Gear: Chapter 2

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Articles of Interest
Episode Title: Gear: Chapter 2
Host: Avery Trufelman
Date: October 29, 2025

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Overview

This episode explores the evolution of outdoor gear and its intersection with military uniform design, focusing on the pivotal 20th-century shift from individual, informal approaches to dressing for the outdoors (and for war) to scientifically tested, mass-produced systems. The narrative traces developments from the early days of Abercrombie & Fitch and the broadening accessibility of the American outdoors, through to the high-stakes wartime debate over the U.S. Army's iconic M1943 field jacket. Key themes include the tension between style and function, the influence of scientific research on clothing, and the enduring legacy of military gear on civilian outdoor equipment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Roots of Outdoor Gear in American Culture

• Early Outdoor Pursuits as Elite, Masculine Pursuits

  • Outdoor activities were once reserved for rugged, elite American men, with shopping for gear seen as cheating. (00:19)
  • Many secretly bought outdoor clothes, primarily buckskin suits made by Native American women. (Rachel Gross, 01:05)
    • Quote: “They often turned to Native American women who were the recognized experts at sewing buckskin suits.” — Rachel Gross, 01:05

• Abercrombie & Fitch Mass-Market Breakthrough

  • Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) opened in 1892, reframing shopping for gear as a sign of expertise, not amateurism.
  • Their stores cultivated a masculine, exclusive vibe with expert salesmen. (02:14)

• Democratization of Outdoor Recreation

  • Automobiles and national park expansion (spurred by President Theodore Roosevelt) opened nature to the middle class, making “nature” a destination rather than part of daily American life. (04:18–05:47)

2. Outdoor Gear Goes High-Tech — and Borrowed from Indigenous Styles

• Brand Innovation and Faux-Indigenous Aesthetics

  • Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean and others launched with a focus on hunting and high-tech gear, yet referenced moccasins and Native aesthetics. (08:01)
  • The Lustberg Nast & Co. “Buckskane” jacket (cotton or wool with DuPont waterproof coating) echoed buckskin in name but was made with modern materials. (09:27, 10:03)
    • Quote: “The Buckskane jacket was made of cotton or wool assembled in a factory and notably covered with a new waterproof coating.” — Avery Trufelman, 09:43

• Rise of Scientific Testing

  • Early collaborations heralded a future where outdoor/military gear would tout technical ingredients, like DuPont coatings — a trend that continues today. (10:34)

3. World War Uniforms: From Wool to Science

• Military’s Clothing Challenge

  • At the start of WWII, the U.S. relied on heavy wool overcoats ill-suited for global operations. (16:34)
  • General J.K. Parsons tried redesigning with off-the-rack golf jackets (the “Parsons jacket”), but this led to chaos of multiple, special-purpose jackets. (19:35)
    • Quote: “It's a members only jacket. It's what Polly Walnuts would use to take someone out in the Sopranos.” — Joshua Kerner, 20:08

• George Doriot’s Intervention: The Scientific Revolution

  • French-American business professor George Doriot became Quartermaster Corps’ chief and reimagined uniform design using extensive scientific testing, industry consultation, and laboratory experiments. (18:09, 21:42)
  • Layering principle discovered: lighter, multiple layers are better than single heavy layers. (26:42)
    • Quote: “The laboratories had shown that wearing lots of lighter layers was going to keep soldiers warmer than wearing a smaller set of much heavier layers.” — Rachel Gross, 26:42

• Use of Dummies ("Chauncey," the Copper Man)

  • Doriot’s team used heated mannequins to obtain objective clothing data, a precursor to modern gear testing. (25:23)

4. The M1943 Jacket Controversy: Science vs. Tradition

• Science Triumphs — But Not Without Struggle

  • The M1943 (M43) field jacket, result of scientific testing, was modular and allowed layering—both revolutionary. (28:19)
  • Massive field test in Italy revealed high soldier satisfaction. Practical pockets and comfort were key. (29:06)
    • Quote (Soldier Feedback): “This uniform makes us feel like soldiers. The old one didn't.” — Anzio test report, paraphrased at 29:23

• Resistance from General Littlejohn

  • Major General Robert McGowan Littlejohn (Quartermaster General, European Theater) detested the “unmilitary” look of the M43, preferring stiff, tailored styles (ETO/Ike jackets) inspired by the British. (35:11–37:28)
    • Quote: “He really thought that the aim of a uniform should be to look crisp and soldierly.” — Charles McFarlane, 36:12
  • Littlejohn obstructed M43 distribution—leading to the cold weather crisis. Soldiers froze, suffered frostbite, and the scandal hit the press. (42:21–44:16)
    • Quote: “Men are losing toes, skin is coming off with the sock. And when you look at the rates of trench foot, frostbite... all of these things are being recorded at a much higher level in the units in Little John's perfviews.” — Charles McFarlane, 43:03

• Aftermath and Legacy

  • Littlejohn ultimately faced no official consequences, thanks to Eisenhower’s protection. (44:53)
    • Quote: “What happens is Eisenhower... puts a press freeze on any stories dealing with the cold weather uniform crisis... He ran policy interference for a friend.” — Joshua Kerner, 44:53
  • Doriot moved on but left a legacy: scientific, soldier-oriented gear design triumphed, especially the layering system. (46:37)

5. Long-term Impact: Military Science and Civilian Gear

• From Soldiers to Civilians

  • Outdoor companies (REI, L.L. Bean, etc.) adopted military-tested designs, often selling literal surplus M43s and other gear postwar. (47:21–48:01; 55:33)
    • Quote: “As early as 1944, REI offered army steel frame packs... and army over mitts. So we actually sold those in the store.” — Scott Mosier, 55:33

• Ongoing Material Innovation and Testing

  • Modern military and civilian outdoor gear continue rigorous lab testing: mannequins (now much more advanced than “Chauncey” — e.g., “Andy the Dynamic Thermal Mannequin”) simulate sweat, temperature, and field conditions. (50:06)

    • Quote: “You can dress him [the mannequin]. It’s in his closet… this is fun!” — Avery Trufelman & Maddy Polyboggan, 51:24

  • Software tools help predict optimal layering for various environments and missions, preventing cold-weather disasters. (51:46)

• Fashion & Function Blur

  • Despite outdoor brands’ claims that “fashion is none of our business,” the crossover of function, expertise, and style is constant. (34:23, 54:07)

    • Quote: “We look at all the Runway shows… fashion is none of our business, get out of here.” — Scott Mosier & Avery Trufelman, 54:07

  • Testing, certification, and a “lab-tested” aura have become the ultimate mark of outdoor quality—replacing the earlier, salesman-driven model of expertise. (55:00)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the taboo of shopping for outdoor gear:

  • “Don't buy anything. If you do, you're essentially showing yourself to be a beginner.” — Rachel Gross, 00:35

• On Abercrombie & Fitch’s unique retail experience:

  • “They created an environment that looked like a gentleman’s clubhouse.” — Avery Trufelman, 01:52

• On the impact of Doriot’s approach:

  • “This was the sartorial embodiment of a democratic army. It is designing in the name of pure science, pure pragmatism.” — Avery Trufelman, 30:21

• On the cold weather crisis consequences:

  • “Men are losing toes, skin is coming off with the sock...” — Charles McFarlane, 43:03

• On the enduring legacy of the M43:

  • “You can still see it as a template on jackets all around you.” — Avery Trufelman, 48:01

• On testing as new expertise:

  • “Testing, testing, testing, opinion testing, field testing, lab testing. This has become the guiding principle in gear.” — Avery Trufelman, 48:39

