From camping gear to gorpcore, consumers may not realize that the functional, tactical and practical clothing worn today has deep connections to the U.S. military. In the latest season of “Articles of Interest,” host and producer Avery Trufelman takes listeners on a journey to learn more about how civilian and military fashion intersect and the ways in which the uniforms of soldiers have influenced the outdoor apparel industry. Trufelman joins us to share more on the history of military gear, the civilian-military divide, Portland’s Functional Fabric Fair and more.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. “Articles of Interest” is a podcast about clothing in the same way that “Moby Dick” is a novel about whaling. You will learn a ton of amazing things about what we wear, but the magic and the power of the podcast is the way it explores everything else: the history, culture, technology and politics behind what we put on our bodies.
Avery Trufelman is the host and producer of “Articles of Interest.” In the past, she has explored zippers, pockets, blue jeans, Hawaiian shirts and American Ivy. The latest season is a seven-episode deep dive into the fascinating interconnections between civilian and military clothing. And the fact that these categories have blurred so much that everyone is basically wearing the same clothing these days, often made by the same companies.
Trufelman spent time in Portland and in Seattle for the new season, which is called “Gear,” and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Avery Trufelman: Oh my God, thank you for that kind introduction, Dave. That’s so sweet. I really appreciate it.
Miller: I appreciate that you appreciated it. [Laughter] So you basically have two modes for your podcast. You have one-off episodes about things that I mentioned like pockets and zippers, and then these multi-episode whole seasons where you really dig deep into something. You did that for Ivy style a few years ago and now this new season is about the tangled histories of clothing worn in tactical or military ways and then for civilians. What was the first kernel for this new season?
Trufelman: Well, yeah, I have this larger aspiration to do these big series [which] tend to be about menswear because I think it’s very easy to write off menswear as like, it’s classic, it’s basic, there’s not that much to say. Women’s wear is the one that does all the expressing and has all the color and has all the meaning behind it. So I’m very interested in the sort of unassuming meanings behind menswear, like why do we think these forms are classic? Why do we think these forms of clothes say “nothing?”
So I did this series about preppy clothes, which I do think is at the root of a lot of menswear. And after I did that series, the idea of the military kept coming up over and over again. Even preppy clothes like khakis come from the military, the peacoat comes from the military. A lot of these examples of garments that we consider timeless or classic, they weren’t just timeless and they didn’t come from nowhere. They came from the military, so I thought, oh, this will be the next series I do. I’ll dive into the military.
Then, once I started spending more than a couple minutes really thinking about it, this connection with the outdoor industry made itself immediately known. They’re just inextricable. So then it ended up being somewhat more complicated, this intersection between the military and the outdoor industry.
Miller: You say early on in episode one, I would wager that almost every single garment and accessory I’ve ever reported on has had some connection to war. [Laughter] You just mentioned khakis and peacoats there, but what are some other examples that come to mind?
Trufelman: Oh man, well, even just in really casual ways … I’m trying to think of another example. But it always feels like the reason this really came about was in WWII or like WWI. One of my favorite examples that I actually mentioned in the podcast is that the sizes, small, medium and large, come from the Civil War. This was the first time that America was mass producing [and] America’s ready-to-wear clothes were invented.
Miller: That blew me away. I mean, I guess I would have thought that that had come earlier.
Trufelman: No, no, it’s really interesting. Ready-to-wear clothes were invented relatively recently. I mean, until the 1800s, you’d go and buy cloth. You wouldn’t buy a ready-made jacket. You’d buy the cloth and you’d bring it to your tailor or your seamstress … or your wife. So this was like a real all-American invention driven out of need. War drives so much of clothing innovation because there are these moments in history where a lot of people need to get clothed very quickly. And so there are a lot of innovations that come up, especially in the United States. This ends up being a very American story.
