What Is a Hubertus Coat?

The story goes that Hubert was a young Frankish nobleman who cared for nothing but hunting, and who went out after a stag on Good Friday. The stag turned around. Between its antlers was a crucifix. Hubert gave up hunting on the spot, became a bishop, and was in due course made the patron saint of hunters, which is the sort of joke history enjoys.

The coat named after him is the one you are picturing. Austrian, usually green, pleat down the back, collar you can turn up against the weather. Almost every part of it was invented by somebody trying to solve a problem halfway up a mountain, and the parts are the good bit.

The parts

The pleat down the back. Deep, inverted, sewn shut at the top and running the full length. Raise a rifle, or reach for something on a high shelf, and the coat opens across the shoulders instead of pinning your arms to your sides. It is also why you can get a tweed jacket and a heavy sweater underneath without looking upholstered. On our Tirol it arrives tacked shut with a loose thread. Pull it out. People leave it in for years.

The slit under the arm. Somebody, at some point, got extremely hot climbing a mountain in a wool coat and cut a hole under the arm. It worked. It has been there ever since. It gives you the full swing of your arm and it vents the coat when you are working hard in the cold, and it is the feature nobody notices until they have lived with one, at which point they will not go back.

Pockets that go through. Two slits at the waist opening into the body of the coat, so you can reach your trouser pocket, or originally a cartridge belt, without unbuttoning anything in the rain. A small thing. You will use it every day.

Leather buttons. They do not crack in the cold, and they look better scuffed than new.

Double cloth across the shoulders. On the traditional pattern the loden runs double over the shoulders, chest and upper back. That is where rain lands and sits. It is the least glamorous feature of the coat and probably the reason the old ones are still walking around.

What loden actually is

Here is the thing nearly everyone gets wrong, shops that sell it included. Loden is not felt.

Felt is matted from loose wool that was never woven into anything. Loden is woven first, from carded yarn, and then fulled: dropped into warm water with soap and beaten until it gives up. At Steiner in Mandling they still do it with wooden hammers, which sounds exactly as good as you are imagining.

How much it shrinks depends on how thick the cloth is meant to end up. Lightly fulled loden loses around a tenth of its size. Heavily fulled loden comes out at a third of what went in, which is to say it loses two thirds. Everything worth having in the finished coat comes from the cloth that vanished: it is dense enough to turn wind and shed rain, and it got there with no coating, no membrane, nothing but warm water, a little soap and agitation.

It is also completely silent. A loden coat makes no sound when you move, which is exactly why hunters wanted it, and which turns out to be unexpectedly pleasant compared to the noise of rubbing synthetic jackets.

Lined, unlined, or neither

Traditionally unlined, or lined only across the shoulders. A lining costs money and is the first thing to wear out, while the loden will cheerfully outlast it by decades. The old coats often used doubleface loden instead, woven with a check on the inside, so the cloth simply lined itself.

There is a purist argument too: a synthetic lining sits between you and the cloth and quietly undoes some of what the cloth is doing.

Against that, a lining makes a heavy coat much easier to get on over a jacket, and a zip-out one turns a January coat into an October one. We sell both. The Tirol is unlined, with just enough satin in the shoulders and sleeves to let it slide on. The Süd Tiroler has a zip out warm plaid lining that will keep you warm even against the wind of downtown Manhattan on a cold January day. Ask me how I know.

The colors

Green is what everybody pictures, but it was never the only one. The traditional range was gray melange, green and brown. Green traveled because the garment that traveled was the hunting coat, and hunting coats are green for reasons that need no explaining.

The grays are the sleeper. The classic Schladminger gray is not a dye at all, it is gray and black fibers spun together, which gives it a depth flat gray cannot manage and means it never goes chalky with age. Navy loden reads like a country coat that has learned manners. Camel and brown land closest to an English country coat.

We carry the shape in green, navy, camel and charcoal which very nearly nobody else does.

What it costs, and why

A yard of heavily fulled loden began life as nearly three. In a real sense you are paying for the two that merged into the one.

Then add details, a slit under each arm, a doubled shoulder, piping, pockets that pass clean through the coat, leather buttons, a generous off the shelf size selection, small batch European production costs and quality! None of that shows up in a photograph, which is precisely why a loden coat looks expensive next to something that is mostly styling.

The consolation is that it is a thirty-year coat. The cloth will outlast the lining, the buttons, and in most cases the owner's original waist measurement.

Will you actually wear it

It has a silhouette. People notice it. If you have spent twenty years in plain topcoats, the first two or three outings will feel faintly like fancy dress.

Then one morning it will be raining sideways and you will be warm, dry, and able to hear yourself think, and the feeling will not come back.

If you would like all of that with none of the announcement, charcoal and navy do the entire job in silence.

One honest note. The pleat moves when you walk. Most people stop noticing within a week and then rather enjoy it. A few never make peace with it, and if that might be you, take a look at our Loden Field Coat in Olive or Charcoal for a stylistically quieter loden coat.

Which of ours are Hubertus coats

Three, in several forms.

The Tirol, is the unlined one and the closest thing we have to the original hunting coat. Full-length pleat, slits under the arms, pass-through pockets, leather buttons, and a chin strap that buttons on when the weather turns serious. Eighty-five percent virgin sheep wool, fifteen percent alpaca, cut to go over a jacket. If you do not plan to layer, come down a size.

The Süd Tiroler, is the same pattern with the zip-out lining, in green, navy and camel. This is the one if you want a single coat to cover most of the year. Due to the removable lining, it does not have the alpine sleeves.

The Richard is the same pattern as the Sud Tiroler, but in 100% cashmere and comes in charcoal.

Available short, regular and long for common sizes, and some sizes in a fuller cut for layering a jacket and a sweater at once.

Where the coat comes from now

Real ones have become harder to find. Austria and southern Germany still have their small weavers and a handful of makers, but the number of places that will sell you a genuine Hubertus, in your size, in the color you want, has been shrinking for years. We have written up where the coat comes from today, including the makers who are not us.

Questions about fit, cloth, or which version suits the way you actually live? Write to us.