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00–01:36 – Setting: Taboo of buying outdoor gear & Abercrombie & Fitch’s role
• 03:24–06:56 – Outdoors as elite leisure; national parks, and the “consumer of nature”
• 08:01–10:34 – Early outdoor brands & technofetishism; the “Buckskane” jacket
• 16:34–19:08 – Military uniform woes: Wool, Parsons jacket
• 21:17–26:42 – Doriot and layering breakthrough; copper “Chauncey” dummy
• 29:06–32:09 – Field jacket testing & the Littlejohn feud
• 34:23–37:58 – Fashion vs. function in uniform design (Littlejohn’s perspective)
• 42:21–45:13 – The cold weather crisis, press coverage, political fallout
• 46:37–47:14 – Doriot’s ideology wins; M43’s influence into Korea, Vietnam, and beyond
• 50:06–52:40 – Modern mannequin testing, software, the military’s “closet” simulator
• 54:07–55:00 – Civilian gear companies & fashion consciousness, REI’s lab culture
• 55:33–55:56 – Outdoor companies selling military surplus
• Throughout – Recurring discussion of how scientific testing became the essence of “gear”

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Conclusion

This episode powerfully illustrates how American outdoor gear — both civilian and military — was shaped by a push-and-pull between tradition and innovation, fueled by the democratization of outdoor activity, technological progress, and the practical, lived experience of soldiers. The legacy of these developments persists: technical, rigorously tested clothing became coveted by everyone from hikers to fashionistas, all traceable to the lessons (hard won and sometimes tragically delayed) of scientifically derived military uniforms and the battles, literal and figurative, over how we dress to face nature.

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For further images and details, visit: articlesofinterest.substack.com

Transcript

[Avery Trufelman]

This is not your mama's house. This is not summer camp. This is not overnight with a friend. This is not Burger King. Cause you will never have it your way. You are now the property of the United States Army.

[Joshua Kerner]

What you will get is Chapter two.

[Avery Trufelman]

Once upon a time, the outdoors was for the most rugged of Americans, the Teddy Roosevelts who. Who wanted to prove their mettle in the manly arts of hunting and fishing and survival. But shopping for those outdoor activities was considered cheating. And if you shopped for gear, it.

[Rachel Gross]

Was a dirty secret many guidebooks often told its readers. Don't buy anything. If you do, you're essentially showing yourself to be a beginner who doesn't know anything really about what the nature experience is supposed to be.

[Avery Trufelman]

Rachel Gross, professor of history at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of the excellent book Shopping all the Way to the Woods. The but as previously discussed in chapter one, essentially most white American men did secretly buy their outdoor clothes, which were often buckskin suits.

[Rachel Gross]

They often turned to Native American women who were the recognized experts at sewing buckskin suits.

[Avery Trufelman]

So they would just buy them.

[Rachel Gross]

They would just buy them.

[Avery Trufelman]

This dirty little secret started to come to light as more and more clothing became mass produced, and that included outdoor clothing. And one particular shop opened in 1892 that finally, once and for all, removed all the stigma of shopping for outdoor gear. And it was called Abercrombie and Fitch.

[Rachel Gross]

Abercrombie and Fitch, based in New York City, sold outdoor clothing and equipment to New Yorkers and taught them, if you want to have the right kit to go to your hunting or camping or fishing trip, you have to stop in at our store to.

[Avery Trufelman]

And don't worry, fellas, this wasn't your wife's kind of department store. No way. When David Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch opened up a new way to buy camping gear in the heart of the Big Apple, they created an environment that looked like a gentleman's clubhouse.

[Rachel Gross]

A green respite from the hustle and bustle of the city is what they called it in their catalogs in the early 20th century, and purchase what you need from us.

[Avery Trufelman]

Taxidermy and antlers filled the walls. There was a log cabin lounge on the roof, which crowned the floors and floors of guns, fishing rods and tackle and, and hats and footwear and anything you could possibly want for your gentlemanly adventure. It was masculine, it was exclusive, it was rugged. But the real draw of a place like Abercrombie and Fitch was its salesmen.

[Rachel Gross]

Often the advertisements for Abercrombie and Fitch or Similar companies would invoke the expertise of the shopkeepers who had tried out all this equipment on, say, their own canoe trip this previous summer.

[Avery Trufelman]

Shopping is no longer a cheat. It is in fact the guide. Retail becomes the very source of knowledge passed on. Shopping for the right gear becomes a hallmark of expertise and experience.

[Rachel Gross]

And so that's the first time I see a shift from the notion of the 19th century, which is don't buy, don't trust shopkeepers. If you have to go talk to them, you're probably doing something wrong, to the early 20th century notion of the shop is the first place that you must go because that's where you're going to learn about the right gear.

[Avery Trufelman]

Another aspect of this widespread acceptance of shopping was that more men of more classes could access the outdoors. Before the turn of the last century, going outdoors for long stretches of time was not something that regular middle class men did for fun.

[Rachel Gross]

In the 1890s, going to a place like a national park was very much an elite activity. It was people who had the time and money to be able to take weeks or months vacation going on grand tours of the American west via railroads.

[Avery Trufelman]

Maybe they would take a stagecoach tour through Yellowstone or Yosemite, but not necessarily.

[Rachel Gross]

Go on long walks up a glacier.

[Avery Trufelman]

And then came the Ford Model T in the highway. And suddenly you could go get out into nature and make stops whenever you wanted. You could get away for shorter amounts of time for like a little weekend hunting trip or a day hike.

[Rachel Gross]

As automobiles began to become more popular in the early 20th century, a lot more middle class Americans were able to access vacations in national parks for the first time.

[Avery Trufelman]

During this time there was also a huge expansion of specially designated outdoor areas thanks to our Rough Rider, the fightin Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who in his time became known as the conservationist president. In his administration, Theodore Roosevelt established 150 National Forests, 51 Federal Bird Reserves, four National Game Reserves, five National Parks and 18 National Monuments, including da da da da, the Grand Canyon. In his appeal to Congress for it, Roosevelt said, Arizona has a natural wonder. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Obviously the Grand Canyon rules. I am so grateful that Theodore Roosevelt roped it off and protected it from becoming a Pizza Hut. And yet Roosevelt's idea that man can only mar land is not exactly true. Many Americans like Roosevelt loved to romanticize nature as this pure, clean, untouched place. But people lived all over These lands before all those Indian wars, Teddy Roosevelt was such a fan of. A lot of the national parks that Teddy Roosevelt admired were once sacred sites to indigenous communities. I mean, of course, look at them, they're amazing. But Roosevelt sort of roped these places off and put them under glass. This was Roosevelt's conception of nature, that it was meant to be pristine, wiped away of people. Don't get me wrong, I love national parks, especially since there are some new national parks that might be created in conjunction with tribal governments. National parks are great, and fundamentally, they helped create this separation. Nature becomes a place to be visited periodically. Rather than imagining nature as just part of the world where we live, the nature of the United States became, according to Rachel Esgross, an attraction, something Americans drive out to go see.

[Rachel Gross]

And so, in other words, they became a kind of consumer of nature via the automobile. And the rise of outdoor companies catered to that growing population of outdoor recreationists.

[Avery Trufelman]

More outdoor retailers, in the vein of Abercrombie and Fitch, hawked trail tested goods sold by expert outdoorsmen. And many new companies were started by expert outdoorsmen like Eddie Bauer.

