Atelier · 8 min read
On the trench — a century of weatherproof tailoring.
The garment that taught Europe to layer was never about the rain. It was about the cut.
By Letizia Rovira ·
The first trench was sewn in 1879 for officers wading through Flemish mud. By 1919 it was civilian; by 1939 it was iconic; by 1979 it had become, like the white shirt and the dark suit, one of the small handful of garments that mean the same thing in every European language.
What no one remembers is that the original cloth — gabardine — was patented not for warmth but for breathability. The yarn is woven so tightly that water runs off it; but the weave is open enough that you don't boil inside it. That tension, between weatherproof and breathable, is the whole quiet genius of the thing.
In rebuilding our Maison Trench we went back to a 280gsm cotton-silk gabardine, the heaviest the mill in Biella still makes. We took out the gun-flap, kept the storm-flap, doubled the back-yoke. The shoulder is wider than fashion, narrower than history. It is, we think, a trench for now.
We made it in three colours: ecru, ink, and a deep bottle-green. None of them photographs perfectly. All of them age beautifully.