With the official start of fall around the corner, I am thinking about the colder days ahead: those blustery days, with leaves blowing around the yard, perhaps the first fire in the hearth and all the comforts of home inviting us to stay inside. We all know what it feels like when you must step outside on one of those days and brace against the unwelcome sensation of biting cold. For this reason, I have always felt that outerwear should feel like a warm embrace from home to take with you as you leave the comfortable indoors for the chilly outdoors. Even in the warmer zones there are those nippy and occasionally freezing days that can leave you shivering if you are not suitably prepared with the right piece.
Our 2022 outerwear lineup includes some J.Hilburn Client favorites like the all-season vest and the quilted hybrid blazer, which continue to work really well as custom-made go-to pieces for cold weather. With new colors to discover in our tech quality, our clients now have another reason to add these incredibly practical pieces to their wardrobes. This season we’ve introduced two new styles to widen the selection.
The first update is the quilted shirt jacket as a tech fabric expansion on this popular, iconic style. The shirt jacket has come a long way since its utilitarian start in workwear. Today it expresses a cool modernity that crosses over into an appropriate sportcoat substitute when created in one of our wool fabric options. The quilted tech option adds a layer of warmth and a quilted pattern that keeps this style firmly in the outerwear category. It also gives the jacket a distinctly town-and-country appeal, with references to both traditional and modern style. The quilt itself is reminiscent of British field coats, while the performance tech fabric with our personalized hardware is more identifiable with modern designer outerwear.
This style proves itself over and over for everyday use, transitioning effortlessly across the many uses we put our outerwear through during the colder part of the year. It also lends itself perfectly to travel, with no need to hang preciously like a sportscoat—you can throw it on the backseat of a car or easily put in the overhead compartment on a flight.
The second outerwear update of note is the new puffer vest, an extension to our recently introduced puffer coat. The characteristic puffer is translated into a more versatile style that guys love, as it adds a layer of warmth when needed while leaving the arms free. Our vests are perfect for guys who drive a lot, great for staving off the chill during the morning school run or an early start to work. It also has a varsity feeling with nods to the sports field and spectator sports: a warmth-trapping, elasticized armhole, a stand collar and ample pockets designed for practical needs.
The standout feature of the puffer vest is that it’s remarkably lightweight: we’ve combined the incredible thermal properties of ultra-light down with our signature design of stitched-through channels that hold just the right amount of warmth in the fill. The result is a sublime, home-like embrace of warmth on even the coldest of days—almost as good as staying indoors by the fire.
