and natural materials throughout, so that every piece is biodegradable by design.

The Bahamas is not, strictly, in the Caribbean. The archipelago lies in the Atlantic, east of Florida and north of Cuba, some seven hundred islands and more than two thousand cays spread across banks so shallow that the sea shows pale from the air. The climate follows: warm all year, freshened by trade winds in winter, hot and humid in summer. Linen is the natural cloth for all of it.

Winter, from December to April, is the high season: days in the mid-twenties, cool evenings that welcome long sleeves, and seas that can turn choppy when a cold front comes down from North America. Summer is hot and humid, and the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June to the end of November. The Bahamas gained independence on 10 July 1973, and its great festival is Junkanoo, when the streets of Nassau fill with costumed groups, cowbells, goatskin drums and horns in the early hours of Boxing Day and New Year’s Day.

For an island wardrobe, judge linen by how it looks at the end of a day by the sea. Good long-fibre linen keeps its body through heat, salt air and a long boat ride, where a weak cloth goes limp. Look for a shirt that feels crisp rather than soft when new, because fine linen softens with every wash; for an even yarn with natural slubs; and for a certification you can check, such as Belgian Linen®, whose certificate traces the flax from the field to the cloth. How durable linen really is explains why the fibre lasts.

Nassau, on New Providence, is the capital and the gateway. Bay Street, the Queen’s Staircase cut into the limestone, the pink public buildings of Parliament Square: a morning in town asks for more than beachwear. For him, the Laos Short Sleeve Linen Shirt in Sky Blue with PP Casual Linen Trousers in Vanille from the men’s linen collection. Across the bridge on Paradise Island, The Ocean Club, a Four Seasons resort, keeps the Versailles Gardens, terraced lawns climbing to a medieval French cloister reassembled there in the 1960s. Dinner there asks for a collar: the Monte-Carlo Male in Oyster, with its walnut buttons, and PP Trousers 100% Linen in White; for her, the Amelia linen dress shirt in Oyster, also with walnut buttons.

Harbour Island, off the north of Eleuthera, is reached by water taxi from the airport at North Eleuthera. It is about three miles long, and its Atlantic side is a beach of pink sand, coloured by the shells of tiny marine organisms called foraminifera. Dunmore Town, its only town, is a grid of clapboard houses and picket fences, and people travel it by golf cart. In the sea, a man wears PP swim shorts in Roosewood Pink, in Belgian linen, and a Laos Short Sleeve Linen Shirt in White over them at lunch; for her, the Linen Ladies Set in Sky Blue by day and the Amelia in Coral Orange for dinner, a dress in itself.

The Exumas run south-east from New Providence in a long chain of cays and sandbars. The Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, established in 1958, was among the first protected areas of its kind anywhere, a no-take zone where fish, coral and iguanas are left undisturbed; nearby are the swimming pigs of Big Major Cay and Thunderball Grotto, a cave entered by swimming at slack tide. This is a wardrobe for a boat: swim shorts, and against the sun on deck the Laos Long Sleeve Linen Shirt in Oyster; for her, the PP linen blouse in Sky Blue over a swimsuit.

Eleuthera itself, long and narrow, has the Glass Window Bridge, where the deep blue Atlantic and the green shallows of the Bight of Eleuthera lie only metres apart. Days there are for driving between empty beaches in PP linen shorts in Beige and a pale shirt.

The collection is ordered before the trip, and in the region it is also presented at the boutique of Four Seasons Resort and Residences, Río Grande, Puerto Rico. For dressing island by island, see what to wear in the Bahamas.

Read more: What to Wear on Harbour Island · What to Wear in the Exumas · What to Wear in Nassau and the Bahamas