From sheepskin to gabardine to Gore-Tex, Nick Ainge-Roy charts the evolution of the performance jacket.
ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1991, TWO GERMAN TOURISTS, ERIKA AND HELMUT SIMON, CAME ACROSS A BODY ON THE EAST RIDGE OF THE FINEILSPITZE IN THE ÖTZAL ALPS NEAR THE AUSTRIAN-ITALIAN BORDER.
The wizened mass looked more like a hunk of gnarled, polished wood than anything human. Five days later, it was helicoptered off the mountain and taken to the office of the medical examiner in nearby Innsbruck, where testing revealed the mummified remains to be those of a 5000-year-old man. They named him Ötzi, after the mountains he was discovered in.
In the ice around his body, archaeologists recovered weapons, tools and clothing that offered unprecedented insights into the lives of early Copper Age humans in Europe. Among his possessions, Ötzi had two items that speak to our eternal struggle against the elements: a coat constructed from the hides of sheep and goats, and a cape made from woven grass.
Ever since humans have breached the snowline, we’ve been looking for waysto keep ourselves warm and dry in environments we have not evolved to tolerate. We’ve also wanted to look sharp, no matter how bad the weather. As Ötzi has shown us, we’ve been succeeding at both for longer than you might think. His coat and cape are semaphores. They tell us that from early in the millennia-long evolution of outerwear we had one thing straight: if you’re going to go out in the cold, you’re going to need a good jacket.
THE PRE- COLONIAL ERA
For explorers and mountaineers, when it comes to jackets, the trick has always been to make a garment that both protects the wearer and allows them to move, like a lightweight, pliable suit of armour. Long before ice-axe toting Pākehā settlers headed for the mountains, Māori regularly navigated alpine and sub-alpine environments. And from the Canterbury Plains to the heights of Arthurs Pass and into the murky forests of Westland, they relied on the raw materials the land provided to craft simple yet highly effective forms of protection.
New Zealand’s Best Holiday Reading
SUBSCRIBE NOW
In the realm of outerwear, the most common pre-colonial garment was the pākē, or rain cape. Made by affixing hundreds of leaf strips, or hukahuka, over a woven foundation, pākē were woven from muka, the processed fibres of harakeke. Usually square or rectangular, they were worn over the shoulders and fastened across the throat or chest with ties.
As with modern jackets, pākē were designed not just to block rain out, but to channel it off the cape and away from the wearer. Nowadays, this is accomplished with a fusion of synthetic fibres, waterproof membranes and durable water repellent coatings, but back then, it was simple design.
Pākē did vary in appearance. Some had woolly, fur-like finishes, while others were embellished with a checkerboard design on their outer face. One rare and striking example held at Te Papa has a chequered black and red pattern made from woven strands of club moss.
According to Ngāi Tahu master weaver Rānui Ngārimu, the variations are both due to the methods employed by different iwi, as well as the availability of resources. “Harakeke was easily accessible and readily made, so it was used often,” she explains. The other materials added to the harakeke base depended on where the weaver was located, and where they went. “They made them out of various plants and fibres that were easily accessible to them on the journey… anything that was available that provided protection that they could utilise would be utilised.”
Each pākē was personalised to its wearer and to their journey. As with any mountaineer, Rānui says, “if they know that they’re going to be traversing mountains, they would make something that is fit for purpose. They planned what they were going to do, and they prepared for what they were planning to do.”
GAGA FOR GABARDINE:THE VICTORIANS
During the early days of European alpinism, mountaineering, as with nearly all leisurely pursuits, was an activity reserved for the monied. The general public was too busy being worked to death on farms and in factories to have time for, or afford, anything as grand as falling off a Swiss glacier. For this reason, the technical climbing jackets of today have a lineage that goes back directly to the attire of the Victorian upper class. And while they didn’t quite have “fit for purpose” nailed from the start, one thing aristocrats of the 19th century cannot be faulted for is their strict standards of dress. Whether playing croquet in Somerset or summiting the Matterhorn, they kept it dapper.
