Wax On, Wax Off
What one jacket taught me about fashion, history, and taking better care of my belongings
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
-Mark Twain
“I do not believe that style is something that you’re born with. I think that you have to be born with curiosity and passion, but if you have that then you can have style.”
-Amy Smilovic
Underdressed, outerwear, unimpressed, I don’t care
For most of my life I believed two unflattering truths about myself: that I was not fashionable and that I was terrible at taking care of my stuff. These two beliefs tended to collide in unfortunate ways that reinforced each other. In high school, my ill-fitting jeans got grass stains on the knees from playing frisbee at lunch. Whenever I got a nice sweater as a gift in college, I’d manage to shrink it in the dryer or see its delicate wool nibbled on by ravenous yet invisible moths. After graduating, my dress shirts became wine-stained and my t-shirts oil-stained, both from too much high-impact cooking, drinking, and gesticulating at the dinner parties that defined and punctuated my 20s. Fashion felt like a game that other people knew how to play, but not me. Instead, I sat on the sidelines, too insecure and self conscious to stop and ask anyone to explain the rules to me.
I also faced relatively little pressure to ever dress up. This was especially true when it came to outerwear. In damp and mild Berkeley, layers were always necessary, but putting one on always meant a hooded sweatshirt or a fleece. The Bay Area, it should be noted, is also not known as a hub for male fashion. Here’s how Anna Wiener aptly described it in her book Uncanny Valley:
“They dressed for work as if embarking on an alpine expedition: high-performance down jackets and foul-weather shells, backpacks with decorative carabiners. They looked ready to gather kindling and build a lean-to, not make sales calls and open pull-requests from climate-controlled open-plan offices. They looked in costume to LARP their weekend selves.”
Upon visiting my brother in Brooklyn for the first time in college I was astounded to see and feel the stylistic differences in how people presented themselves when it was cold out. Here was a city of sharply dressed men and women, each subway car packed with endless iterations of ways to present an eye-catching silhouette to the world. Since I timed my visit in the midst of a frigid and wet spring, it looked like all 5 boroughs had been recently carpet bombed with pea coats.
When I was living in Madrid after college, yet another city infinitely more cosmopolitan than Berkeley, I was again floored by the dimensions of the fashion all around me. Thankfully for my non-existent style, I spent much of those 3 months cloistered in the prep kitchen of a Navarran restaurant trimming anchovies and frying pippara peppers and chistorra sausages, splattering grease ruddy with paprika all over my apron and chef’s coat in the process.
The stylish Spaniards still got to me somehow. With some help from my aunt Belén, I returned home with a thick bomber jacket from Adolfo Dominguez that was unlike any of the performance outerwear hanging in my closet. It caused me to critically re-examine the polar fleece based athleisure look I’d never consciously chosen in the first place, sowing the seeds of curiosity that would eventually reinvigorate my wardrobe the way a rainstorm reinvigorates a forest.
The compelling male fantasy of Roark
Clothing companies like Roark, Huckberry, and Filson are all textbook examples of aspirational lifestyle brands. Just as YETI’s marketing is about more than coolers, these companies fancy themselves as selling more than just attire, but rather an adventurous and rugged masculine identity you’re projecting to the world. People wearing the Roark Axeman jacket are ironically not all that different from the people in North Face Denali fleeces. You’re still cosplaying, just as a different kind of man. Instead of looking like you’re ready to stand astride a glacier or ice climb up K2, you look like the kind of gent one who might ride a motorcycle, split some logs, and then drink whiskey around a meticulously crafted fire while grilling multiple beasts over it with the self-assured pyromania of Francis Mallman.
This “old-school-cool” aesthetic that’s so prevalent in menswear today is in many ways a reaction against athleisure and technical clothing, where aesthetics have been largely cast aside for practicality and comfort above all else. This “REI-chique” look that Anna Wiener so elegantly parodied is defined by boxy synthetic fabrics, gratuitous amounts of pockets and zippers, and large logos of mountaineering companies, sometimes in reflective typefaces so even passing automobiles at night will still know where you shop. Wearing a Roark shirt or jacket is about projecting a different vision of manliness, one replaces functionality with handsomeness, synthetic fibers with cotton and wool, and performative outdoorsiness with an almost religious obsession with ruggedness. Even the Roark logo is deliberately understated, looking more like JRR Tolkien’s famous name symbol than the calling card of a clothing brand headquartered in Irvine.