[Rachel Gross]

He is most well known for his quilted down jacket design. The story that he often told was that he had almost died on a particular trip, but it was only because of this jacket that he was able to survive.

[Avery Trufelman]

Most of these early brands were really about hunting, but it is just a hunting hunting catalog. At the Outdoor Recreation Archive in Logan, Utah, you can see some of the earliest catalogs from the outdoor industry. It's very cool, and all these outdoorsmen are very gentlemanly looking. They're wearing collared shirts and they're all smoking pipes. Especially if you look at the first printed super duper rugged manly catalog for L.L. bean. And in the back it says, outside of your gun, nothing is so important to your outfit as your footwear. A hunter named Leon Leonwood Bean owned a specialty hunting shop in Maine. Upon returning from one of his many duck hunting trips in 1911, the legend goes, Bean was irked by his perpetually cold and wet feet. Barely protected in his leather soled shoes, he made his own boots out of soft tan leather with a thick rubber sole. They were waterproof, warm and efficient, and they premiered in 1912. Bean dubbed them the Maine hunting Shoe. The mane hunting shoe is designed by a hunter who has tramped Maine woods for the past 24 years. Bean promoted his boot as the height of new technology, and yet the language in his 1920s catalogs and advertisements still referenced moccasins a lot. Light as a Moccasin with the swinging protection of a heavy hunting boot. Although many of these early cutting edge outdoor brands are experimenting with new kinds of rubber and material technologies, aesthetically they cannot let go of this faux indigenous thing.

[Rachel Gross]

There was an interesting jacket. It was produced by a company called lustberg Nast & Co. In the 1920s through the 1940s. It is a nod to older technologies and designs, but updated to reflect new uses of materials.

[Avery Trufelman]

It was called the Buckskane jacket.

[Rachel Gross]

You can hear in that name. It's a nod to the historical jacket Buckskin, right? But Buckskane wasn't produced by killing a buck and then skinning the deer and then sewing that material together into a jacket.

[Avery Trufelman]

The Buckskane jacket was made of cotton or wool assembled in a factory and notably covered with a new waterproof coating.

[Rachel Gross]

I can't tell you how well it worked, but that was considered one version of high tech for the early 20th century, in part because it had a DuPont produced waterproof coating.

[Avery Trufelman]

DuPont, the chemical company that made weapons in World War I, made the high tech coating on this otherwise Daniel Boone looking old style Bucks Skein jacket.

[Rachel Gross]

And it includes not just a specific kind of coating that's going to keep water out, but also the trademark of a chemical company that signals that kind of effectiveness.

[Avery Trufelman]

Advertisements for the Buckskane proudly flaunt dupont's logo.

[Rachel Gross]

The Buckskane one is the first time I see their trademark appear in a clothing advertisement.

[Avery Trufelman]

This kind of collaboration will be imitated many, many times in the future where outdoor clothing will advertise its own materials. A certain kind of rubber, a certain kind of liner, a certain kind of fleece. And many of these materials will make their way into both the outdoor industry and the military because they will be scientifically tested and proven.

[Rachel Gross]

That's the most important outcome of the link between the military and the outdoor industry is the rise of scientific testing.

[Avery Trufelman]

This is what will come to define gear. If it's performance tested. It's going to change the whole aesthetic of American outdoor clothing. And it's also going to change what it means to look like an American soldier.

[Cassidy or April (Fashion Historians, Podcast Hosts)]

Hi, I'm Cassidy. And I'm April. And together we are fashion historians, friends and co hosts of the History of Fashion, a podcast about why the clothes we wear matter throughout history and around the world, from the cultural and societal to the personal and often political. With each episode, we explore the multitude of meanings quite literally sewn into the clothes we wear. Please join us in unraveling the hidden histories residing in your closet. New episodes are available on Wednesdays and our Dressed Classic episodes re air each Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever else you listen to your favorite shows.

[Avery Trufelman]

Kick off the holiday season with Macy's Friends and Family Sale because Macy's considers you a friend. Take an extra 30% off everything with the Code Friend and the timing really couldn't be better because I'm sure you're planning your holiday travel and maybe plotting out your gifts. Macy's also has up to 50% off on luggage from Samsonite and Travelpro. If you're getting out of town or if you're hosting, there are great deals on cookware from Greenpan, Anolon and more. Shop the Macy's Friends and Family sale and don't forget to use the Code Friend because you're a friend. It's going on from October 27th to November 3rd. Shop at Macy's.com or in store I always love clothing that comes with a story, and so I love that I have this hoodie that looks like a plain heather gray hoodie, but I ask people to guess what it is. Come on, what do you think it is? It's softer than cashmere. It's warmer than wool. What could it be? They'll never guess that it's Alpaca communities in Peru have been turning alpaca fiber into soft, cuddly clothes for generations, and it makes sense why? It's breathable, it's warm, and somehow it's also cooling when it's hot out. The alpaca is a little underappreciated, and it's time that we give it its due. I'm talking about paka P a k a Pakka hoodies are made sustainably and ethically from traceable alpaca fiber. Each paca hoodie is handcrafted in Peru by artisans who stitch their name into the tag. And right now, when you order your paca hoodie, they'll throw in a free pair of their alpaca crew socks. Have you ever had socks that come with a lifetime guarantee? Paca dares you to wear these socks out and if you can, they'll replace them. If you've been thinking about leveling up your hoodie game, this is your sign to do it now to grab your Pakka hoodie and get a free pair of alpaca crew socks. Head to go.pakkaapparel.com articles and use my code articles. That's go.p a k a apparel.com articles and enter code articles. If you ever have the distinct pleasure of meeting Joshua Kerner, the attorney, layperson, expert in militariat, to whom I spoke with for 14 hours. Do not mention Major General Robert McGowan Littlejohn. Kerner will go off on a tear.

[Joshua Kerner]

Oh, he's just. He's just an asshole.

[Avery Trufelman]

Kerner has appointed himself General Littlejohn's nemesis. Not that Kerner ever met Major General Littlejohn personally.

[Charles McFarlane]

No.

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John died long before Kerner was born. This is about something Little John did in 1944.

[Joshua Kerner]

There's this meme that the Onion did where it's like, Boyfriend is still upset about coup that the CIA did in, like, 1976. And for me, it's like Boyfriend is still upset about decisions the quartermaster cord made in 1944. 45.

[Avery Trufelman]

And Kerner's kind of in the minority here. He warned me as we drove to Fort Lee in Virginia to go look at the cool old uniforms in the quartermaster archive. That we would be confronted face to face with Kerner's enemy.

[Joshua Kerner]

You'll see in the museum near the archive when we go inside. There's a massive picture of Little John.

[Avery Trufelman]

This really makes Kerner so mad. His animosity burns bright and active.

[Joshua Kerner]

I think everybody actually now needs to know how you fucked up.

[Avery Trufelman]

And I think once you know what Little John did, you'll be upset, too. Maybe not as upset as Kerner. He made a whole meme page devoted to roasting General Little John. But Little John arguably did make one of the dumbest and most dangerous fashion decisions in US Military history. So at the end of last chapter, we had reached the end of the Philippine American War, basically, when President Theodore Roosevelt was like, this war is getting too gruesome. I'm just calling it off. That was in 1902. Meanwhile, the American Indian wars are continuing across the American West. And there are ongoing colonization attempts in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which are widely known as the Banana Wars. So war is ongoing in the United States. But if you look at any big American war timeline, they'll tell you the next big, significant American war is World War I, the Great War. The war that is about to be defined by these new, improved, smokeless weapons. A war defined by having to be very far away from each other, having to hide, having to be in trenches, and having to wear a very specific uniform.