At the time, gentleman’s fashion centred around the suit and, with some allowances for practicality, this held true in the mountains. The fine wools favoured for eveningwear were substituted for durable, workhorse fabrics such as tweed. Long-tailed frock coats — think the type of jacket a moustachioed man riding a Penny Farthing would wear — were replaced by the sack coat, a shorter, loose-fitting jacket that became the basis for the modern blazer. But they were still essentially in suits, complete with ties.
For women, there was little distinction between climbing gear and everyday clothes. Blouses, petticoats, long skirts, corsets and jackets, as well as straw boater hats adorned with ribbons — they wore them all, and wore them in the hills. (When Freda Du Faur became the first woman to climb Aoraki in 1910, she did in a skirt, though, at just below the knee, it was scandalously short.)
Tweed was the fabric of choice because its high lanolin content provided some measure of water resistance. But there were a number of alternatives. In 1823, the Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh patented a process for waterproofing fabric by putting a layer of rubber between two layers of fabric. The Macintosh coat, or “mac”, was born. It wasn’t perfect. The rubberised fabric tended to get smelly, and it was known to melt in the hot sun.
There were home remedies for water resistance too. The Workwoman’s Guide (1840) offered this recipe for waterproofing cloth: “take half and ounce of isinglass (Russian is best), put it into one pound of rain water, and boil until dissolved; take one ounce of alum, put it into two pounds of water; and boil till it is dissolved; take a quarter of an ounce of white soap, with one pound of rain water, and boil till it is dissolved. After each of these ingredients has been separately dissolved, strain them separately through a piece of linen; afterwards, mix them well together in a pot … while thus near boiling, dip a brush into it, and apply it to the wrong side of the cloth intended to be waterproof.” (Insinglass, also known as “fish glue”, is a kind of collagen that comes from the dried swim bladder of fish. Alum, or aluminium potassium sulfate, is used in pickling and taxidermy.)
The nineteenth century’s greatest material advance in the battle against the wet, however, came in 1879, with the invention of gabardine by Thomas Burberry. Originally made from worsted wool and, later, cotton, gabardine is a fabric that uses an incredibly dense, tight weave to prevent water from penetrating. In Burberry’s time, the fibres were also coated in lanolin to improve water resistance. Gabardine offered climbers a significant improvement in durability, weatherproofing and weight reduction over the heavy tweeds they were accustomed to, and its introduction likely marks the first time that a specialised, purpose-made fabric was used in alpinism.
When the body of George Mallory, the famous English mountaineer who disappeared on Everest in 1924, was discovered in 1999, he was wearing a custom- made Burberry climbing suit. Mallory’s coat included a small, yet important, technical detail: a pivot sleeve. A pivot sleeve allows for a greater range of motion in the arms and shoulders by cutting the lower panel of the sleeve into the body of the jacket instead of attaching it to the shoulder with a circular armhole. It’s a minor change, but the ergonomic effect is drastic.
By the 1930s, developments like this had moved climbing jackets away fromthe formality and dual-use status of the Victorian era, and into a niche of their own.
DON’T MENTION THE WAR: VENTILE
As mountaineering moved into the second half of the 20th century, the gear involved became increasingly specialised and more recognisably modern. The ties were long gone, and even designs like Mallory’s comparatively modern Burberry getup were superseded as climbers slipped into synthetic base layers and swaddled themselves in goosedown suits.
In photos from 1953 ascent of Everest, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary are wearing parkas much like those you could find on the main street of any modern city. Drawing heavily from British military designs of the Second World War, their jackets featured snug snorkel hoods, zippered chest openings, storm flap button closures and windbreaker-style kangaroo pockets, as well as toggles and drawstrings at the neck, waist and hem to cinch tight against the brutal Himalayan winds.
The use of these features on Everest marks the beginning of a design language that has remained largely unchanged over the past 70 years — the most significant difference between the jackets of 1953 and those of today is one of fabric, not cut.