All brand personas are clever fictions. Roark’s is no different. They seduce you with the fantasy of being of being well-traveled vagabond with the endless PTO days and disposable income necessary to pinball around the world on an endless adventure. He jaunts from Java to the Serengeti, from the Hebrides to Oaxaca, picking up friends and photos along the way, back just in time for a dawn surf session at a secret spot. He is immune to jet lag. The sun never sets on his five o’clock shadow in the same way the British imagined it wouldn’t on their empire. The only man I’ve ever seen that actually lives the life of a Roark wardrobe is The Most Interesting Man in The World from that Dos Equis ad campaign.
Yet while I can mock this marketing now, it still got to me. It is the reason why one day, while window shopping in the overpriced retail oasis that is West Berkeley’s Fourth Street, a green raincoat beckoned to me from inside the flagship Roark store.
Inspecting this coat up close, I felt an unfamiliar tacky finish on the fabric. Looking at the tags I learned that it was a collaboration between Roark and Halley Stevensons, a Scottish company with a long history of waterproofing and the claim to the domain name waxedcotton.com. I was captivated by the weather-beaten look of this raincoat. Marie Kondo would say it sparked joy. I knew I had to have it with a conviction that surprised even me.
Buying a heavy raincoat built for the Scottish highlands in the depths of California summer, drought, and wildfires was an odd choice. Perhaps buying it was a way to express my wish for it to rain more. I didn’t wear it often. When I did though, I’d reliably get a few compliments. It was a nice layer for when it was damp and misty, if not actively raining, as it is perpetually in the Western fringes of San Francisco and Marin County.
After wearing it to Ocean Beach, it got enough dust and sand on it that I reasoned it was time to finally try cleaning it. Having ruined multiple sweaters by machine washing them I reasoned the enlightened care decision would be bringing it to my local dry cleaner. When I went to pick it up I was appalled to see that that the jacket was 3 shades lighter and appeared to have lost all of the wax. In trying to turn a new leaf on my wardrobe, I’d ruined yet another foray into menswear with my own ignorance.
A quick sail through the history of waxed jackets
The genealogy of most menswear traces back to just two places: work and the military. While today men thankfully do more than just labor and kill each other (sometimes we’re contrarian assholes online, too), to look at our wardrobes you’d be forgiven for thinking that all our ancestors did was fight, fix stuff, and the other f-word. Waxed outerware is no different. Chronicling the rise of the waxed jacket deftly weaves together the history of fighting and working men quite nicely. It also smothers both in the waxy embrace of colonialism because Britain was involved.
Like the peacoat, the waxed jacket traces its ancestry to the British navy. Hundreds of years ago, an observant sailor in a storm noticed that wet canvas sails caught the wind better. However, wet sails were much heavier, which could actually slow the ship down. An enterprising sailmaker addressed both the problem and opportunity posed by wet sails by covering their canvas sails in grease so they would catch the wind but repel water. Since the most readily available type of grease at that time was fish oil, you can imagine just how rank these rudimentary waterproof sails must have been. Sailors back then didn’t have to imagine, since for hundreds of years they’d repurpose the leftover sail scraps to create waterproof raincoats or “slickers.”
Thankfully, they weren’t stuck with fishy coats forever. In the late 1700s, some enterprising Scottish sailmakers began to experiment with adding linseed oil to their flax sails, which was lighter and considerably less stinky than fish oil. Now is a suitable time to underline how much the history of raincoats owes a huge debt of gratitude to Scotland. It’s no accident this rainy and gloomy corner of the UK has produced some of the worlds most hardy and enduring outerwear.
With this rainy hub of sail and raincoat manufacturing firmly under their thumb, the British Empire exported waxed canvas coats around the world via their powerful navy and vast colonial influence. Lighter and more flexible Egyptian cotton was eventually introduced as an alternative for the thick and heavy canvas sail cloth. In the 1920s, the linseed oil was replaced with paraffin wax, which wouldn’t discolor and crack over time like linseed oil did. Waxed jackets reached their pinnacle just after World War Two, when military surplus waxed canvas was widely available, Britain was still clinging on to its sartorial relevance, and synthetic raincoats were still a bit away in terms of an affordable price point and mass market availability.
