By slot: outerwear

A guide to outerwear

Coats are often the most expensive thing in a wardrobe, partly because they use so much fabric. This guide explains the words you’ll see on a coat’s label, so you can tell what a high price is paying for.

Gabardine and the trench

The V&A’s guide to the Burberry trench says Thomas Burberry invented gabardine in 1879 and patented it in 1888, a fabric woven in a tight twill from specially prepared yarn. During the First World War, the gabardine coat’s protective qualities led to its wide use by officers, which is what gave the “trench” coat its name.

What’s useful here is the idea that a coat’s protection can start with how the cloth is made. It’s a good question to ask of any technical coat: where does its performance actually come from?

Cashmere means something specific

In the United States “cashmere” is a labelled term with a definition. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance says the fibre must be the fine, dehaired undercoat of a cashmere goat, averaging no more than 19 microns, with no more than 3% by weight of fibres averaging above 30 microns. So on a US label, the word carries a measurable claim. It says nothing about how long the fibre is or how well the cloth was woven, and those are worth judging with your hands.

Vicuña, the far end of the scale

Loro Piana describes vicuña underfleece as averaging about 12.5 microns, from a wild camelid living above 4,000 metres in the Andes. It says a framework for the fibre trade was set up in 1994 with the Peruvian government and Andean communities, and that the population has more than quadrupled since. That’s the company’s own account of work it’s part of, so read it as such, but it does explain why so few coats are made from it.

Down: what the number means

Fill power is the volume a measured weight of down occupies, usually quoted in cubic inches per ounce: at 800, one ounce fills 800 cubic inches. PHD, a down specialist, calls it a useful simple measure of down quality, with “more filled air-space” meaning more warmth from the same weight. Note the limits. Figures vary by test method, and the number describes the quality of the down, not how much of it is in the jacket.

The shoulder

Tailored coats and jackets are largely decided at the shoulder. Neapolitan tailoring grew up as a reaction to the structured, formal style of Savile Row. Its jackets leave out shoulder padding, keep linings to a minimum, and on informal jackets set the sleeve like a shirt’s, the spalla a camicia, so the shoulder follows the body’s natural line and doesn’t reshape it. Neither approach is better. A structured shoulder gives you a silhouette, and a soft one gives you ease. Our guide to style tribes looks at both.

Next: Four style tribes