Read: Esquire: The Best Rain Jacket Is Still a Waxed Jacket
Waxed cotton originated in sailcloth and was, for decades, the choice of sailors, ranchers, and explorers. Then modern chemistry figured out how to turn liquefied dinosaur bones into a synthetic fabric, and we got the swishy modern raincoat. But this is Esquire, where we still care about watches as mechanical alternatives to the clock on our iPhones. There has to be a place for the old stuff, right?
Correct. After college, I tested fabrics for Gore-Tex. I was doing a summer course of wilderness skills training in the Alaskan backcountry—mountaineering, sea kayaking, and backpacking across public lands. Another part of the gig was that posh British fabric engineers would send us, the enterprising young students, into the wild with Frankenstein-ed jackets of experimental fabrics. We were out in the field for three to four weeks at a time, re-rationed by bush plane, and got to know our gear (and tentmates) better than we wanted.
I learned two things that summer: 1) Don’t fuck with bears and 2) even the best, most high-tech modern fabric can’t last against an all-day rainstorm. Eventually, everyone gets wet.
Don’t sleep on domestic production...I’ve also rotated in Tom Beckbe’s burly Tensaw jacket....
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