Here’s Everything You Need To Know About Buying A Winter Coat This Season

To the uninitiated, choosing the right winter jacket can feel like wandering in a blizzard. Inundated by tech specs, numbed by price tags, and frozen by an ever-expanding list of acronyms that really just mean “this should keep you dry.” It’s enough to put even the most confident buyer on ice. To their credit, most outdoors brands stake their marketing on customer education. Unfortunately for any would-be buyers, that education often takes the form of exploding animations and spurious branded trade names. If you thought Nike Lunar vs. adidas Bounce was a lot of fuss over comparable technologies, welcome to the world of H2No, HyVent, NanoPro, and Omni-Tech. Fashion brands, on the other hand, are particularly notorious offenders in this game of winter jacket jargon jam. As market tastes shifts towards performance wear, brands who’ve staked their claim on high-cost artisan fabrics simply export their price structure to plasticized, machine-woven technical textiles with nothing but logo recognition and a few lines of tech-tinted product copy. The simple truth is that most will interpret a high price tag and matte black nylon as signals of quality; in reality, not so much. While a “Made in Italy” story and four-digit price tag may signal quality in suiting, for anything longer than a walk between subway stations, a $3000 Fendi tech jacket is no better suited at keeping you warm than a Costco softshell around 1 percent its price. Read more at Highsnobiety.