I own fourteen umbrellas. Fourteen. They’ve been abandoned in stand at airports, left swinging behind café doors, stashed under seats in cars and discarded in restaurant cloakrooms all over god’s flood plain that is Manchester.
I just can’t seem to hold on to the fucking things. Which is bad news for me but particularly bad life advice considering I live in a city where rain isn’t so much a weather forecast as a state of identity. Last April, following yet another week of London-deluge style rainfall here in Manchester (that oddly British meteorological occurrence that’s just drizzle-never-quite-quite-raining), I gave up trying to manage without one and accepted I had an umbrella problem.
Particularly bad timing given that’s the week I left my go-to umbrella behind in the back of a taxi following an aftershow during fashion week. The taxi driver had long since sped off into the night before I realised.
So too had my umbrella, my dignity and approximately £170. “You need a proper mac,” said my dad when I rang him to commiserate. “You can’t lose a mac if you’ve got it on you.” The thing about Dad advice is it’s almost always annoying.
And then turns out to be mostly true. I embarked upon what has become a mildly obsessive mission to find the perfect lightweight mac. You know, what grandad would’ve referred to as a “proper mac” but the style media likes to gatekeep with incomprehensible buzzwords like, “transitional outerwear” and “rain resistant layers.” Saying that out loud makes me want to hurl myself into the Manchester Ship Canal.
The great thing about a proper mac is it needs to do quite a lot of things at once. It needs to be compact enough that you want to wear it when it isn’t actually raining – which in Manchester sometimes isn’t very often during the summer. It also needs to be actually waterproof, not “water resistant.” Trust me on this, when an item of clothing claims to be water resistant what that actually means is “will withstand precipitation for approximately eight minutes before defeat is utterly and embarrassingly acknowledged.” It needs to look good worn over both jeans and a suit.
And finally – and this is the bit I wrestled with for years – it can’t look like a proper mac. My first foray into the world of macs was earnest but painful: a vintage Burberry rescued from a charity shop in Didsbury. Adorable honey coloured cotton gabardine.
Classic cut. Nice bit of heritage. Bingo.
Wrong. Three months previous to acquiring it I’d written about precisely this Burberry example as The One You Need. Fits with coats.
Cheques jeans boxes. Buys shoes off the shelf. The whole nine.
Suffice to say it did not live up to its stellar reputation. The previous owner had clearly been about four inches smaller than me in the sleeve department (hello soggy pits), making me look like I was still wearing my childhood coat. But Age Old Stickney stalwart that I am, it wasn’t until I was thoroughly drenched despite its Burberry guarantee that I finally admitted defeat and mailed it back. (“Much appreciated for sending back and apologies for cost of returns however due to this being three months ago we’ve gone ahead and donated to charity.” True story.) I moved swiftly into the world of technicals.
If traditional cotton gabardine wasn’t up to snuff I reasoned I simply needed to become Best Friend with the shiny sealed-seam offerings of the performance clothing industry. I duly ordered an expensive-looking North Face shell that would, the website assured me, withstand Category 5 hurricanes in breathable confidence. It succeeded in neither of these things.
However manfully I bundled into it I looked like I was about to take on K2, not amble down to the shop to pick up a copy of Arena. “Are you off somewhere adventurous?” enquired Riz, our features editor upon seeing me. “Planning on climbing all the way to the coffee shop?” (True story.) Let’s call this the hillwalking conundrum. Generally speaking, the more waterproof any given item of rainwear is, the more likely you are to end up looking like you want to go walk into the Pennines with your SAS ultra lightweight “floshirt.” Which again, fine up on Scafell but a bit impractical when you’re meeting clients for coffee. Humiliated but undeterred, I tried dozens more.
The aggressively minimal Scandi numbers that looked incredible but had hoods so fiendishly engineered they poured water straight into your collarbone. Japanese-influenced workwear hustlers with enough pockets for your entire life but made me resemble something from the set of Children of Men. (“Mate, are you trying to look like The Walking Dead?” asked RIF when he saw me.) None felt like They Re one. I began to despair.
Had the holy grail of macs been narrowed down to ugly OR useless? Were utility AND style forever resigned to live on opposite sides of the fashion/practicality divide? Had I finally uncovered the Great British Mac Conundrum?
Spoiler alert: No. Turns out I just hadn’t found the right guy yet. Which is how I ended up talking to Oli, the head of menswear at a well-regarded British heritage brand I was writing about when he mentioned offhandedly that they’d dusted off an old mac from their archive dating back to the 1960s. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s got this thing called Millerain finish on it.
Really proper waterproof but doesn’t scream hiking yourLocal Munro.” Millerain, it transpired, is waxed cotton. A fabric that’s been around, in its current incarnation, since the 1800s. It’s cotton that’s been through a process that coats each thread in wax, making it technically waterproof but with the added selling point of looking like…regular cotton.
Suddenly all my previous failures clicked into place. The expensive hiking jacket shell hadn’t worked because it was too techy looking. The Burberry was too cosy.
And where had I been with jackets that looked this good but performed like…I don’t know…actual jackets? I played it cool. Studied.
Prod what notebook I had lingering about my person as if I wasn’t mentally preparing to buy a dozen of whatever he was wearing and go home. When he told me shipping times I feigned interest in the rest of their collection before grilling him some more about the mac. When he told me they were working on an espresso machine I about crocodiled him in his own office. (He was very nice about it.) The PR rep – they have these for brands so they can schmooze with journalists on your behalf, I now know – wisely deduced I was on the prowl when he emailed me a sample to “borrow” for a week.