The waxy golden age ended in earnest around the same time as the British Empire did. To be fair, the seeds of its demise, like those of the British Empire, had been around for a while. The heir apparent to the waxed jacket was always going to be the synthetic raincoat, which was invented by Scotsman Charles Mackintosh way back in 1823. While these Mackintosh coats were so popular that the word itself became synonymous with the raincoat for a while, rubber raincoats had some of the same disadvantages as waxed canvas or cotton: they were thick, heavy, and didn’t breath well. It wasn’t until lighter, petroleum based fabrics like nylon and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) became widely available after World War Two ended that the wind shifted away from waxed canvas and towards synthetic alternatives. Powered by companies like DuPont, the global economy was awash in suddenly cheap and bountiful petroleum byproducts. The future of outerwear was, to quote The Graduate, “one word: plastics.”
These plastic-based coats were much lighter, more waterproof, and more breathable than waxed cotton could ever be. They also firmly rejected the image of outdoorsiness that British fashion represented. Who would want to look like a posh British aristocrat surveying his country estate when you could look like a well-traveled rock climber about to bike across Portland for a bouldering sesh with the dudes?
Return of the wax
Despite the fact that objectively more breathable and more waterproof materials like GoreTex are readily available now, waxed jackets have refused to die. They remain a remarkably timeless way to layer up. Like the cast iron pans of outerwear, they’ve stuck around even as lighter, slicker, more high tech replacements have taken over their original niche.
Waxed canvas, like cast iron, is an incredibly tough and durable material. A waxed jacket will not tear when it catches on a nail or branch the way a leather jacket or GoreTex jacket might. Like a high quality knife or pair of leather shoes, a waxed jacket is something you can own for your entire life if you care for it properly. Similar to a great pair of jeans or leather shoes, waxed fabrics also look better with age, breaking in and displaying a well-creased patina over time that male fashion personalities go crazy for. A man also just looks rugged in a waxed jacket in a way that he just doesn’t in even the fanciest Arcterx rain jacket. I’ve seen enough weekend warriors in Marin county astride expensive mountain bikes to assure you that I am correct about this last one.
If you want proof as to the enduring relevance of waxed coats, just look at Barbour. Founded in 1894 by (of course) a Scotsman, Barbour built its brand around raincoats that embodied a curiously British duality. They were hearty enough for rugged activities like hunting, farming or vigorous croquet matches on a drizzly day, but also stylish enough to wear to tea or a nice dinner afterwards. These jackets also have blindingly white names like Beaufort and Bedale. Barbour and Warby Parker are the only companies I’ve come across whose products sound like the lacrosse stick wielding sons of Connecticut hedge fund managers you met in the Hamptons. My glasses are called Hayden, not that anyone asked.
Barbour quickly became the go-to brand for Brits pursuing countryside hobbies in the rainy North. The Royal Family also became enamored with them. Queen Elizabeth II famously owned one Barbour coat for over 25 years. The Duke of Edinburgh and later the Queen granted them an exclusive Royal Warrant in the 70s and 80s, essentially naming Barbour one of the official brands of the Royal Family. This would be like Biden signing an exclusive deal with The North Face or Supreme. Lest you think this was just a British thing, American movie star Steve McQueen was also a big Barbour booster.
This British countryside-chic look, pioneered and popularized by Barbour, helped keep waxed outerwear relevant even as lighter and slicker raincoats abounded. They have a drizzly prestige, a cozy je ne sais quoi that’s as enduring as Scottish rain itself. Helping them stay on shelves and in fashion blogs is the fact that film and television costume departments give waxed jackets a glistening 15 minutes of fame every few years or so.
The Queen (2006)
Nothing says stoic Britishness like Queen Elizabeth II staring at a gray and rainy sky in an olive green Barbour coat while astounded hounds bound through your forested country estate. Blame Peter Morgan for that sentence, not me.
“While I can’t display emotion publicly, I can display a predilection for Barbour.”
Skyfall (2012)
When Bond goes to Scotland, you can be he ditches the suit for a Barbour jacket whose colors compliment his shotgun perfectly. Good luck killing a man this handsome, Javier Bardem.
“My stylish jacket will make you forget about the silly Home Alone-style boobytrap sequence that’s about to follow.”
