Sartorials: Mac & Trench

the classic civilian mac coat

Walking by an M&S shop window the other week I immediately noticed they had reversed the labelling on their rain coats prominently displayed. What was clearly, in my mind, a trench coat was advertised as a mac, and vice-versa. I somehow felt it was ironic as, of any shop, an archly traditional British outfitter like Marks & Spencer ought to get their raincoats right.

I may care inordinately about my outerwear, but, alongside the Barbour waxed jacket, the Burberry designed trench and the Charles Mackintosh jacket represent historical icons in British fashion.

The mac was even name dropped in Penny Lane ("and the banker never wears a mac/ in the pouring rain/ very strange/ Penny Lane is in my ears/ and in my eyes..."). The now eponymous, everyday civilian waterproof rain coat is credited to the patent of Charles Mackintosh of Glasgow.

Born in 1766, the son of a Glasgow merchant, Mackintosh at first nominally followed in that line of work, but in reality pursued his amateur passion for the field of chemistry when possible.  In 1797 he opened up the first Alum works factory in Glasgow, and eventually had his breakthrough from fiddling about with the remnant waste from the gas works. He used the flammable liquid run-off from the distillation of tar known as naptha and soaked india rubber in it. Double stitching this material resulted in the first bonafide waterproof fabric.

By the 1820's not only were the first raincoats being produced industrially, after finally finding fashion acceptance, but rubberized waterproof material was being used for items like bags and pillows for John Franklin's Arctic expeditions.

In 1830 Mackintosh joined forces with clothing manufacturer Thomas Hancock of Manchester, and the use of vulcanized rubber was implemented to make the coats more comfortable and pliable.

In 1836 Mackintosh was in court to protect his patent, where the judge remarked that "the cloaks had obtained a great celebrity"; and for his scientific achievements Mackintosh was elected a member of the Royal Academy.

Into the 20th century the coat company itself had mixed fortunes and was subsumed under a number of successive international manufacturing conglomerates, until only recently in the last decade finding a niche resurgence in the popularity of the brand. Nonetheless, the original reputation of the 'mac coat' meant its appellation was indelibly linked with an overall prototypical rain jacket.

Like Mackintosh's invention of a revolutionary material, the origins of the famous trench coat lie in Burberry's development of gabardine. Originally produced from extremely tighly woven wool, and occasionally cotton, it was not meant to be as truly waterproof as the rubberized jackets, but more flexible and comfortable.

As such Burberry gabardine fabricated clothing became particularly popular with explorers like Shackleton, Amudsen and George Mallory. However, Burberry was ultimately to forge its name with the officer's coat of the First World War. It was in this military context that gave the trench coat perhaps it's most identifiable feature, the shoulder epaulette for affixing rank.

Into the modern era, it is the look of the coat rather than its constituent material that tends to define the difference between a mac and a trench, and as such met my chagrin that day outside Marks & Sparks.

A mac: single breasted and belt-less. Here, unhelpfully profiled on the wikipedia page for a trench coat, which it is clearly not 

The Burberry trench: double breasted, belted, and with epaulettes.

A mac, by and large, now refers to a a single breasted, belt-less rain jacket without visible exterior pockets. A trench by contrast is stereo-typically double breasted, belted, and features shoulder epaulettes and storm flaps above the chest.
That said, a trench could conceivably be single breasted and belt-less, thus the defining aspect of the coat, harkening to its military past, are the epaulettes.

So that's raincoats... I still have the origins of topcoats, greatcoats, pea coats, chesterfields, and bombers to rummage about for in my inane thoughts on outerwear.