[Rachel Gross]

The heavy wool overcoat that reached almost to the knees was part of what the standard military issue was in the.

[Avery Trufelman]

US during World War I. Rachel S. Gross. Again, World War I was the United States first time fighting abroad on a large scale in Cold, soggy weather. In a long, heavy wool overcoat, if you get wet, you get really wet.

[Rachel Gross]

Heavy wool overcoats had limited flexibility.

[Avery Trufelman]

These coats were very heavy. It was like carrying around a blanket.

[Rachel Gross]

Either they were on and they were quite warm, or they were off and you were really cold.

[Avery Trufelman]

The heavy wool overcoat was just all or nothing. This was not an advanced or convenient coat for the soldiers. So after World War I might have been a good time to recoup, find a better solution for a better military jacket. But then it was the Great Depression and the size and budget of the military were slashed. So When World War II comes around, the army is sort of like, oh, no.

[Rachel Gross]

The US Military had very little cold weather expertise going into World War II.

[Avery Trufelman]

The United States Quartermaster Corps, the department responsible for clothing the troops, was like, there's gotta be something in the middle. We're not going to get rid of this big wool overcoat just yet. But there has to be some sort of intermediary jacket that's not so big and warm. And the man who ultimately takes on the task of developing this military jacket is this French American business professor named Georges Doriot. But everyone's going to call him Georges Dorio.

[Rachel Gross]

Doriot served for the French military during World War I and then emigrated to the United States. He was working as a business professor at the Harvard Business School.

[Avery Trufelman]

George Dorio is most famous for being the inventor of venture capital. Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is just a massive footnote in his life.

[Rachel Gross]

And he knew through his work in the management field as well as his military background, that he would likely be called on to serve during World War.

[Avery Trufelman]

II, knowing he was probably going to be put in charge of some large, sprawling enterprise. George Dorio undertakes some work for the Military Planning Division. And sure enough, in 1941, he gets a direct appointment as lieutenant colonel and becomes the chief of the Military Planning Division in the Office of the Quartermaster General. Essentially, he's a civilian recruit into this machine. Because the Quartermaster Corps needed the help of someone with Dorio's organizational skills and know how they were spinning out.

[Joshua Kerner]

The Office of the quartermaster general in D.C. goes, what are we doing here?

[Avery Trufelman]

Kerner says the Quartermaster Corps had gotten themselves into a real pickle with the jacket situation. Basically, in trying to solve the heavy wool overcoat problem, they created an even bigger jacket problem, and they brought on Dorio to clean it up. What had happened was this one general, General J.K. parsons, was like, I've got it. I will make a better Alternative to the heavy wool overcoat. Let me do it. I'll design a new jacket. General Parsons sort of took this on.

[Joshua Kerner]

As a pet project, and the quartermaster corps gave him a bunch of money. And he bought like 300 different, like, golfing jackets, members only style jackets, and chose the parts of each one he liked best. And he sent that to the quartermaster corps and was like, this is what I want. And the quartermaster corps was like, okay, boss.

[Avery Trufelman]

That was pretty much how clothing development worked at the time. A general wanted it, so he got it. And so this jacket was commonly known as the Parsons jacket after general Parsons. It really just looked like a zip up golf jacket.

[Joshua Kerner]

So it's a members only jacket. It's what polly walnuts would use to take someone out in the Sopranos.

[Avery Trufelman]

It looked really cool.

[Joshua Kerner]

And it's so popular that it's actually issued under armed guard. And you have to sign off for it because it's just a rush. It's the thing to have.

[Avery Trufelman]

But the problems with the Parsons jacket were glaring. I mean, it's a golf jacket. It's not for fighting.

[Joshua Kerner]

It's short. If you lift your arms, it exposes your belly, it makes your kidneys cold.

[Avery Trufelman]

Soldiers in Washington state and Alaska immediately complain about its shortcomings.

[Joshua Kerner]

The warmth and length issues are fixed in something called the arctic field jacket.

[Avery Trufelman]

So there's this new Arctic edition field jacket.

[Joshua Kerner]

Then the paratroops, they want their own version. The mountain troops want their own version. You get a special jacket for tankers. You just get special jacket after special jacket.

[Avery Trufelman]

The quartermaster corps could not handle all these special orders for special jackets for each special need and climate.

[Joshua Kerner]

And that just doesn't work on a global war where you're having millions of men having niche jackets just isn't. That's. It's insane.

[Avery Trufelman]

So this was the challenge for George Dorio.

[Joshua Kerner]

We need a universal jacket for everyone.

[Avery Trufelman]

Can you make a jacket for the military that can work all the time, everywhere? And Dorio, instead of doing what had been done before, which was, you know, looking at 300 commercially available jackets or looking at what militaries in other countries were doing, Dorio develops this jacket from first principles. He does scientific testing.

[Rachel Gross]

George Dorio decided that taking a scientific approach to testing through consultation with climatologists, physiologists, geographers, and others, was the best way to go about determining how to equip what would eventually be a fighting force of 12 million people.

[Avery Trufelman]

And in addition to all these scientists are a bunch of consultants from the clothing industry.

[Rachel Gross]

They're all men who worked at, say, Brooks Brothers or perhaps dupont or a woolen mill, for instance.

[Avery Trufelman]

I mean, everyone. And all facets of industry turned to the war effort on a scale that we cannot fathom now, and that included the outdoor industry. The Quartermaster Corps turned to some of the most famous outdoorsmen who had come onto the scene.

[Rachel Gross]

Eddie Bauer, L.L. bean, Harold Hirsch, who owned the company White Stag, were among those who served as civilian consultants, advising on things like tent design or jacket manufacturing or what sleeping bags ought to look like.

[Avery Trufelman]

And it was entirely new that this young, fledgling industry was being taken seriously by the United States government.

[Rachel Gross]

The outdoor industry was represented, probably for the first time in a big way on the national stage.

[Avery Trufelman]

These outdoorsmen were asked for their ideas about what to wear. And a number of explorers and alpinists were asked to. To join the Quartermaster Corps on a cold weather expedition to Mount McKinley in Alaska to test out equipment.

[Rachel Gross]

A lot of the American mountaineers were serving as either civilian consultants or actually as officers in the Quartermaster Corps, doing the testing work for the development of these kinds of jackets and other pieces of quilting.

[Avery Trufelman]

But Doria wanted testing that could get even more exact. Yeah, the army wanted a jacket that would keep soldiers warm, but how warm? Yeah, they want soldiers to be dry, but how dry? Yeah, it was valuable to know if an experienced outdoorsman thought a particular jacket worked. But how would you know if it worked for the average soldier? The quartermaster wanted tangible, measurable results that could be calibrated in degrees, in clo. In percentage moisture content to ensure that you could really adjust and fine tune these jackets. So Dorio looked back at the facilities they had at his old job at Harvard.

[Rachel Gross]

I know that the Harvard Fatigue Lab, which is a physiology lab that had been around for a few decades, was prominent when it came to shaping what the military testing facilities would look like for the Quartermaster Corps.

[Avery Trufelman]

The Harvard fatigue labs had chambers that could get very cold or very hot for conducting tests in physiology.

[Rachel Gross]

It had been quite common to take, say, a Harvard undergraduate into the laboratory, put them on a treadmill, and understand, say, changes in skin temperature or levels of sweating.

[Avery Trufelman]

But what was new was that Dorio wasn't trying to test the limits of the human body. Dorio and his team were putting test subjects in various military garb to test the clothing.