The Crown (2016-present)
Given that the Crown is about the Royal Family, it’s basically a Barbour ad, the Cut even calling season 4 “Barbour jacket porn.”
“Wow, Ms. Thatcher, you really didn’t bring your Barbour to Balmoral?”
Yellowstone (2018-present)
Yellowstone’s popularized the Freenote Cloth riders jacket, picked out by Oscar winning costume designer Ruth Carter of Black Panther, worn here by Kayce Dutton.
“What does it say about America that my show is the most popular thing on cable?”
No Time to Die (2021)
The online jacket community lost its mind when Bond showed up wearing the waxed canvas supply jacket from Rogue Territory (for all of 15 seconds) in No Time to Die.
“While I have no time to die, I do have some time for some time to tinker with my Aston Martin in the garage.”
The Last of Us (2023-present)
More recently, famous actor and global daddy Pedro Pascal breathed new life into the waxed cotton jacket hype machine when he sported this waxed canvas trucker jacket from Huckberry brand Flint and Tinder in the HBO zombie drama, The Last of Us.
“The Pedro Pascal drip, like the zombies, is undead and worldwide.”
Raincoat resurrection
It was undeniable that I’d messed up my jacket by dry cleaning it but I had no idea if or how I could possibly fix it.
Initially I had hope. According to the internet, re-waxing a jacket was not just possible; it was encouraged. This was part of their enduring appeal. A waxed jacket could be reproofed at home every summer, giving it a decades long lifespan.
Researching the process further made me feel as panicked and overwhelmed as looking up symptoms on WebMD. The online jacket community, like most subcultures, is opinionated about everything. Some Reddit commenters said fixing a jacket you’d washed by mistake was doable. Others claimed it was ruined for good.
Every jacket company insisted you could only re-wax your jacket with their special wax. Since my jacket was from Roark but made with Halley Stevensons waxed cotton, I wasn’t sure who to talk to. When I went to Roark I learned that they didn’t sell wax. When I went to Halley Stevensons website I learned that they did, but since they were based on Scotland, I couldn’t just order it online, I’d have to email them and arrange to get it shipped internationally. Even if I got my hands on their precious wax, it was unclear if salvaging the waterproofing was actually possible based on the damage I’d done.
Re-waxing a jacket is not dissimilar from re-seasoning a cast iron pan. In both cases you’re restoring the functional patina on an item by re-lubricating it with a fresh coat of a desirable hydrophobic lipid. However, there’s a key difference. Waxed cotton doesn’t just have wax on top of the coat, it actually has it impregnated into the fabric itself thanks to some nifty panini-pressing in the factory. Imagine a peanut butter sandwich, but with the peanut butter infused into the bread. That’s how deep the wax is inside the cloth. So while I could slather on all the wax I could muster on top of my jacket, I would never be able to re-season the interior if I’d stripped out all the wax through my ill-advised dry cleaning. I wouldn’t know until I tried. A handy how-to video from Barbour made the process look as cozy and painfully British as an episode of Bridgerton. How hard could this be?
I set aside a few hours on a Sunday afternoon to find out. I lined the floor of my office with cardboard and set the space heater to high.
After heating up the tin of Barbour wax I’d ordered in hot water, I began to apply it to the jacket using a sponge as the video had advised. Since the room felt as hot as the wax, I worked in frisbee shorts and a tank top to avoid overheating. I felt silly, but literally every forum had advised working in as hot a room as you could create. So there I was, Hephaestus of jackets, laboring away in my sweaty, waxy kingdom. I quickly found myself lost in the process, reveling in the meticulous work of painting on a new layer of wax. It incorporated the tactile satisfaction of oil painting that I’d loved in art class. Having fully saturated the exterior with new wax, I left it to dry overnight.
The next day, the jacket looked wet and felt leathery. Something felt off. Now familiar with the contours of the online jacket community, I quickly found a helpful video from a fashion Youtuber all about re-waxing jackets. He advised to take a second pass with a hair dryer which would help smooth out finish from its garbage bag sheen to something less unsightly. He also recommended using a cloth instead of a sponge to get a better finish. Sure enough, a pass with Alexis’s hair dryer and some smoothing out with a cloth magically transformed the surface of the jacket to a handsome matte finish.