Miller: You met a lot of fascinating people in the course of your interviewing, but maybe my favorite – and I think one of yours, based on the way you talk about him – is a lawyer and military apparel obsessive, named Joshua Kerner, who you just call Kerner a lot.
Trufelman: Yes.
Miller: Can you introduce us to him?
Trufelman: Yeah, Kerner is a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia. And this is almost so annoying for someone like me who’s a journalist professionally, and I think I’m so good at getting backstories just for fun – by night, Joshua digs deep into archives and has found incredible documents that no one else has found. He’s kind of an amazing authority in his own right, and he’s just a guy, he’s just a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia. But so many people have told me about him and he’s kind of known as an entity. And we had the longest conversation I’ve ever had on tape. We talked on tape for 14 hours, and that doesn’t even include all our meals together and all the time we spent traveling. But yeah, that guy has a lot to say. He’s a veritable font of knowledge.
Miller: The story that you spend the most time on the podcast exploring with him is this huge and hugely important debate about two different jackets in the last couple of years of World War II. So before we get to the two different jackets, what was the design brief? What was the need at that time?
Trufelman: So to cut a very long story short, essentially, if you think about World War I, you imagine men fighting in long trench coats. It was this long wool coat that a lot of soldiers were wearing, and it’s really impractical because when you’re running around with a gun, you start getting sweaty, you start getting hot and maybe you want to take your jacket off. But then you take this big, heavy jacket off and then suddenly you’re freezing. And also, it’s very long and it’s bulky, and when it rains, it gets very heavy.
So there was this idea that there has to be another way. There has to be a jacket that’s maybe a little lighter, a little flexible, that can work for lots of different environments – especially as the United States was going all across Europe and now suddenly in the Pacific theater. We were in all these different locations all over the world and there was this idea, well, we need a new field jacket, a new sort of modernized, convenient field jacket.
And then there were these two sorts of conflicting designs that emerged. I don’t know if you want me to go into that.
Miller: Well, I do, because in some ways this encapsulated so many of the themes that animate the entire series. So can you describe first, the better jacket – we can say that definitively – and the way that it was created?
Trufelman: Yeah. This jacket was the initiative of a Harvard economics professor named Georges Doriot, and the funny thing about him is that this guy invented venture capital. This is not what he’s famous for. It’s just a funny little footnote on his illustrious career that he also was in charge of this jacket project for the military.
Basically, he had this idea that is very beautiful, if I may live out for a second … I saw a lot of horrible things that the United States military has done, and then there were a few things like the story of this jacket where I was like, that’s really beautiful and really inspiring. But basically, before this point, the way that military jackets were designed was some general said, “I want a new jacket,” and then it was just sort of made, or they would copy something available in the commercial world, or more often than not, we used to just copy a lot of other nations. We’d be like, “OK, who’s the military superpower now? Is it the French? Let’s copy the French.” Like during the Civil War, we were kind of copying the French and then we copied the Prussians for a long time. We just sort of copied whoever the major military power was.
But there was this new idea – this is why it’s so beautiful – that’s like the epitome of what our democratic army was supposed to mean. There’s this idea in World War II of like, “Well, why don’t we ask the soldiers? Why don’t we figure out what works for the common fighter?” Women were around. There were women fighting in World War II, but mostly they were talking about men in the field. So they were thinking what would make these men most comfortable, what would keep them warmest, what would be most flexible, what would be most useful for their lives?
Really, this guy Georges Doriot, brings in a lot of experts from lots of different industries, including the outdoor industry, including Leon Leonwood Bean, L.L. Bean, and Eddie Bauer – the people who started these companies. He brings them in. And he also brings in lessons from the new practice of physiology, where a Harvard professor would maybe put a student on a treadmill, see how much they sweat, and what’s the capacity for warmth and exertion in the human body? He took these principles and applied them to clothing. So they were like spraying jackets with water. They were spraying air on jackets. They put jackets on mannequins that were outfitted with sensors to test the heat of different jackets. They were scientifically testing, “What will be the best jacket? How can we prove definitively that we are making the best jacket?”
