The Coat Issue: They’ve got you covered

MONTREAL – Coats, beautiful coats: We’ve got to have them. Long and short, down and cloth, leather and fur, warm and warmer.

“We pray for cold every day,’’ said Monte Perlman of Manteaux Manteaux, a family-run retail chain.

Inevitably,
the big chill arrives. The puffer, which has come down in size, has
become the outerwear basic, the go-to topper for every day. And they are
so stylish, so comfortable, so cozy, we don’t even wait for the deep
freeze to wear them.

Even before the first frost, college kids, in particular, don their downs, often a Canada Goose or a Mackage.

Wool
and leather are the more traditional options for transitional weather,
of course, but wool has not been performing in sales in recent years at
Manteaux Manteaux, according to Perlman, vice-president of the chain of
41 multi-brand stores.

Montreal designers and manufacturers have
long seen the need for us to bundle up. Utex, Hilary Radley, Mackage,
Rudsak and Harricana have built successful brands beyond our borders,
using wool, leather, fur, down and synthetics to cheat the chill. Kanuk
has confined its business in synthetic fills to Quebec, “a big name but a
small business,’’ said Kanuk’s Nathalie Mongeau.

The European
brands like Moncler and Add are game players, too, having pioneered the
match of high tech and high style in down coats.

A new player in the Canadian field, Nobis, claims to improve on the warmth and comfort of the Canada Goose.

UTEX: Montreal company was amongthe first to market down

Utex
started out in a bicycle shop in Victoriaville in 1943, making men’s
shirts and evolving into outerwear. Chances are, women of a certain
generation in Montreal grew up wearing Utex and may still have Utex
coats in the closet.

“We produce a nice fashion, not way out. It’s
fashion that lasts, it’s a fit that lasts, a quality that lasts,’’ said
Marian Gurberg, vice-president and daughter of founder Irving, who
travelled to China in the 1960s, developing the technology for factories
to make down coats there.

“If not the first, we were one of the
first to go into China,’’ Gurberg said, and possibly the first to bring
down coats to the mass market. “It’s the consistent, dependable,
count-on garment, not so fashion-forward it only lasts 10 minutes.”

Utex
has a stable of brands, including Daniel Hechter and Jones, and will
introduce a mini collection by Cynthia Rowley for next spring, followed
by a full collection next fall. Branching out, Utex Fashion Group has
just launched an online site for shopping by measurement, not size. The
site, http://www.asuare.com, short for Just As You Are, caters to plus size.
Gurberg noted that more than 60 per cent of women in the U.S. are plus
size and the average size is 14. “We really feel this concept is the
wave of the future,’’ she said.

MACKAGE: Young designers now see the value in warmth

Eran
Elfassy and Elisa Dahan, 32 and in business since 1999, are the
wunderkinds of the coat world, having put their Mackage brand on the
map, with points of sale in all the majors across North America, their
own boutiques in Soho and on the Left Bank, and a ready-to-wear line
going into its fourth collection.

One coat in particular has been
so popular, it has been on the backs of seemingly every second stylish
Montrealer and has been knocked off. The demand is so huge, Elfassy
said, that they remade it, in the original Peaches version with Dupont
synthetic fill and bouffant sleeves, as well as in a new modified style.
The new version – called Adali in a short length, Kay in long – is
down-filled and more classic in design, Dahan said. It has duck down and
feathers, a polyester, water-resistant outer shell and fur trim of
coyote or raccoon.

And the demand is still there, with the company recutting the style for second orders from stores, Elfassy said.

“It’s a warm coat that doesn’t make you look sporty. You can dress up and be warm,’’ Dahan said.

“A woman does not have to feel like a Goodyear,’’ Elfassy added. “As we get older, we realized it’s important to be warm.’’

Their
priorities have changed, Dahan acknowledged. Their coats used to be
fashion first and cut very tiny. “I guess in business, and as a
designer, experience in life helps. We learn from the mistakes of the
past, and improve for the future,” Elfassy said.

The pair do every category of outerwear, with a lot of mixed materials like leather, wool and sheepskin combinations.

“The climate is a big inspiration,’’ Elfassy said.

HARRICANA: Recyling pioneerlooks to Hermès quality

Canada,
coats and pioneers seem to go together. Mariouche Gagné is yet another
groundbreaker in the outerwear field, having taken the notion of
recycling furs to market in 1994 with her Harricana line.

