Seattle Is a Coat Town
Seattle Is a Coat Town
Less rain than New York, spread across twice as many days.
People who have never been here assume Seattle is drowning. The numbers say something more interesting.
The numbers
Seattle averages somewhere around 38 inches of precipitation a year. New York gets closer to 50. What Seattle has is days. Rain falls here on roughly 150 days a year, and a good share of those days are drizzle and mist rather than anything you would call a downpour. It is also one of the cloudiest cities in the country, with something like 226 cloudy days a year.
The reason is the Olympic Mountains to the west. Wet air off the Pacific gets pushed up over them, drops most of its water on the way, and comes down the eastern side thinner. We live in the shadow of that.
What that does to a wardrobe
It means the coat is the center of everything. For eight months of the year the coat is what you are actually wearing, and everything underneath it is a private matter between you and the coat. Nobody here dresses for a single dramatic storm. You dress for a grey Tuesday in March that never quite commits.
Wool suits that perfectly. Wool holds warmth when it is damp, it does not get loud in the wind, and a densely milled cloth turns light rain away long enough to walk to the truck. It is not an accident that the great wool coats came out of maritime places.
First and Jackson
The original Black Bear Brand was a Seattle company at the turn of the twentieth century, run by George G. Black out of First and Jackson. A 1927 account in the Seattle Times lists what came out of that building: denim, wool jackets, shirting, corduroy, tin cloth. A hundred years later I am designing wool jackets in the same city and for the same weather.
Made here
Our Harris Tweed jackets are cut and sewn in Seattle from cloth woven by hand in Scotland. Our leather pieces are made here too. The rain outside the door is part of the design brief, and it always has been.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
Black Bear Brand Harris Tweed HIGHLANDER Coat
Black Bear Brand ULTIMATE WOOL Chore Coat in GOLDEN Harris Tweed
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Made in Seattle, Made in Japan: The Two Homes of Black Bear Brand