The Down Jacket, Decoded

How to choose a winter jacket that will last five seasons

November is when people buy their winter jackets. The sales are at their peak, the cold has become persuasive, and there is still time before January, when the racks will have been picked clean. And nearly everyone buys on the strength of a single number that, on its own, tells you nothing.

Fill power is not warmth. The 550, 700 or 800 on the label is the result of a lab test: how many cubic inches one ounce of down fills under a light weight. The number describes the quality of the down, its ability to hold loft. How much down actually went into the jacket, it doesn't say.

Hence the classic mistake of the season. A jacket with 800 fill power and thirty grams of down is colder than one with 550 and a hundred grams. The first one, meanwhile, costs more, weighs less and feels lovelier in your hand in the store.

What to ask the salesperson: how many grams of down are in the garment. A good brand knows the answer. A mediocre one will start talking about technology. For a city winter anywhere from Toronto to Chicago and New York, the combination that works is 600 fill power or higher and at least 150 grams, a little over five ounces, in a mid-length jacket. Fill power above 700 matters to people who care about weight and packability, which means on the trail and on the plane.

The temperature rating on the label is the manufacturer's invention. Sleeping bags have an international testing standard. Jackets have nothing of the kind: "rated to -30" means only that someone in marketing decided to print exactly that. Comparing those numbers from one brand to the next is pointless.

Read the construction instead. A hood with a stiffened brim and volume adjustment. A cuff inside the sleeve, not just on the outside. A high collar that closes all the way to the chin. A storm flap behind the zipper. A snow skirt inside. Each of these details holds in more warmth than an extra hundred grams of down, because heat escapes through the gaps, not through the fabric.

Goose or duck. Goose down grows larger clusters and so reaches higher fill power numbers. Duck tops out lower, but good duck down beats mediocre goose down, and the gap in price between them is wider than the gap in warmth.

In Canada, the words on the label carry legal weight. "Goose down" requires that at least ninety percent of the fill come from geese. Claiming "100% down" is simply not allowed: commercial down always contains a share of small feathers, and an honest label carries a note saying so. In the United States the rule is worded differently but comes to the same thing: "100% down" may appear only on a product that contains nothing but down, and commercial down like that practically doesn't exist. If a jacket says "100% down," you are reading fiction rather than a fill content.

When synthetic is honestly better. Wet down stops working. The clusters clump, the loft collapses, the jacket turns into a damp rag and takes a full day to dry. Water-repellent treated down slows the process but doesn't stop it.

Now look out the window. Toronto gets about 120 centimetres of snow a year (roughly 47 inches), Chicago about 95 (37), New York about 75 (30), while Buffalo and Barrie, in the path of the Great Lakes snow bands, get more than 220 (over 85). Yet the bigger problem for most large cities on the continent is the temperature, which hovers around freezing: wet snow, sleet, slush, a January thaw. That is exactly the kind of weather in which down loses.

So the honest division looks like this. For a city with a wet winter and a commute along a lake or the ocean, choose synthetic, or a hybrid with down in the body and synthetic fill in the hood, shoulders and hem. For Montreal, Ottawa, Minneapolis, Winnipeg and Calgary, for the cottage, ice fishing and anywhere the cold is drier and more serious, choose down.

The car or the platform. This is what decides the length, and nobody thinks about it in the store.

Down keeps you warm through loft. Pressed flat, it does nothing. Get into a car in a long parka and you sit on its tails, they get crushed under the seatbelt, and twenty minutes later your back is cold under a layer of down. On top of that, a parka gets in the way of the steering wheel, and there's nowhere to put it at the office.

If you spend the day behind the wheel, you need a jacket that stops at mid-thigh and not an inch lower. If you stand for fifteen minutes on an open commuter rail platform, whether it's GO outside Toronto, Metra outside Chicago or Metro-North outside New York, with the wind coming off the fields, you need a parka below the knee, and no mid-length synthetic jacket will stand in for it.

What Suits Whom, and What to Avoid

Mid-thigh is the universal answer. It covers the small of the back, works in the car, goes over a blazer and doesn't cut the figure. If you're buying one jacket for everything, buy this one.

A below-the-knee parka works on tall people. On someone shorter, it cuts off everything below the knee and visually takes away height. The fix is a slightly shorter version that ends at the knee, with footwear in the same tone as the bottom of the jacket so the line doesn't break.

A short puffer to the hip looks current and keeps the leg long, but it isn't built for waiting outside. It's a jacket for people who go from door to door.

Quilting comes in sizes. Wide horizontal baffles add bulk to the body. A fuller figure is better served by narrow quilting and vertical lines. The big "marshmallow" baffles belong on slim people only.

Shiny nylon starts looking cheap within a season and reads as sportswear. A matte fabric looks more expensive at the same price.

Over a suit, you don't wear a sporty puffer. It breaks the line of the shoulder and turns a businessman into a man who got cold on his way somewhere. What works here is a straight-cut down coat with a soft shoulder, a wool overcoat, or a clean-lined parka in a dark matte colour.

Colour. Black is practical, and everyone wears it. Graphite, deep navy, olive and taupe look more expensive in a crowd for the same money. Avoid white anywhere the roads are salted in winter: salt and road spray show up on it within the first week.

Fur on the hood has a function. It breaks up the wind in front of your face, and on a platform you can feel the difference. Get a detachable trim, or every cleaning becomes an ordeal.

What Really Decides Five Seasons

Down isn't killed by wear. It's killed by two household habits.

The first is storing it compressed. A jacket that spends the summer squashed in a bag or under boxes in a closet loses its loft for good. In summer, hang it loosely on a hanger.

The second is dry cleaning, which strips the natural oils from the down. A down jacket should be washed at home, in a machine without a high-speed spin, using a dedicated down wash, then tumble-dried on low with three tennis balls to break up the clumps. Two or three times a season is enough, and the jacket returns to its original loft.

Synthetic shrugs all of this off and is easier to live with. It's also true that good down, cared for this way, keeps its shape for decades, while synthetic goes flat sooner.

Five seasons isn't a property of the jacket. It's a property of its owner.