Most of St John is national park. In the 1950s Laurance Rockefeller acquired much of the island and gave the land to the United States, and Virgin Islands National Park, established in 1956, now covers roughly three fifths of it along with a good part of the surrounding water. Development stays at the edges, and the interior is forest, ridge and trail. The clothes worth bringing are the ones that can go from a trail to a bay to a table in Cruz Bay without a hotel room in between.

Cruz Bay is where almost everyone arrives, on the short ferry from Red Hook on St Thomas. It is a small town of bars, restaurants and galleries around a harbour, informal and friendly, where cars drive on the left and the currency is the US dollar. In town, what to wear in St John is simple: swimwear stays on the beach, and a shirt is expected. The Laos Short Sleeve Linen Shirt in Pink, worn over PP linen shorts in Navy Blue, is the right weight for an afternoon on the harbour front: open enough for the humidity, finished enough for a restaurant terrace.

The north shore road runs east from Cruz Bay past a series of bays inside the park: Hawksnest, Trunk Bay with its marked underwater snorkelling trail, Cinnamon, Maho. The water is clear, the sand pale and the shade comes from sea grape and palms. For men, the PP natural swim shorts in Oyster or Sapphire Blue are the shorts for the sea, worn from the car park to the reef and back. For women, the Amelia linen dress shirt in Blue goes over the shoulders after a swim and on to lunch without anything else, and the ladies linen set in Light Blue works for the drive between bays.

The trails are the other half of the island. The Reef Bay Trail descends through forest past stone petroglyphs to the ruins of a sugar estate on the south coast; the Ram Head Trail crosses open, dry, cactus-covered ground to a headland above the sea. The Annaberg ruins on the north shore, the remains of a plantation worked by enslaved people, are a sober and important place to stand. On these walks, long sleeves and longer legs are worth more than shorts: the forest has insects and the open ground has no shade. The Laos Long Sleeve Linen Shirt in Oyster, sleeves down in the morning and rolled by midday, covers the arms without adding heat, and light trousers protect the legs on the scrub sections.

Coral Bay, at the eastern end, is the island’s quieter half: a wide bay of moored sailing boats, a scatter of restaurants and bars, and a pace slower even than Cruz Bay. Evenings across St John stay casual, but the better tables deserve a little thought. For men, the Bliss Linen Shirt in Pink with PP Casual Linen Trousers in Vanille; for women, the Amelia linen dress shirt in Pink, which needs nothing more than a pair of sandals. Linen colours read well against the deep greens of the hills and the blue of the bay.

The winter season runs from December to April, when the trade winds are steady and the air is at its driest. Autumn is the end of the Atlantic hurricane season, so October and November visits are best planned with an eye on the forecast, though the island is green and quiet then. St John sits within easy reach of other islands in the same waters: the British Virgin Islands lie across a narrow channel to the north and east, and to the west, beyond St Thomas, is Puerto Rico, where the PP collection is presented at the Four Seasons Resort and Residences in Río Grande, as Pieter Petros in Puerto Rico sets out.

A practical note on packing: the park asks for reef-safe sun protection and for nothing to be taken from the shore, and a small dry bag for the trail keeps a spare shirt clean for the drive back to town.

From Leinster Bay, below the Annaberg ruins, Tortola is close enough to pick out the roads on its hillsides, and the line between American and British waters runs through the strait in between.

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