Historical breakdown of trench coatsfrom @fineasjackson

Transcript

This strap held grenades. This flap stopped a rifle kick. This latch sealed out trench wind. Nothing on this coat is decoration. It was built for war. This is episode 31 of Chasing Best, and today, we're looking at the design of the trench coat. Before this coat existed, staying dry meant wearing a Macintosh. Cotton bonded with rubber. It kept the rain out better trapped all your sweat in. You worse either wet from outside or wet from yourself. In 1879, a 21 year old Draper named Thomas Burberry figured out a solution. He'd been watching shepherds wearing smocks coated in lanolin, the natural wax from sheep's good, and it gave him an idea. What if you waterproofed each individual yarn before weaving it, instead of coating the whole fabric after? The result was gabardine. The waterproofing was the fabric itself. Then in 1900, the British War Office came to Burberry and said, build us a coat. Officers were still wearing heavy wool gray coats that soaked up rain and caked with mud, weighing them down. Burberry took his gabardine and solved their problems one by one. Rain soaking through the shoulders, a second panel across the upper back to catch the water before it hit the bad. Gear the officers had to carry, D rings on the belt for grenades, maps, and flasks. A gap at the collar that let the wind in, the throat latch, and an extra layer on the right chest, the gun flap, to pad the rifle kick and add waterproofing while aiming. But there's a part that most people don't no. Only officers could wear it, and officers worse exclusively aristocrats, the upper class. Regular soldiers were stuck in those heavy wool great coats. Some of them literally cutting off the bottoms to be able to walk through the mud. Meanwhile, officers were buying tailored gabardine from Burberry at a considerable personal expense. And then the coat that was supposed to protect officers started getting them killed. The trench coat made them instantly identifiable from a distance. And German snipers figured this out fast. By Christmas nineteen fourteen, officers were dying at a higher rate than enlisted soldiers. And the army was running out of officers. So they were forced to do something that had never been done before, promote working class soldiers into officer roles. The military called them temporary gentlemen. And one of the first things they did with that new officer's allowance, buy a trench coat. For a man who'd been a clerk or laborer a week earlier, this was proof. Proof that you belonged in a position that had always been reserved for someone above your class. But when the war ended, the temporary gentleman's status was revoked. These men went back to being clerks, but they kept wearing their coats, a badge of what they'd briefly been.