The Loden Library

Loden is badly served in English. Most of what is written about it online is either wrong about the cloth or copied from something that was, and the mistakes compound: one shop calls it felt, then everyone does.

So this is our attempt at the reference that ought to exist. What the cloth actually is, where it comes from, the vocabulary nobody bothers to translate, and how to tell a real coat from one that is merely green.

We sell the stuff, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to write the version we would want if we did not.

Start here

• What is a Hubertus coat? The Austrian loden coat, part by part, and why each part is there. Most of them were invented by somebody solving a problem halfway up a mountain.
• A loden glossary Eighteen words, from fulling to Wetterfleck. Half of them describe things no English garment does.

The cloth

• The art of shrinking wool in Tirol How fulling works, and why cloth leaves the mill at a fraction of the size it arrived.
• Making loden The whole process on film, carded fleece to finished cloth.
• Our colors of loden and boiled wool Green was never the only one.
• The artisanship of German coats What happens between the cloth and the coat.

The mills

Makers come and go. The mills are older, steadier, and the reason any of this still exists.

• Tuchfabrik Gebrüder Mehler The oldest loden mill in Germany.
• Loden Steiner at Mandling Still fulling cloth under wooden hammers, in Styria.
• Stapf, at Wörgl in Tirol Where the wool is boiled.
• How the oldest mill survived
• All of our weavers

The history

• A short history of loden Mountain sheep, an imperial decree about what peasants were allowed to wear, and the Archduke who took the local cloth back to Vienna and scandalized the court with it.
• From the peasantry to the Habsburg court The same story at length, with the making of the cloth step by step.

Buying a loden coat

• Where to buy a Hubertus coat now What happened to Schneiders of Salzburg, who still makes the coat, and what to check before buying from anyone, ourselves included.
• Size and fit This coat is cut to go over a jacket, which catches people out.

Still to come

Being written, roughly in this order: loden against tweed, a question Bernhard Roetzel raised and nobody has answered properly; how loden ages, with photographs of coats twenty and thirty years old; and a register of the old makers' labels, so that if you turn up a loden coat in a flea market in Gmunden you can work out what you are holding.

If there is something you want covered, or something here you think is wrong, write and tell us.