[Rachel Gross]

You could turn the temperature really low and see how long it took before people shivered uncomfortably. Or desert testing facilities where you could turn the temperature way up. Or wind tunnels where you might shoot a shock of air at a soldier who acts as the test subjects to see how much they could withstand.

[Avery Trufelman]

Dorio and the Quartermaster Corps worked with at least four different university laboratories and their own climactic research lab. But they soon realized there was a flaw in these experiments. These test subject soldiers, they were too.

[Rachel Gross]

Subjective because they might say, I feel very cold. And that's really hard to represent scientifically on a scale that is numerically universalizable. So they developed a copper man.

[Avery Trufelman]

The Quartermaster Corps developed a dummy, a.

[Rachel Gross]

Heated mannequin made out of copper with lots of wires attached to it.

[Avery Trufelman]

And they would put the copper man in, say, a jacket, to get an even more exact and accurate understanding of how clothing felt on the human body, or rather on Chauncey's body. That was the copper man's name. His name was Chauncey.

[Rachel Gross]

But it wasn't just one Chauncey. Often the producers would create 10 or 15 and then send them to different testing facilities.

[Avery Trufelman]

With Chauncey, the facts didn't lie. He was covered with sensors.

[Rachel Gross]

And that, the scientists at the military research laboratories believed would yield more trustworthy and dependable data that they could then use to create the jackets that they wanted to.

[Avery Trufelman]

This was George Dorio's era of the quartermaster, a new era of clothing that was scientific and based on data. Chauncey was warmer in this jacket than that jacket. Chauncey was drier in this parka than that one. Based on this incredible, unprecedented use of garment science, buttressed with input and support from outdoorsmen and consultants, Dorio and the Quartermaster Corps emerged with a brilliant new concept. They found the scientifically proven answer for how to dress outside. There was no one perfect jacket. The answer was layering.

[Rachel Gross]

The laboratories had shown that wearing lots of lighter layers was going to keep soldiers warmer than wearing a smaller set of much heavier layers.

[Avery Trufelman]

And you might be like, yeah, layering. I could have told you that.

[Rachel Gross]

This might seem obvious to a modern listener.

[Avery Trufelman]

Right. It's like just what we all do.

[Rachel Gross]

Yeah. You wear some things underneath and then you put other things on top, and then you can take them on or off, depending on what the temperature looks like outside or if you're hot. Layering. Layering. It's a good idea.

[Avery Trufelman]

This was in the 1940s. New.

[Charles McFarlane]

We talk about the layering principle, like, everyone understands it, but like, During World War II, most men did not understand the layering principle.

[Avery Trufelman]

That's Charles McFarlane, a costume historian and journalist who wrote his master's thesis in part on the development of the field jacket. But you can really see how new the layering principle was, because in this field jacket that Charles has from the 1950s, there are lengthy instructions printed on the inside.

[Charles McFarlane]

This tag has instructions for how to wear this properly. Number one is wear as an outer garment in cold wet climates and intermediate garment in cold, dry climates.

[Avery Trufelman]

This field jacket wasn't just a coat. It wasn't just a blazer. It wasn't just a windbreaker. It was a whole system. You could add a liner for warmth, a parka for cold, a rain cover for rain. You could tighten and cinch the drawstring depending on the layer and the weather.

[Charles McFarlane]

For cold weather, button the liner. So there's a liner that goes into this and they're saying in cold, dry climates like the Arctic, you're going to need like a parka over this. And then wear alone in mild weather.

[Avery Trufelman]

But if you undid all the attachments and stripped it all down, at its core was just an olive green cotton sateen jacket.

[Charles McFarlane]

When you close your eyes, you picture an army jacket.

[Rachel Gross]

This is that an army green military jacket.

[Charles McFarlane]

Cotton green jacket with four large cargo.

[Rachel Gross]

Pockets, two chest pocket and then two pockets lower down at the hip, about hip length with adjustable cuffs.

[Avery Trufelman]

I suppose we now just think of this as like the classic army field jacket. But in its day, this was the base of a high tech modular all weather dressing system. And once it had been perfected in laboratories and in outdoor field tests, the design was further refined. Find in actual battlefields they send a.

[Charles McFarlane]

Little over a thousand jackets to a battle.

[Avery Trufelman]

In Italy, the Anzio beachhead was in a stalemate phase. In late March of 1944, a battalion of men is given these new jackets to try out and then they collect.

[Charles McFarlane]

Them at the end of a two week period and conduct interviews, really asking these guys what stuff they like and what stuff they don't.

[Avery Trufelman]

On the whole, the guys really like this new jacket. As one soldier said in the report, this uniform makes us feel like soldiers. The old one didn't. Still, some soldiers give feedback like they can't fit their meal rations, their K rations in the front pocket of these.

[Charles McFarlane]

New field jackets, they enlarge the pocket ever so slightly to allow it to be buttoned closed. While the K rations inside the pockets.

[Avery Trufelman]

Are really important because In World War II, soldiers are living out of their pockets. They are loaded down with stuff.

[Charles McFarlane]

These men in World War II are, you know, living outdoors for weeks at a time. They sleep in holes that they dig and they don't change their clothes and they have to carry everything on their backs that they need for their livelihood.

[Avery Trufelman]

And all these demands fell upon the jacket, it depended on the gear.

[Charles McFarlane]

There are quartermaster observers being sent into the field. Looking to see how men are wearing their stuff. They're really thinking about the well being of the average soldier.

[Avery Trufelman]

So this is the first time American military dress is looking towards its own soldiers for feedback. This uniform is not about what some general wants. It's not about emulating some foreign military power. This is the sartorial embodiment of a democratic army. It is designing in the name of pure science, pure pragmatism. This jacket is really revolutionary. Every other military in the world is still fighting in heavy wool overcoats. They're not doing science, scientific testing. They're not practicing the layering principle. And the United States is going all in. They're deploying this completely new looking thing at mass scale. It's really bold. And this resulting jacket was called the M1943M. Standing for model. 1943 was the year it came out. And the M43 was unlike anything most Americans had ever experienced. Outside of avid hunters and mountaineers. In May of 1944, the New York Times reported how well that test in Anzio, Italy had gone. And how the M43 had, quote, a splendid effect on the morale of the men who wore it. George Dorio and the Quartermaster Corps really did it. They created the perfect scientifically proven, warm, flexible, movable jacket for all environments. And now all they had to do was get these M43 jackets over to the brave boys in the European theater of operations quickly. Before the winter came. But this is where Kerner's nemesis, General Littlejohn comes in.

[Joshua Kerner]

He was an annoying dick that made more suffering than needed to really exist.

[Avery Trufelman]

General Littlejohn is like, no, I don't like the M43 jackets.

[Joshua Kerner]

Because Little John is just a fucking idiot.