“We
should buy less and buy better quality. Montrealers need something that
will last and fur is still the longest lasting coat you can have. It
lasts three generations, from the grandma, to the daughter to the
granddaughter,’’ Gagné said.

“The DNA of Harricana – I would like
it to be like a Canadian, Inuit, Grand Nord Hermès,’’ she said, noting
the superb, lasting quality of the French brand. “If everything we
bought lasted longer, the planet would be in much better shape and
everybody would look better. I’m a planet freak and a winter freak.”

A
sweater coat mixed with fur, good for right now, is her pick for a coat
to represent her brand. Still, she realizes that Montrealers need coats
for deep freeze temps of down to -40C. The big parkas are not the
sexiest things, she acknowledges, but they do the job.

The other
option is recycled fur. Gagné prefers wild furs like coyote and lynx, as
well as Canadian sable and sheared, dyed raccoon. Raccoon is
indestructible, she notes. The price range is $1,000 to $3,000.

Gagné is hosting a vintage sale, Nov. 23, for old furs and cashmeres that are too pretty to recycle. RSVP on Facebook.

HILARY RADLEY: Queen of coats moves into fabulous furs

Call
her the queen of coats. Since 1983, the British-born Hilary Radley, our
lady of the coats, has been defining outerwear style across North
America.

“It’s intelligent, well-thought-out comfort with luxury and value,’’ Radley said of the DNA of her coats.

Radley
has branched out. Formerly part of Utex, the brand is now part of the
Levy Group coat family, and has collections that range from alpaca and
wool to sporty down. She also has forayed into fur, creating a capsule
of 12 coats, from mink and chinchilla to “a nice cocoon sable,’’ a
collection done with Montreal’s North Pole Furs.

“Fur trim and fur
is so hot at this moment,’’ she noted. That said, Radley chose a
classic camel coat with a fur collar to exemplify the essence of her
style.

KANUK: Quebec brand uses synthetic fills to vanquish Montreal humidity

Founded
in 1975, this Quebec-only brand features a signature round gold owl
logo inside the collar. The fill is always synthetic. “Because it’s
always humid in Montreal because of the St. Lawrence River,’’ said
Nathalie Mongeau, in charge of the catalogue for the company. A
micro-porous fabric allows breathability, she said, adding, “(we mean
it) when we say minus 35 degrees … we’re crazy maniacs for warmth,’’ she
said. “There are two layers of insulation. No seam goes right through
both layers.’’

NOBIS: Beyond the Goose

A
former principal of Canada Goose, Robin Yates launched Nobis in 2008.
The brand, now shipped to 25 countries, improves on the Goose, according
to Yates, who is based in Markham, Ont. People were getting wet when it
rained, “aggressive Velcro” was ruining sweaters and the jackets are
hot, he said.

The Nobis has an extra layer of lining to keep down
feathers off your clothes. The lining, 20 denier nylon, is also
breathable, Yates said.

“Down doesn’t insulate unless it can trap
warm air off your body. When it does so, if that air is warm and moist,
it will actually wick away the moisture and then create that insulation
barrier,’’ he explained.

“If you can’t get the warm air to it, it actually doesn’t do anything other than burden you by weight.’’

Yates
calls the She-Ra, a full-length ultimate parka, awesome, with a
removable Rex rabbit collar and a coyote trim on a removable hood.

“City cold is different than North cold,’’ he pointed out.

In
the city when you get cold, it’s because you get wet or damp or the
wind gets to you. The Nobis uses a Sympatex membrane lining, laminated
to the outershell and sealed to major seams so the coats are windproof,
waterproof and breathable.

The coats also contain 100 per cent
Canadian duck down for larger volume that creates bigger fill areas with
less weight, he said.

In a nutshell, Yates added, the jackets
with their removable fur bits and pit zips can be styled to suit the
weather from late September to April.

“It’s amazing that you don’t
have to peel it off when you get in the car or, when you’re going
shopping, lop it off your shoulders,’’ he said.

Yates is off to London soon, for a pop-up shop at Harrods, to open mid-November.

“Down
functions three times better than the best synthetic as far insulation
value. I am that crazy guy that goes to the Arctic, but I don’t like to
be cold,’’ Yates said.

Down is heavier, but takes a little more care to wash.

The
best thing to do for down is to wash it in a non-aggressive detergent,
inside out on medium cycle, then loft it in the dryer, he said.