filson jackets and domestic wool
Posted in beautiful things by will - Mar 30, 2010Filson’s wool jackets are great. Beautiful clean minimal structures, great outer shell layers for sweaters and longjohns in the winter, and great for rainy and windy days the rest of the year. The only coat a person needs. Filson will send you a foot of any of their materials for home repair; this kind of support for the life of the object is a all too rare sensibility.
I feel the coolness of Filson may be belabored by many blogs recently, but it’s interesting to think about why they are so popular. They are simple. They are functional. They are old patterns, don’t have a dated feel, and they have a cultural statement. They remind us of outdoor labor and pioneering times, and also of later subcultures that were trying to reference those feelings, maybe the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies. The great fashion for beards and knit caps may be another manifestation of this nostalgia, or of these values, depending on the individual. I live in Brooklyn and I see there are definitely both camps under the same image. Why do woolens have these connotations for us though? There definitely can be some hard values behind this psychological/romantic image.
Beyond reference, wearing wool does carry a genuine social statement. Wool is a great garment for pioneers and ourdoorsmen for a few reasons, it is warm when wet, it doesn’t smell after a few uses, and it’s a relatively durable fiber. It’s been the garment of choice for the hardy fringes of society for ages, largely due to the hardy nature of sheep.
This is the true magic of wool; sheep can survive where few other things can. In the high mountains, the desolate faroe and shetland islands, and on the american frontier. Sheep are vital tools in the history of northern self suffiency. Now, in our industrial world where it is difficult to be self sufficient, the wool industry serves a reverse function; it an allow small scale agriculture to be a viable option for homesteaders in areas where the soil is not ideal for commercial crops. Thats an important thing, because most land is sub-optimal for competitive vegetable farming. Wool can keep land in the hands of small farmers. It is easy to blend when from multiple sources, it is easy to store and ship. The sad thing is that the price of wool in the us is now laughable since the military gave up on its longtime devotion to domestic wool uniforms in the midcentury and sportswear companies have moved on to modern synthetics.
US wool prices as of this week are at twenty nine cents per pound as of this week. This is absurd. Hundreds of thousands of small farms across the country have disappeared since the fifties, along with the textile mills that bought their fleece.
Filson is one of the last, and one of the very few to still use domestic wool. So buy a gorgeous two hundred dollar Filson jacket, it weighs about four pounds, a farmer somewhere will make a dollar. At least it’s a step in the right direction.