Work jacket in working linen in Gaelic blue
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Buying
£245.00
Work jacket, made in London, with a linen of middling weight (260gsm) from Northern Ireland, and horn buttons from the Midlands.
Sizing
The jacket fits true to size, and so the mannequin — the most standard 38 in the world — wears S. The body is short, and its shape is fairly straight. The sleeves are narrow, and the cuffs tighten firmly around the wrist.
| XS | S | M | L | XL | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| To fit chest | 36 | 38 | 40 | 42 | 44 |
| Pit-to-pit | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| Shoulder | 18¾ | 19¼ | 19¾ | 20¼ | 20¾ |
| Back length | 27½ | 27¾ | 28 | 28¼ | 28½ |
| Sleeve from centre-back | 34 | 34½ | 35 | 35½ | 36 |
The jacket is a short and casual one, with five buttons. It has a stand collar — a Mao collar, sometimes called, or a Delhi collar, depending on your historical reference points — which starts an inch high at the front, and rises gently around the back of the neck.
The buttons on the jacket are horn, and are light in colour and matte in finish. Being as they are an entirely natural thing, these buttons, each one looks a little different to the next, varying in tone and hue. The same goes for the little backing buttons (below-left) which support each of the buttons on the front.
The jacket has five visible pockets. First are two open pockets running across the front. They are deep and capacious, and are best thought of as buckets for all and every belonging. They are supported at either corner with strong tacking stitches (above-right) — as are all the other patch pockets here.
The jacket has a chest pocket on the right-side as worn — by no means slight in its own right — which is mirrored by stitching of another pocket over on the opposite side.
The sleeves are a standard sort of width, but they taper sharply at the elbow and fasten snugly around the wrist with gusset-type cuffs.
The jacket has two medium-size jet pockets on the inside — one on each side. That brings the total pocket count on the jacket up to five — or even six, if you include the hidden one, the stitching of which is hinted at on the front of the body.
The jacket is half-lined in the body with the same material as the outer cloth. It has a little pleat down the centre — decorative, really — and the sleeves are lined with lightweight cotton.
The cloth here is a mid-weight hopsack linen. It is a deceptively simple cloth. The colour is very deep, the handle is soft and smooth rather than coarse, and up close can be seen the little slubs and markings that elevate a very good, trusty linen, to a pleasingly characterful one.
As worn
The gent here is 6'1", more or less 12 stone, and is as standard a 38 chest as you could hope to meet. The jacket he's wearing here, then, is a size S.
Makers of
The jacket is made at an outerwear factory in London: the best, many agree, in the capital. The jacket is cut by the hands of a cutter with some 30 years in the trade, and sewn by one of four seamsters whose meticulousness and pursuit of perfection would be caricature were the end results not always so good.
The cloth is woven by a linen mill, a few miles south of Belfast in Northern Ireland. The mill was built at the end of the 1800s, back when Belfast was "Linenopolis". That it's one of the last mills still standing in the area is testament to its exemplary work in the weaving, dying, and finishing of luxury-grade linen.
The horn buttons were cut, shaped, and polished by the last such factory in Britain (now defunct). It was part of a tradition in the Midlands first linked to the meat industry of the 18th century. "It is no easy task," said William Hutton in 1780, "to enumerate the infinite diversity of buttons here in Birmingham."
So they say
Yet another beautiful (and functional) thing.
Feedback from a chap in London, who picked up the work jacket in heavy cord in October 2018.
As with my overshirt, I am very pleased with the work jacket, too. Your things are very distinctive, without being at all gimmicky, and are beautifully made. Thank you.
On the heels of an overshirt acquired one week earlier, this gent bought the jacket in melton in August 2017.
After a brief detention in a mountain-top post office, the [work] jacket has arrived and is unsurprisingly delightful.
This gent bought a rare thing indeed — the jacket in wool-angora — in September of 2016.