This Iconic Jacket Has Come a Long Way From Its Toilet Cover Roots

There’s enough lore about the early days of Patagonia to rival a Tolkien novel, but one of my personal favorite tales concerns the origin of the fleece jacket.

According to Patagonia’s marketing team, in the early 1970s, the brand’s founder—legendary outdoor businessman, environmentalist, and philanthropist Yvon Chouinard—was looking to solve a problem with his favorite wool sweater. He loved the durability and warmth-to-weight ratio of the natural fibers, but he was irked by how wool got heavy when wet and was slow to dry.

So he tasked his wife, Malinda Chouinard, with hunting for fabric that could match the warmth and durability of wool while being lighter and faster-drying.

She discovered a polyester originally developed for toilet seat covers that offered essentially everything Chouinard was looking for. Soon enough, a prototype was made, and Patagonia contracted the Massachusetts fabric maker Malden Mills, known as Polartec today, to create the very first fleece sweaters at scale.

WTF Is Fleece Anyway?

Huckberry

What is fleece? This obvious question is harder to answer than you’d think. It’s also a clear example of how broken the English language is in many respects.

The word fleece, of course, can technically refer to the natural wool of wool-bearing animals. But most of the time, when the term appears next to articles of clothing, it’s about a genre of soft, warm, and hydrophobic fabrics comprised mostly of polyester – a.k.a. a form of plastic fabric derived from petroleum.

The word genre is key because many different iterations of fleece exist, and they can vary wildly in weight, look, hand feel, texture, and even the blend of materials they’re made from.

While many who keep a close eye on outdoor apparel have likely seen or know clothing made from multiple fleece variations, such as Polar Fleece or Patagonia’s own Synchilla – the mental picture most people associate with the material, at least these days, is a so-called “high pile” or slightly more extreme “Sherpa” variant that mimics the look and feel of natural sheep’s wool.

From Technical to Typical

Todd Snyder

Fleece jackets have been a staple in the outdoor industry for 30+ years now, effectively replacing the role of traditional wool sweaters in active pursuits, just as Chouinard might have imagined.

Over the last ten years, the garment has also increasingly made further inroads as a sweater alternative that anyone can wear in almost any setting. As a result, fleece jackets are now popping up in arenas Chouinard likely never imagined.

Just last week, The New York Times ran a story entitled “Is a $910 Fleece Actually Worth It?” highlighting the rise and appeal of luxury fleeces. Back in February, The Guardian published A New Fleece of Life: Humble Fuzzy Fabric Becomes Fashion’s Hottest Item, one of the most recent versions of countless trend pieces published over the years documenting the acceptance-turned-full embrace of fleece jackets by the traditional fashion world.

Along the way, fleece vests even somehow became the garment synonymous with one of the least outdoorsy segments in modern humanity – the finance bro.

But more telling than the press clippings and media think pieces are the sheer number of brands selling fleece jackets now.

Loro Piana, a century-old luxury brand now owned by LVMH whose claim to fame is built on cashmere, now sells what essentially looks like a typical fleece jacket made from a blend of fleece and cashmere for $9,600. Kirkland, the cult-favorite in-house brand of Costco, also sells fleece jackets for $22.

The reality is that if a company is in the business of making outerwear—or, in some cases, clothes in general—then it’s probably selling fleeces now too.

Honing the Sherpa Style

Outerknown

There’s no doubt that the rise of fleece sweaters has benefitted from general trends towards casual fashion, particularly in America, as well as fashion’s relatively new-found obsession with outdoor aesthetics, often dubbed Gorpcore.

But the truth is that half a century is also plenty of time for designers and consumers to figure out exactly what makes a certain article of clothing appealing.

And to that end, it feels as if everyone’s starting to reach the same conclusion when it comes to fleeces, at least for the time being.

The current popularity of high-pile and Sherpa fleece represents a full-circle moment for the jacket in many ways, given that this incarnation of the material most closely resembles the humble toilet seat fabric that inspired the garment in the first place.

Combined with design details such as logo-less fronts, warm and earthy neutral color options, and better restraint with pockets and zipper pulls, clothing makers have significantly toned down the outdoorsy vibes of fleece jackets, allowing the garment to look even more natural in a variety of settings, just like a sweater would.

To prove this point, below we’ve highlighted a small sample of sherpa and high-pile style fleece jackets – none made by traditional technical outdoor brands – that have crossed our radar this year alone.

From this vantage, the through lines of the trends are apparent.

And while these jackets might be a far cry from Chouinard’s early vision, we’re certainly fans of where the warm, versatile layer stands right now, and are grateful to have yet another soft insulating option to choose from beyond the wool sweater.

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