[Avery Trufelman]

This is why Kerner will never forgive Little John for what he did in 1944. It's actually quite bad. I'll tell you about it after the break. Kick off the holiday season with Macy's Friends and Family sale. Because Macy's considers you a friend. Take an extra 30% off everything with the code friend. And the timing really couldn't be better. Because I'm sure you're planning your holiday. Holiday travel and maybe plotting out your gifts. Macy's also has up to 50% off on luggage from Samsonite and Travelpro. If you're getting out of town or if you're hosting. There are great deals on cookware from Greenpan, Anolon and more shop the Macy's Friends and family sale. And don't forget to use the code friend because you're a friend. It's going on from October 27th to November 3rd. Shop at Macy's.com or in store. Mood is a company that thinks cannabis should be accessible, affordable and transparent. They're really into talking about it, which is why I'm talking about it. I'm talking about Mood.com's incredible line of functional gummies. And you can get 20% off your first [e-mail] with promo code articles. Their gummies kick in in under 15 minutes and if you go to mood.com you can see that they calibrate all their formulas for all different sorts of things. It's not about just getting stoned. Best of all, not only is every Mood product backed by a 100 day satisfaction guarantee, but as I mentioned, listeners get 20% off their first order with code articles. So head to mood.com, find the functional gummy that matches exactly what you're looking for and let Mood help you discover your perfect me. And don't forget to use promo code articles when you check out to save 20% on your first order. There's this ongoing fallacy that outdoorsy people don't care about how they look, but it's getting preposterous. Last May, I snapped a picture of a Patagonia storefront where it said in big serif font, fashion is none of our business. As though that company's design team didn't have to submit a color trend report that quarter please.

[Rachel Gross]

One of the ethos of the outdoor world been we're not about looking good. It's all about what works.

[Avery Trufelman]

That is of course, Rachel Esgross. And one would think that in wartime, while marching for days on end, killing, surviving, that one would think nothing at all of style.

[Rachel Gross]

However, the Quartermaster Corps representatives would be the first to say that how a particular item looked was really important to acceptance and therefore important to function because.

[Avery Trufelman]

It will determine if a given garment will actually be worn.

[Rachel Gross]

Because if soldiers didn't accept the look and feel of a particular piece, they might undermine the entire system that had been so carefully proven to be effective in research laboratories. So style, the look of the goods.

[Avery Trufelman]

Is crucial and a certain kind of aesthetics were very important for General Robert McGowan Little John.

[Charles McFarlane]

General Little John was the Quartermaster Chief of the ETO, or the European Theater of Operations.

[Avery Trufelman]

That's journalist Charles McFarlane again.

[Charles McFarlane]

Littlejohn had been in uniform since basically he was in his 20s.

[Avery Trufelman]

General Littlejohn was a career soldier he went to West Point. He had risen through the ranks. He was friends with Dwight Eisenhower. He had friends in high places. He worked his way up to quartermaster general of the European theater.

[Charles McFarlane]

At that point, that's really just England is before the invasion of France.

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John was in charge of what soldiers stationed in the European theater would use and eat and wear. So even before Dorio was recruited to help the quartermaster with their uniform problem, Little John does not like where uniform development is trending. He did not like that golf jacket members only look in Parsons jacket. He did not like all those other field jackets. He did not like this trend. He did not think a uniform was something that was supposed to be tossed on easily.

[Charles McFarlane]

He really thought that the aim of a uniform should be to look crisp and soldierly.

[Avery Trufelman]

To Little John, the crisp and suit like appearance of the uniform was vitally important. This was to him, a career soldier, the way to deal with an army of draftees.

[Charles McFarlane]

To Little John, the uniform was one of the most important tools to take this kind of unformed rabble of civilians and turn them into a fighting force. You need to look like a soldier to be a soldier. And part of that was the right creases, was the right polished buttons and a very trim look.

[Avery Trufelman]

Even before Dorio gets on the scene, before the M43 is invented, back in the era where the Quartermaster Corps is like, ah, there are too many specialty jackets for all these specialized needs. General Littlejohn is like, I will solve the problem of the perfect general use jacket.

[Joshua Kerner]

And he also doesn't like that there's a different field jacket and a different dress coat.

[Avery Trufelman]

That's Kerner again. Little John's self proclaimed generations removed nemesis, Little John.

[Joshua Kerner]

I have my own design. We should adopt my jacket.

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John was like, we have to go back to basics. And Little John designs a jacket that looks almost formal.

[Charles McFarlane]

It's a thick wool with two breast pockets with waist adjusters to cinch it.

[Avery Trufelman]

In a spiffy wool suit that cuts high right at the waist. Admittedly, it is very smart looking and cuts a very dashing profile, especially if your upper body is naturally shaped like a triangle.

[Rachel Gross]

It was closely aligned with the English military uniforms that Little John was seeing when he was stationed there.

[Avery Trufelman]

These wool jackets were tight fitting and trim because of course you didn't have to layer much under them. Like the collar is designed for a tie, not for keeping rain out.

[Charles McFarlane]

But that's his idea, right? This is the field jacket we need.

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John's jacket is officially known as the ETO jacket as in the European.

[Joshua Kerner]

Theater of operations, these ETO jackets are being made in pretty much the same factories that are making British battle dress jackets.

[Avery Trufelman]

The ETO jacket was the precursor to what was known as the Ike jacket because General Littlejohn's buddy, General Eisenhower, took on a version of the cut trim ETO jacket as his signature.

[Joshua Kerner]

So he's testing that in parallel with the 43 jacket being developed.

[Avery Trufelman]

And then when Major General Littlejohn finally actually catches sight of some M43 jackets for the very first time, he just hates them.

[Joshua Kerner]

Comes in and is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're adopting this thing?

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John is determined to stop the M43 field jacket.

[Joshua Kerner]

It seems to create this unreasonable hatred of the 43 jacket that is just truly deranged.

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John refuses to let representatives of the office of the Quartermaster General into his theater of operations. He's like, don't bring these M43 things in here for sure.

[Rachel Gross]

Many generals had opinions about the jackets the people around them ought to be wearing.

[Avery Trufelman]

While some generals, mostly the career soldiers who had come out of West Point, might prefer Little John's more formal, proper fitted ETO jacket, the majority of soldiers probably preferred the more comfortable, scientifically proven M43 jacket.

[Charles McFarlane]

And they basically found growing divide between two factions within the US Army.

[Avery Trufelman]

Teams were developing ETO jacket versus M43, Little John versus Dorio, style versus function. Okay, that last face off is a bit reductive because Dorio and a lot of soldiers would argue that there's a lot of style in the M43.

[Joshua Kerner]

A 43 jacket that's clean and good was oftentimes used as a casual spirit warts coat.

[Avery Trufelman]

And Little John and his generals would argue that there's a particular kind of function in the ETO jacket.

[Joshua Kerner]

I could just use this jacket for both combat and dress. It's more efficient.

[Avery Trufelman]

It's great out in the field. In the European theater, Little John is offered shipments of the new M43 field jackets with their windproof and waterproof layers. And he's like, no, no, thank you.

[Charles McFarlane]

General Littlejean, basically, at every turn, is refusing shipments of 1943 field jackets.

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John is the quartermaster general in the region, so it's not anyone's place to question him. But in letters written to Little John in 1944, when it's clear the war is about to last through the winter, you can read letters from quartermasters under Little John who are clearly starting to panic. They don't have the right supplies.

[Joshua Kerner]

And the quartermaster of the third army is like, I know you Think that it's not that cold. But actually if you look at it, it is maybe cold. So please don't get mad at me. Which in the way it's written is so deferential and like roundabout. You kind of tell like what sort of office personality Little John is. And it's like, oh, he's just, he's just an asshole.

[Avery Trufelman]

Dorio is begging Little John to just please swallow his pride and just take the M43 jackets.

[Joshua Kerner]

Little John, he's getting these letters from Dorio going like, you need to start ordering 43 field jackets and other cold weather uniform items like now. Because it takes three to four months for it to get on a boat and to get to you at the quickest. You should have been doing it yesterday. And Little John is just dawdling and he's requesting crazy stuff. So like, there are 43 jackets in the New York port of embarkation ready to be sent to the eto.