This blew open the door for what we consider to be high-tech clothing today. A lot of outdoor companies are like, “we test our wares.” It’s battle worn, we try it out and we use it in a laboratory. This is all extending from the invention of this field jacket, which now, we would just think of as like, “oh, that’s the classic military field jacket.” It’s green. It’s got four pockets – two on the breast, two on the hip. It cinches at the waist. It’s like the army field jacket, which now we think of as a stalwart. But at the time, it was incredibly cutting edge, because the thing they invented at the end of it was layering.
Miller: You say that this isn’t just a jacket, it’s a system.
Trufelman: Yes.
Miller: So, when I heard that they invented layering, I couldn’t believe it … or layering as we sort of think about it now. It blew my mind. What did they actually devise with this jacket?
Trufelman: Yeah, it’s an idea like a module jacket that has a lot of different parts to it. There’s a waterproof part you can put on, there’s a liner that you can zip into it or snap into it. It’s adjustable. You’re supposed to cinch in the waist, you’re supposed to roll up the collar in certain weather. There are all these dynamic forms that you’re supposed to change in the jacket, as opposed to like the wool overcoat, which was functionally just a wool overcoat.
And to give you an idea of how novel and new this idea of layering was, there used to be instructions in the jacket. In the 1940s and 1950s, if you look at old field jackets, they say in the label, wear it this way in temperate weather, wear it this way in cold weather. Bundle it up this way. This was all totally new, that you were supposed to sort of modify and change your jacket with the weather, and this is how it became the one jacket that worked in most locations. It’s this incredible feat of engineering and design.
That said, it looked very, very, very different. If you think about it, the rest of the world is still dressing like little tin soldiers. They’re wearing versions of a wool suit. They’re wearing versions of the long trench coat. And then here is the United States, trying out this strange looking new jacket that’s a bit bulkier. It’s a bit shaggier. Some would say it’s a little less professional looking. And they’re rolling it out on a massive scale. This was so, so bold and new, and it totally changed what soldiers looked like. And soldiers have worn something that looks like the field jacket, basically ever since.
Miller: Although not immediately.
Trufelman: Not immediately. [Laughs]
Miller: I want to play a short excerpt because this was the jacket devised by this guy Doriot. But then the guy in charge of outfitting folks for the European theater, this guy named Little John, he hated it, So he, instead, gave the soldiers under his command a coat much more like the ones that you’re describing that the other armies had.
I want to play a short excerpt from the podcast podcast episode about this and about the soldiers who got the inferior woolen jacket.
[Recording from the “Articles of Interest” podcast playing]
Trufelman [recording]: These poor soldiers who did not necessarily want to be in Europe in the dead of winter, were shivering in their wet wool suits and leather boots that got bogged down with water, catching pneumonia and frostbite, and there were some truly disgusting consequences to not clothing soldiers properly. This is a little content warning, Charles McFarlane is about to talk about a nasty consequence of Little John’s negligence.
Charles McFarlane [recording]: Men are losing toes, skin is coming off with the sock, and when you look at the rates of trench foot, frostbite, all of these things are being recorded at a much higher level in the units in Little John’s purview.
Trufelman [recording]: And Americans at home were getting wind of this because soldiers were writing letters to their families.
McFarlane [recording]: “Ma, Pa, I’m fighting in combat. There’s snow on the ground. I don’t have this, I don’t have that.” The parents then write their congressman, then the congressman’s writing Doriot going, “what the hell’s going on?”
Trufelman [recording]: So. Even though Doriot’s scientifically-proven layering principle was absolutely correct, Little John’s ego prevented its implementation.
[Recording ends]
Miller: So that engineered, tested, modular coat – we heard there that there was an outcry and then it eventually became embraced by the military. How did it then get embraced by civilians?
