The Peacoat Came Off a Ship
The Peacoat Came Off a Ship
A Dutch word, a naval cut, and wool milled until the wind gives up.
The peacoat is one of the few pieces of clothing whose name is older than the language most of us wear it in.
The word came from the cloth
In Dutch and West Frisian, pij meant a coarse twilled blue cloth with a nap raised on one side. A pijjekker was a jacket cut from it. Say pijjekker out loud a few times in an English harbor and you get pea jacket. The other explanation, the one the US Navy has long favored, is pilot cloth, a heavy blue cloth shortened to P cloth and then to P coat. Both stories end in the same place, which is that the coat is named for the wool and not for the shape.
American newspapers were already printing the words pea jacket in the 1720s. The coat is that old.
Cut for a deck
Everything about the shape came from working on the water. It is short, because a long coat catches on rigging. It is double breasted, so a second layer of wool sits over your chest where the wind hits. The collar is broad and stands up. The pockets are cut on a slant so your hands go in flat, and the coat pulls in tighter against you while they are in there. Nothing on it is decoration, and it has stayed almost exactly the same for three hundred years.
Kersey, then melton
The old naval coats were made in kersey, a dense wool left with much of its natural lanolin in the fiber, which is why they shed rain the way a sheep does. The standard for a long time was around 30oz cloth. Kersey gave way to melton through the 1970s, and modern coats generally sit between 22oz and 32oz. Either way the principle holds. The cloth is milled until the weave closes up, and once the weave closes, wind has nowhere to go.
Ours
I wore a vintage peacoat for more than ten years before we made one. Ours is 14.7oz wool woven special for Black Bear Brand in the Aichi Ichinomiya area of Japan, a region that has woven wool for generations. It is lined throughout in blue cupro made special for us in Japan. Anchor buttons made in Japan. Two concealed pockets inside. The COMMANDER tag at the inner neck. The coat is made in Japan by our craftsmen from the wool to the final construction, and a new color is coming in my forest green melton.
A Way Of Life.
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