[Avery Trufelman]

And Little John still is like, no, I don't want those. Those are tacky.

[Joshua Kerner]

He actually asked for in Getz instead of 43 field jackets, dress coats, and issues them out to the 80th Infantry Division.

[Avery Trufelman]

This is to fight Nazis in the winter.

[Joshua Kerner]

And it's not until mid to late October 44 that he starts ordering the 43 jacket, which means November, December, January, that most of these are not going to be arriving until the end of January. Just like too late. Little John procrastinated because he was obstinate and angry and didn't really prepare right. So you have this natural experiment of was Dorio correct or is Little John correct?

[Avery Trufelman]

Who ultimately wins?

[Rachel Gross]

I can tell you who ultimately loses. And that would be the individual US Soldiers whose bodies are the site of these high level battles about the correct equipping of the military and different notions of what scientific testing or decision making about uniforms ought to look like.

[Avery Trufelman]

These poor soldiers who did not necessarily want to be in Europe in the dead of winter, were shivering in their wet wool suits and leather boots that got bogged down with water, catching pneumonia and frostbite. And there were some truly disgusting consequences to not clothing soldiers properly. This is a little content warning. Charles McFarlane is about to talk about a nasty consequence of Little John's negligence.

[Charles McFarlane]

Men are losing toes, skin is coming off with the sock. And when you look at the rates of trench foot frostbite, all of these things are being recorded at a much higher level in the units in Little John's perfumes.

[Avery Trufelman]

And Americans at home were getting wind of this because soldiers were writing Letters to their families.

[Joshua Kerner]

Ma, Pa, I'm fighting in combat. There's snow on the ground. I don't have this. I don't have that. The parents then write their congressman. Then the congressman's writing Dorio going, what the hell's going on?

[Avery Trufelman]

So even though Dorio's scientifically proven layering principle was absolutely correct, Little John's ego prevented its implementation. And so a lot of people had to suffer before it actually worked. This was a catastrophe. And it was known in the press as the cold weather crisis.

[Joshua Kerner]

It's becoming a massive news thing with front page stories of the New York Times.

[Avery Trufelman]

This was a legitimately massive scandal. Whoa, what's this?

[Joshua Kerner]

This is The Washington Post, February 18, 1945. A full page story.

[Avery Trufelman]

Yeah, like giant pictures of boots and stuff. This is page four, and not the.

[Joshua Kerner]

Style section either, with illustrations, talking about the pluses and minuses. The ideal outfit.

[Avery Trufelman]

This was a big, explosive expose, very much pointed at Little John. And all this widespread anger in these investigations from the New York Times and the Washington Post led to a military investigation looking into who was responsible for the cold weather crisis. And the resulting report revealed. Revealed nothing. No one at all was responsible for this. Who was to say who's at fault? It doesn't get pinned on Little John at all. Little John gets off the hook entirely. And the only logical explanation for this is that it's very nice to have a friend like General Eisenhower.

[Joshua Kerner]

What happens is Eisenhower and I have the memo for this. Puts a press freeze on any stories dealing with the cold weather uniform crisis in January of 45, saying, Bad morale, bad morale. It makes it look bad back home and stuff like that. It's like nobody could file stories on this. What it looks like is he ran policy interference for a friend of his.

[Avery Trufelman]

Little John continues to spend the rest of his life trying to clean his own record and deny any wrongdoing.

[Joshua Kerner]

He's writing to historians, like in the 60s and 70s, asking them to do a new edit of the official history of quartermaster operations because he thinks they're not nice enough to him. And they make him look bad. Just real. Like, everybody knows the type of guy that this is. The thing that makes this story so enjoyable is he's so unlikable.

[Avery Trufelman]

And yet Little John's efforts to clear his name eventually paid off.

[Joshua Kerner]

Because he played the long game at the alumni dinners, Essentially, Little John stuck around.

[Avery Trufelman]

He showed up to all the quartermaster officer graduations, all the ceremonies, all the parties. He became a beloved elder.

[Joshua Kerner]

And that's why there's a massive Picture of Little John you'll see in the museum.

[Charles McFarlane]

When?

[Joshua Kerner]

Near the archive, when we go inside. That's so funny. There's a huge picture of him, and he was just wrong.

[Avery Trufelman]

And Kerner doesn't want anyone to forget it.

[Joshua Kerner]

You lost. You were wrong. Your side of history was wrong.

[Avery Trufelman]

You are his nightmare. I am his nightmare. And the reason there's not a giant portrait of George Dorio in the Quartermaster archive is because Dorio didn't care about a military legacy. He got out of there and it's.

[Joshua Kerner]

Like, fuck all you guys. I'm going back to business. This is terrible. I hate all of it.

[Avery Trufelman]

Again, this man invented venture capital. Don't worry, he was fine.

[Joshua Kerner]

But there was a lot of people that were kind of brought up under him and appreciated that sort of research and dedication.

[Avery Trufelman]

Ultimately, Dorio's approach won because everyone is operating under his ideology that comfort and protection is more important to the soldier than formality and perfection. And yes, all of us, including the military, now take the layering system entirely for granted. But that is in part because of the absolute ubiquity and cultural dominance of the M43 jacket. The M43 field jacket starts the template for design that continues to evolve. There's a version of something that looks like the field jacket in almost every war that follows.

[Rachel Gross]

We can see different versions of the M43 jacket through the 1950s and 19 1960s in Korea and Vietnam.

[Avery Trufelman]

And this style of jacket, something that looked like the M43, seeped out into the civilian market through the outdoor industry. Rachel S. Gross saw many of the outdoor industry professionals who had advised on the M43, like Harold Hirsch, the owner of White Stag, start to incorporate elements of the design into his products.

[Rachel Gross]

We do know that there was a direct line between what he was seeing in the research laboratories, the quartermaster core, and then what kinds of civilian jackets appeared in his catalogs immediately thereafter. In other words, I can see the military style jackets that Hirsch was selling by 1944 and 1945. A look that's really similar to the M43 jacket.

[Avery Trufelman]

A lot of the outdoor companies who had consulted with the military started to sell their own civilian spins on the M43. All different versions of cotton sateen, hip length jackets with drawstrings and four pockets. It was just objectively a great design. You can still see it as a template on jackets all around you. But the biggest legacy of the M43 and all its accompanying layers was how it was developed.

[Joshua Kerner]

It also shows that having, like, true rigorous scientific testing is oftentimes better, almost always better than having some random auteur guiding things.

[Avery Trufelman]

Testing, testing, testing, opinion testing, field testing, lab testing. This has become the guiding principle in gear, which is why the military's clothing testing facility to this day bears Dorio's name.

[David Assetta]

We're going right to Dorio.

[Avery Trufelman]

And what is Dorio?

[David Assetta]

Doreo is our climatic chambers.

[Avery Trufelman]

Here at the army laboratories at Natick, Massachusetts, which the Quartermaster Corps first established in 1953. There's a heat chamber, a cold chamber, and various testing sites.

[David Assetta]

And it is a very novel and unique research facility. There are very few like it in the world.

[Avery Trufelman]

That's my guide, Chief Public Affairs Officer David Assetta.

[David Assetta]

We can control. You can see the monitor there, the temperature, the wind speed, and the relative humidity. We have snow making capability in here.

[Avery Trufelman]

Does it actually look like snow?

[David Assetta]

Yeah, it's a snow machine.

[Avery Trufelman]

The military, as it did in the 1940s, continues to not solely rely on humans. We're gonna go up and see Maddie now.