In the case of Norgay and Hillary’s historic climb, the fabric in question was Ventile. The stuff has a great origin story. In the late 1930s, with war looming, there were concerns about shortages of the flax needed to make firehoses; this prompted researchers at Manchester’s Shirley Institute to start investigating cotton alternatives. The fabric they created, Ventile, was not coated with anything, but instead had a tight, dense weave, and fibres that would swell when they became wet to prevent further water penetration. Ventile was also durable, quiet, windproof and breathable when dry. So far so true.
Then, the legend goes, the besieged RAF were in desperate need of immersion suits that could keep downed pilots alive in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic long enough to be rescued, and Ventile, with all its marvellous features, was selected for the job. It’s been claimed that life expectancy for pilots who went into the drink was extended, thanks to Ventile, from just a few minutes to more than 20. However, according to a research paper published by Transport Canada, there is no substantial evidence that Ventile was used by the RAF during the war. The pilot story, it seems, is nothing more than a corporate fiction served up with a side of British wartime nostalgia by the currently Swiss manufacturer of Ventile.
Ventile may not have won the war, but it did offer fabulous performance. Its weatherproof qualities quickly found favour with adventurers and outdoor types as ideal for cold, dry mountain climates as a more durable and lighter alternative to wool.
By 1953, Ventile was the first performance fabric to stand atop Everest, and it continued to be used by mountaineers and polar explorers for more than 20 years.
THE MODERN DAY: GOING TO GORE-TEX
Rubberised fabrics like Macintosh were waterproof, but they weren’t breathable, hence smelly-ness notes above. Gabardine and Ventile were warm, but they weren’t great in the rain. They got heavy when saturated and could freeze in the cold. Unless you’re a traditional bushcraft enthusiast, you have no doubt turned, at some point, to synthetic fabrics, especially breathables like Gore-Tex.
To understand how Gore-Tex works, take a look at a non-stick frying pan. The fabric is made from polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), otherwise known as Teflon. A Kiwi engineer, John W. Cropper, was the first person to come up with a technique for turning a non-stick coating into fabric. It involved stretching the stuff until billions of tiny pores opened up; in fact, every square inch of Gore-Tex membrane contains nine billion pores, each one 20,000 times smaller than a drop of water, yet 700 times larger than a molecule of water vapour. It is this combination that makes water bead off you in a rainstorm and also ensures you don’t end up encased in a sweat-filled plastic cocoon.
Unfortunately, Mr Cropper didn’t patent his invention, and three years later, Wilbert Gore had the same idea. Hence Gore-Tex.
With this kind of technology on hand, the days of fundamental changes in materials and design are probably behind us. According to Daniel Bruce, senior designer at the British mountaineering label Rab, the development of garments like jackets is now focussed on incremental adjustments, “updates and innovations that, for most people, won’t make a difference.” And things are getting more specialised. Where a climber 50 or 60 years ago may have owned just one jacket, now they might have three, each for a specific pursuit. In turn, outerwear companies are expanding and versifying their ranges. “We can domuch more specialised products. Like, this is amazing for steep ice climbing and so for that jacket, we are going to have the best arm-lift you can possibly have,” Bruce explains.
STITCHES IN TIME
While Gore-Tex and other breathable waterproofs may mark the final step in an age-old mission to make the ultimate jacket for outdoor adventure, issues remain.
One is environmental impact. As Bruce noted, Rab have been working on stripping the fluorocarbons out of their products. “What we have found really difficult is maintaining functionality… the next big changes will be when we come up with amazing waterproof fabrics that don’t need any harmful chemicals.”
With this in mind, there has been a revival of interest in heritage fabrics, as consumers look to go back to natural fibres like wool and cotton which have less of an environmental impact than plastics. It’s also, like vinyl records and singlespeed bicycles, a bit of a hipster thing. Performance or not, Ventile looks cool.
The author would like to thank Nic Low, Rānui Ngarimu, Daniel Bruce and Jos Button for their contributions and assistance with this piece.
WORDS: NICK AINGE-ROY
ART: LULU GORDON-BOOTH