Trufelman: Well, the interesting thing with this history and a lot of the histories of various military garments is that it wasn’t just a project of the military. Georges Doriot, the director of this project, had brought in a lot of civilian designers. Most famously for Pacific Northwest purposes, Harold Hirsch of White Stag. And I talked to this incredible historian, Rachel S. Gross, who wrote this book called “Shopping All the Way to the Woods.” She found this catalog from White Stag that came out very shortly after Harold Hirsch had worked on this project. And he is selling a version of this jacket, of the M-43 jacket, a version that was geared towards civilians, essentially because it’s a great design. They found this incredible jacket design, and the designers who were part of making it and testing it, we’re like, “oh, we want to use this too.”
I think that’s a really interesting part of American military clothes. It was very much a co-creation of the civilian world as well. Camouflage was also invented by a civilian. Civilians are as much responsible for this sort of culture as the military. It’s not like it exists in a closed bubble and then somehow comes out.
Miller: Can you give us a sense today for just how deep the connections are between household name clothing companies and the military?
Trufelman: Oh, I mean, they’re deeply related. A lot of popular outdoor brands still make a lot of clothes for the military and some of them really don’t want to advertise it too much. Arc’teryx makes clothes for Special Forces. Patagonia, even though they make it through a different company that’s independent and not affiliated with Patagonia anymore. They have these sort of separate brands that make their special forces stuff. It’s not gonna come up on their website. You kind of have to know they exist.
More fundamentally, there are a lot of ingredient brands like Gore-Tex, Vibram, PrimaLoft or these ingredient brands that are present in jackets and footwear that also manufacture for the military. And a lot of times … I just mentioned PrimaLoft, they’re a maker of artificial down. They make synthetic down that replicates goose down really, really well. That was invented for the military and then it was brought out to the civilian market through a partnership with L.L.Bean.
So these things are just really inextricable, even today. And the funny thing is, when you look at the military edition stuff that these outdoor companies make, it’s really, really cool. [Laughs]
Miller: What do you mean by “cool” when you say that now?
Trufelman: I talked to this one company based in Seattle called Outdoor Research. They’re super popular. You can get their clothes at REI. They were telling me about the differences between the clothes they make for civilians and the clothes they make for soldiers. And by the way, they’re making them side by side in the same building. They might manufacture the exact same product, one for the civilian market, one for special operations or one for soldiers. The big difference is the civilian outdoor clothes tend to be more colorful, the logo is a little bit louder, and for special ops, you’re supposed to be a little bit stealth. I mean, who knows what you’re doing, but you might be doing a night raid and the logo can’t be reflective, it can’t be too loud, it’s in these low-profile colors, it might be in black, it might be in camouflage, it might be in coyote brown or ranger green. They’re just sleeker, darker, more subdued.
Because they’re sort of rare and a little harder to find than civilian clothes – like you’re not going to be able to buy the special operations clothes at REI – they’re just cooler, they’re harder to get, they look more subtle and sleek. And my pet theory is, I think they contributed to the “gorpcore” trend. I think a lot of celebrities started to discover the military edition outdoor wear and started wearing it.
Miller: How have you come to think about the interplay between aesthetics and function, when it comes to military clothing or even just outdoor apparel? Some of these apparel companies for civilians, they sell us on function, and some of them have even gone as far as to say that fashion doesn’t matter. This is not about fashion.
Trufelman: Yeah. [Laughter]
Miller: This is about repelling the rain, staying warm in terrible conditions. But, obviously, fashion and looks and aesthetic, it’s still a part of it. How do you think about that interplay?
Trufelman: I think it’s really, really vital. And the thing that was really interesting to me is that it was even really vital in the military. That story we just told about the M-43 jacket, this incredible, dynamic, cutting-edge new jacket, it wasn’t used in the European theater just because the chief quartermaster there didn’t like the way it looked. So the technology wasn’t used. It’s really vital, if the technology is going to be used, that people actually want to wear it, that it looks good to a degree, that it’s not too alien or too separate from what you’d feel comfortable wearing on the street. So that’s the thing, it’s like, wow, if this matters to soldiers – and it really matters to soldiers – it really matters to everybody, as much as someone might think they’re above it.