Said week turned into months. Not only did Oli’s brand apparently make the perfect traditional-style mac. They had it in navy, a brown that wasn’t camel, green and lilac.
On day three it got caught in a torrential downpour en route to meet friends for dinner. By day five I’d been caught in another storm and a spilled coffee (not mine. Some guy on the tram spilled coffee all over it.
Watching him try to dry it with a napkin traumatized me for weeks). It survived each of these ordeals looking better than when I acquired it, the wax coating imbuing it with that je ne sais quoi of water repelled faded denim. By day seven I knew I wasn’t giving it back.
Problem was, it wasn’t cheap. As far outside my budget as my budget could conceivably stretch. I negotiated deftly with the PR lady (gifted items are never discussed lightly in retail, let me tell you) and had it couriered back to my flat.
Mourning its departure about as much as I was sad to see my sandal shoes go. I still looked. Mac obsessives know what they want when they know it, trust me.
There’s just something about a good mac coat that primes you for deep sleuthing. And now I knew what was possible I had a very particular gap to fill. I wanted that coat.
Or more realistically, its underpriced equivalent. What followed was a crash course in everything British rainwear, sorted, as I tend to do, by how annoyingly specific the industry subcultures within it became. Fun fact: We still make pretty much all of our own macs in the UK.
Who knew? Living on an island that often feels like Atlantis has obviously led to us becoming extremely adept at waterproofing clothes. I talked to mills, pattern cutters, cloth merchants, brands both big and small.
Each school on coat craftsmanship with the kind of fervour devout Christians probably reserve for their holy texts. Through these conversations what emerged was the trifecta of mac life: Invest. Mid-tier.
Budget. Investments, ie coats you’ll need to take out a second mortgage to buy, are still defended with vigor by the owners of Mackintosh. The original mac, they make them all by hand in Scotland using the original rubberised cotton technique they invented back in 1823.
Overpriced? Maybe. Will last you seven generations?
Also yes. In the same vein but slightly less wallet destroying are your Hancock’s vulcanised rubber jackets and private label options that the remaining bastions of British mills sell to fashion houses (think shirt makers like Newman or Harris Tweed to Prada-level brands). Mid-tier, where things start to get really interesting, is where the old guard reign supreme.
Heritage British brands like Baracuta, whose iconic G4 cagoule is the standard bearer here, as it reliably walks the tightrope between actually waterproof and actually looking like a mac coat. Or Percival, another British stalwart who does probably the finest coaches jacket mac there is. Turn one of these bad boys upside down in the rain and it only gets better with age.
Folk do excellent macs too, as do Universal Works and Margaret Howell. You can’t go wrong with any of these should you find yourself willing to splash out on a mac but don’t have the Bank of Dad. Budget is where things get interesting.
You can Mac drill all you like but, at the end of the day, it’s not practical for everyone to drop four figures on a coat that they’ll probably only wear three months of the year. Fortunately that doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to some crappy supermarket own-brand synthetic blend. As irritating as some of its output can be, Uniqlo does a surprisingly good mac in their blocktech range.
I wouldn’t recommend the shortest cuts as they tend to ride up rather unflatteringly but the mid and longer lengths hold together very well. Not technically British, sure. But who’s got the cheek to say Uniqlo aren’t inspired by British technicals?
Community Clothing also does a surprisingly good mac that is actually MADE in Britain – in that same Lancashire factory I visited – at a very reasonable price point considering the mills they use. And contrary to every pre-order mailing my bank account has received over the last eighteen months I can actually recommend M&S’s finest mac isn’t one of their rainbow-hued shop floor stalwarts but hidden away in their Autograph collection. Simple single-breasted design that looks way more expensive than it is and doesn’t hike up at your knees when you put it on.
In fact so happy was I with this last find that I ended up buying three different macs. A dark navy number in hefty cotton from a small maker in Scotland as an investment piece. An olive one from a quintessentially British workwear company as my now everyday carry.
And then this black lightweight M&S number as a backup that lives permanently in my work drawer for when I’m feeling lazy. Don’t judge me, I went on a bit of a macheimer. But you know what?
It’s been worth it.
Because while I’ve still misplaced about eight umbrellas since discovering the perfect mac coat – I did leave one on a train recently – I now actually look forward to seeing rain in the forecast. It’s given me an excuse to layer up, pull a Clash-style collar and strut like I live here.
Like THIS weather was made for me. Best of all though? I stay dry.
Not kinda dry, wet-through-your-shirt despite-covering-yourself-with-cities-rainwear dry. Properly dry. I put this theory to the test on a recent client meeting in London.
We were meeting in their Soho office on a day that hailed an absolute fucker. I rocked up looking like I’d spent the morning getting fucked over a transatlantic data deal while my client looked like a drowned rat who’d somehow managed to dip both suit and trousers in an actual pond. We hung out on the damp steps waiting for the lift, both silently staring down at our coats like anything was going to happen. “HOW ARE YOU SO DAMN DRY?” they yelled over the torrent.
I smiled smugly, smiled dad’s impression so accurately you’d have thought I grew up with his genes embedded in my DNA. “Proper mac, love.” Best Dad win yet.