I was delighted with myself. I’d managed to recover from one of the biggest no-no’s in the mens outerwear world. Excited to see how it would handle, I proudly brought this dark green, freshly re-waxed raincoat to Ireland. There, on cue, the weather gave me multiple summer days to test its new patina against some of the most picturesque rainfall on Earth. Wearing it on strolls through the lush Blarney Castle gardens, on bike rides through verdant Killarney national park, and during a particularly memorable afternoon of falconry, I felt like one of the models in the Roark catalog. While the sun was rarely shining, this jacket was.
To the delight of my subscribers, I don’t write essays about changing my oil, watering my houseplants, or re-seasoning my cast iron pans. While John McPhee could somehow make these topics into page-turning essays as meticulously crafted as a Swiss watch, I’m not sure I could. I honestly never imagined I’d be excited to talk about something as self-indulgent as menswear or as boring as menswear maintenance. So why write about a raincoat at all?
Figuring out how to un-ruin my beloved green jacket made me learn to fix myself. First, I had to stop believing my wardrobe was beyond my power to maintain. The two root causes of this unhelpful belief which were my own impatience and pride. In the past I was so impatient and unwilling to ask for help that I’d sooner throw something away than learn to fix it.
This was the kind of task that a younger me would have put off for months or never attempted. To be fair, I had put it off for months before a looming international trip forced my hand. Yet once I’d started on it, despite not knowing anything and even getting it wrong at multiple points, I’d found a way to see it through to completion. Restoring this jacket proved to myself that even don’t initially know what to do, by being patient and open to learning, I can figure out how. While I’m not sure if I fully fixed the damage that dry-cleaning did to my jacket, I am certain that it’s much better off than if I’d given up on it entirely.
When my friend Matt mentioned he had a 7 year old Barbour jacket that had lost its waxy sheen, I biked over to his apartment and spent an evening using what I’d learned from my coat to re-wax his together. Picture him slathering on wax with a spatula and me smoothing it out with a pastry brush before touching it up with a hair dryer and cloth, a form of male bonding we’ve since christened “man crafts.” In a world where the dominant cultural and economic impulse is to constantly replace everything you own with new things, this slow, careful tending felt like a breath of fresh air.
Feeling buoyed by this sense of efficacy I finally got around to cleaning and re-seasoning my woefully scuffed Detroit Redwing boots. After just 10 minutes of my attention, I was astounded by how nice they looked.
If there’s one thing I took away from this experience and hope you take away from my account of it, it’s this: don’t be too quick to define what parts of yourself can never change. You might just be surprised by how easily something as small and silly as a jacket can capsize your entire worldview.
I’d long assumed that could never be stylish, that I was destined to ruin all my nice things through clumsiness and ignorance, and that the only way to look presentable was to endlessly pass my disposable petrochemical closet through the wood chipper of late stage capitalism. Yet taking the time to understand and care for one raincoat showed me that I was wrong about pretty much all of this. High quality belongings should be treasured and cared for, starting by actually reading the care instructions tag. Fixing your own stuff is still possible, especially if you have the patience and humility to ask for help and do some internet research. Clothing isn’t just a costume you put on or a barrier between you and the elements, it can be a charismatic and joyful fusion of both. The right layer can help the rain bounce off and the compliments stick, which is an underrated form of magic indeed. Thanks, Scotland.
Appendix: Gear Recommendations
If you’re interested in waxed jackets, here are three I’d recommend:
Roark Halley Stevensons X Axeman Jacket: They’ve discontinued the exact Roark raincoat I own, but having owned a Roark Axeman and a Roark raincoat with Halley Stevensons wax I can only assume this is just as cozy, rugged, and well-built as those jackets are.
Flint & Tinder Flannel-Lined Waxed Trucker Jacket: This is a handsome, durable, and surprisingly warm jacket for its weight that gives off a timeless American work wear vibe. My one complaint is that the pockets are unlined— since waxed canvas feels cold and clammy on the skin this is a bit annoying when it’s chilly out.
Jack Murphy Archie Waxed Jacket: I bought this in Ireland and it’s become my go-to jacket for blustery coastal weather. It’s essentially an Irish version of a Barbour. There’s lots of little details to love in the construction, like the hand warmer pockets on the sides, the cozy quilted lining, and the soft corduroy on the collar and elbow patches.
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