[Joshua Kerner]

She leads our mannequin work.

[Avery Trufelman]

They still use mannequins to test clothes, just like they did with Chauncey the Copper Man. It's just that mannequin technology has gotten so much more elaborate. The mannequin does a lot more work.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

This is an environmental chamber where we house one of our mannequins.

[Avery Trufelman]

Mattie, Polyboggan, biomedical research fellow at the United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, introduced me to the life size doll. She spends all day dressing and undressing.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

Then, if you want to take a look, of course, his name is Andy. Our dynamic thermal mannequin.

[Avery Trufelman]

Terrifying. Andy looks like he's being tortured. He's hanging from a pole in a gray lycra hood that has only a hole for his mouth. He's got a riot of tooth guts spilling out of his stomach. It's quite macabre. Why does he have a hood on?

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

This is actually for. It's called evaporative resistance testing or wet testing. And it mimics sweat.

[Avery Trufelman]

Like this fabric mimics sweat.

[Rachel Gross]

Okay.

[Avery Trufelman]

This mannequin, Andy, evaluates heat and moisture content and really almost anything. He's way more advanced than Chauncey ever was. Maddy puts Andy in jacket after jacket, glove after glove, boot after boot, and.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

Then we input those resistance values into thermoregulatory models.

[Avery Trufelman]

So I asked what exactly thermoregulatory models meant, and I thought I'd be shown a series of numbers and charts, and instead I was shown a software that looked like a dress up doll. There was an image of A soldier. And you could scroll through images of different military issue clothes and put a little outfit on him.

[Rachel Gross]

Yeah.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

So you can see here we have all of these.

[Avery Trufelman]

Oh, my God. Yeah.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

So you can dress him. It's in his closet. I know, I know. Isn't it cool?

[Avery Trufelman]

It really was like the military's version of the closet from Clueless. If Cher was heading out to sub 40 Arctic tundra. Wait, but this is not like a public thing like this. This is not anything that anyone can play with.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

It's not.

[Avery Trufelman]

The public affairs officer David Assetta chimed in here.

[David Assetta]

This is a tool for commanders to figure out what uniforms their troops should be wearing for a given operation or mission to provide them with the best protection but optimal performance.

[Avery Trufelman]

And this clueless closet simulator helps avoid anything remotely similar to the cold weather crisis from ever happening again. You model exactly what you'll need on this little avatar. So you, the commander, can be sure to order it in time. So it's head, upper body, hands, legs, feet, and all the different options. This is fun.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

I know, isn't it?

[Avery Trufelman]

This software is the ultimate triumph of the layering principle. It fundamentally relies on it. Wait, it's wearing, like, multiple things on top of each other? Like it's wearing two gloves.

[Rachel Gross]

Yeah.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

Okay, you can see there's three.

[Avery Trufelman]

Three pants.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

Yeah, three pants. I think four shirts. And then two.

[David Assetta]

Use your layers.

[Avery Trufelman]

Yep. And then with whatever combination of clothes you choose, you see the resulting numbers.

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

And then you press results, and it will give you times for cold injury. So frostbite, hypothermia, and then you can.

[Avery Trufelman]

So these boots are not the best for frostbite, is what this is saying?

[Maddy (Polyboggan)]

Probably not.

[Avery Trufelman]

Although this felt kind of fun and abstract in the moment. When I stepped back for a second, I was like, wait, what cold weather war? Is all of this anticipating? Is it sort of like, oh, every year, here's the new. Here's the new upgraded edition? Or is it like, oh, there's a new conflict here? Yeah. How do you.

[David Assetta]

It depends on operational needs.

[Rachel Gross]

Okay.

[David Assetta]

So we have renewed focus on the Arctic. So we're looking at new gloves. Are we evaluating new technologies?

[Avery Trufelman]

That's about as much information as I got. Whatever may happen in the Arctic, we're preparing for it. Testing, testing, testing. That's the law of gear. That's what makes gear. Gear not only for soldiers, for civilians, too.

[Scott Mosier]

We have a field testing team that comes and grabs their samples here to actually take them out into the field.

[Avery Trufelman]

Wait, that's their job?

[Rachel Gross]

Yeah.

[Avery Trufelman]

This is Scott Mosier, creative brand Director at rei. Other than the fact that REI HQ is decorated with, like, canoes and backpacks and stuff, it really looks like all the other high fashion clothing companies I've visited. They even have the massive vision boards with photos of last season's Paris Fashion Week. Scott, this is crazy. This is rei. I didn't know you were this fashion minded.

[Scott Mosier]

Yeah, and you know, we love it. Like, I think oftentimes people are surprised when I tell them, like, we look at all the Runway shows.

[Avery Trufelman]

Really?

[Scott Mosier]

Yeah, for sure.

[Avery Trufelman]

See, fashion is none of our business. Get out of here. But the thing that was absolutely unlike a fashion company was that at REI, there is a laboratory.

[Scott Mosier]

We have tons of lab testing in there, including a cold room. And we have a rain room. We have a mannequin that's fitted with sensors. Exactly.

[Avery Trufelman]

Testing has become the ultimate mark of quality. And outdoor brands promise that they've thoroughly pushed their wares to the absolute limit. Sometimes this is true, sometimes this is not. Like I talk to companies that contract out the testing at the manufacturing level, but at a place like rei, testing is a point of pride. Companies like REI aim to prove scientifically the lengths their gear can go. How warm, how dry, how UV resistant.

[Scott Mosier]

We're really focused on quality, and we've done enough testing to know there's a difference.

[Avery Trufelman]

It is perhaps a natural extension of the expertise of Abercrombie and Fitch's flagship store, once guaranteed in its salesman, but now baked directly into the design of a product itself. And in the aftermath of the Second World War, companies like REI weren't just selling gear with military level testing, they were selling actual military gear.

[Scott Mosier]

As early as 1944, Rei offered army steel frame packs, like, literally army packs, army pup tents, army crampons, and army over mitts. So we actually sold those in the store.

[Avery Trufelman]

Two civilians, though, like, not to the army.

[Scott Mosier]

Exactly, two civilians. Literal army stuff that we were selling.

[Avery Trufelman]

It was surplus army stuff.

[Scott Mosier]

Yes, exactly. Surplus army. We weren't having them manufacture it, but it was surplus stuff.

[Avery Trufelman]

Selling off military surplus helped REI and many other young post war outdoor companies stock their shelves. It was a direct line from George Dorio to companies we know and love today. But how did these outdoor companies get this military gear? I'll tell you Next chapter, articles of interest is by Avery Trufelman. But the first person to hear my messy first edit and read my scripts is my editor on this project, Alison Barringer. And right after her comes my guardrail, the costume historian Charles McFarlane, who is currently flying off to do a World War II reenactment. My fact checker is the mighty Yasmin Al Syad. The music is by Ray Royal Lullatone and theme songs are always by Sasami. Engineering, Mixing, mastering and finessing by the patient and kind Jocelyn Gonzalez and her team at prx. Huge thank you to Chase Anderson, Clint Humphrey and the Outdoor Recreation Archive at Utah State University, along with the Quartermaster Archive at Fort Lee. And to the author Rahawa Haile. Thank you to Radiotopia for being my podcasting partners, and thank you to Drew Haupt for being my life partner. And thank you for listening. Thank you very much. Would you like to see images of Andy the Mannequin? Do you have any questions? There's a place to reach out and to learn more, and it is articlesofinterest.substack.com.

[Joshua Kerner]

Radiotopia.

[Avery Trufelman]

From PRX.