I think the biggest revelation for myself, in terms of aesthetics is, before I worked on this story, before I worked on the series, I was very categorically against the military. I would say I’m still pretty categorically anti-war, but I hadn’t really spoken to a lot of members of the military. I hadn’t really thought about it in a considered way and the role it plays in my life as an American. And I was very against wearing camouflage, wearing combat boots, anything that I thought sort of fetishized American militarism. But after working on this series, and realizing things like the diplomacy of the democratic design of the field jacket or the ways that civilians were involved in designing all these things, it made me realize that this is part of my history, too.
And also, talking to a lot of soldiers, they’re like, “I would never wear camo because that’s my work clothes,” like, “you go and do it.” That’s almost a civilian privilege for you to wear camouflage. So, the funny thing is this is like the opposite of the way that I thought I would emerge from this story. I’m like, “yeah, you can wear camo, you can wear combat boots, this is part of your history, too.” We all contributed to this, we all live in this. and in terms of its function being in war, we should all have a say in that. I think pretending that it doesn’t affect you and pretending that you don’t have any control over it is almost worse.
Miller: You went to the Functional Fabric Fair in Portland last year.
Trufelman: Yes.
Miller: This is an annual big meetup that happens in Portland. What is it? What did you see there?
Trufelman: Oh my God, the Functional Fabric Fair is so overwhelming and wonderful. I highly recommend everybody go. It’s essentially a giant fair in the Portland Convention Center. It’s just rows and rows and rows of booths from different textile manufacturers, textile mills, all these different makers of high tech fabrics. And they are showing off the most cutting-edge clothes … well, not clothes, these are like raw fabrics. I saw completely waterproof textiles. I saw someone pour a bottle of water on a piece of cloth and then they just shook it off and it was entirely dry. There wasn’t even a mark that there was water on it. There are fabrics that are like gossamer thin. There are fabrics that are bulletproof. They’re just fabrics that can do incredible things.
This is where you see a lot of company representatives and representatives from the Department of Defense. Everyone wants to check out … it’s not even trends, it’s what the latest technology is, like what clothing is able to do. And it’s really interesting because it doesn’t necessarily come from the labs at The North Face or whatever, it comes from these separate mills and these separate textiles. They’re the ones experimenting with twists of yarn and new fabric covers. This is where a lot of the innovation comes from. It’s kind of cool to see it in a raw state before it’s purchased and marketed by a brand.
Miller: You called this season of the podcast “Gear.” What’s the distinction for you between gear and not-gear clothing?
Trufelman: That’s such a good question. It’s also a question that I asked everybody, like everyone I talked to ...
Miller: But I don’t think that you include the answers in the podcast.
Trufelman: No, because they all had different reasons. They all had different explanations of it. I’m trying to think what my personal definition would be. A lot of companies I talked to [say] there is no difference, “we make functional clothes and that’s gear.” And there were other places that were like, “well, gear is more like backpacks, tents and things like that, as opposed to apparel.”
But I really think what makes clothing gear is its roots in this history that we talked about with the M-43 field jacket. Has it been tested? Has it been put to scientific use at some point in its life? Was its fabric tested? Were its fixtures tested? Was its ultimate end use case tested? So many of these companies really, really pride themselves on, oh, “how rigorous our testing is.” And I think that’s what makes something gear rather than fashion.
