All toggled up

The thermoregulating duffle coat—both a seafarers’ favourite and a sartorial symbol of bohemian intellectualism—is perhaps most famously sported by a certain Peruvian bear with a penchant for marmalade, finds Russell Higham

- Russell Higham

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The jury is still out as to who wore it best: Gregory Peck (or for that matter, David Niven) in The Guns of Navarone, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth or Trevor Howard in arguably the best British film ever made, The Third Man.

The duffle coat, for all its big-screen hero credentials (heroines, too: Ali MacGraw and Brigitte Bardot smouldered wearing theirs in, respectively, Love Story and The Truth), started life in a small municipality on the outskirts of Antwerp. The town of Duffel in Belgium took its name from the thick, boiled woollen cloth that was used there for making blankets and luggage. The material, with its excellent thermoregulating properties, found its way, via 15th-century Flemish emigrants, to Britain, where an overcoat made from duffel was produced in the 1850s, originally designed by English tailor John Partridge. It bore a resemblance to the Polish 'frock' coat that had first appeared a few decades earlier, its horizontal toggle 'buckle' becoming fashionable for its ease of closing and unfastening.

Hefty, hardwearing and weatherproof, the overcoat (with name Anglicised to 'duffle') seemed the perfect thing for Royal Navy sailors to wrap up in out on 'the cruel sea'-by coincidence, the name of the film in which the garment made its first screen appearance (in 1953), worn by Jack Hawkins. The British Admiralty certainly thought so and commissioned a handful of manufacturers, including The Ideal Clothing Company (now called Original Montgomery) to produce a version for its seafarers.