And I think it comes with its own aesthetic. The series begins basically with the founding of America and this idea that outdoor clothing essentially used to be faux Indigenous. It used to look like Davy Crockett or Johnny Appleseed, some sort of imagined idea of what Indigenous people wear. But as soon as you get this sort of gear tested, it was put on a censored mannequin and it was put in a heat chamber, in a cold chamber, you get this different aesthetic of what it means to look outdoorsy. Suddenly, it’s not about looking Indigenous and wearing buckskin and fringes. It’s about having the latest high-tech stuff, and I really don’t think that’s changed since the ‘40s.
Miller: Is there a distinction for you between clothing and costumes? Are we all wearing costumes every second of our lives?
Trufelman: [Laughs] I guess so. Although, I don’t think that’s a bad thing ...
Miller: I don’t mean it to make it seem bad. It’s a question that’s come to me as I’ve listened to various episodes of yours for this series and just overall. It’s, I guess, a question about self presentation.
Trufelman: Well, I mean, the interesting thing about clothing is that sure, in some ways it’s image-making and sort of constructing yourself, but in other ways it’s extremely practical, especially when we’re talking about gear. It’s also shaped by like, is it raining outside, is it cold outside? Clothing is at the frontier where your interiority meets the outside world. It’s a way of both expressing what’s inside and protecting yourself from what’s outside. So both things factor in.
So, to a degree is it a costume? Yeah, but there’s always going to be that functional element. I mean, you can’t be naked.
Miller: I put on my “it’s raining hard today in Portland” costume today before I came to work.
Trufelman: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly.
Miller: One of the paradoxes of the series as a whole – this is what you get to in the end and you talked about it briefly, but I want to come back to it – is that while there’s maybe never been more correspondence and overlap between civilian and military clothing, the division between civilians and members of the armed forces in our country right now is huge, maybe as big as it’s ever been. There’s no draft, for example, and there hasn’t been for decades is one big reason, but that’s not the only one. How do you think about those two facts together?
Trufelman: The fact that soldiers and civilians are so separate?
Miller: But we look the same.
Trufelman: Oh yeah. The funny thing is the military civilian divide is so huge that it’s something I didn’t even see. I didn’t even realize it because I’m just so not even around soldiers and nor would I ever think that I could ask soldiers about what they’re wearing. Even as a white woman, I should feel relatively safe approaching the soldiers who are patrolling the New York City Subway. But it felt so alien and so foreign to me. And I think the more that we’re told that we’re different, the scarier it will be, the less in common we will have. That is a really threatening thing, especially as our military is being turned against civilians.
We have to realize our commonality. We have to understand that we all live in the same nation and that it’s not an “us” versus “them.” And I also have to be really clear, when I’m talking about the military, I’m not talking about ICE. It’s like a very separate, separate, separate thing. I’m not saying you have to like to go out and hug an ICE agent today. But I do think that the idea, the whole founding principle of the United States military is we’re supposed to be for the people, not for a king, not for any military leader. And it’s vital, vital, vital to come back and to remember that. Clothes just seemed like a good vector for talking about it.
Miller: You also point out that ICE agents dress like police officers who dress like people going on hikes who dress like special forces who dress like everybody. Everybody is dressing the same right now.
Trufelman: That’s true. There is a dark side to this, which is it’s really hard to tell who is who, and that is also dangerous in its own right when everybody is kind of wearing the same form of camouflage. I mean, The New York Times put out a guide for how to tell who is who on the street – and it really should never come to that. I mean, these are all separate entities. They all have separate jurisdictions. They have different sources of funding. They should not look the same. It’s so wild. Sometimes when I’m in the subway and I see what looks like a soldier wearing all camouflage, sometimes they’ll have a badge that says police. And if that’s what it takes to recognize that that’s a police officer and not a soldier, we’ve got to do a little better than that. In that way, I wish there’s a little more regulation for what different branches are supposed to wear.
Miller: Avery, we’re out of time, but thank you so much.
Trufelman: Thank you so much.
Miller: Avery Trufelman is the host of the “Articles of Interest” podcast. The new season is called “Gear.” It’s about the outdoor apparel industry and the convergence of civilian and military style.
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