Men's Lightweight Down Jacket - Classic Wardrobe Piece - Light Weight Feather Jackets Coats
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I'm Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style.
Today, I'm going to be talking about the lightweight down jacket.
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Let's go ahead and dive into it, the lightweight down jacket.
As you can see, I have one on.
I don't know if it exactly matches the cardigan and tie and white dress shirt that I have
on underneath, but it is something that is very functional, a very useful piece in a
man's wardrobe especially if you like to layer and if you're going to be in areas where it
is cold and you value really the strengths that this piece of clothing brings to the
table.
Let me go ahead and lay out the strengths.
By the way, fashion and style is not one of these.
It used to be probably back in the '70s, but since I would say '90s, this look has really
been overplayed in cities, but let me go ahead and talk about the strengths.
The strengths are it is warm.
This does a great job.
Down is an excellent insulator and how it does that is actually with these pockets right
here.
These has a number of pockets and these pockets, they suck in air and they use down, which
is if you're not familiar, you feathers and then right below the feather are down.
I'm not an ornithologist here, but I do understand I think the basics of it, and my understanding
is they're not true feathers, but they are very feather-like, much smaller, and they
put them in here.
What this does, they create space and the air comes in, the air is trapped, and air
is an excellent insulator.
Air is an excellent insulator because it doesn’t allow heat to transfer very easily.
So in the same way that your cooler does a good job of keeping things cold or keeping
things hot like a thermos, this does the same for you.
It keeps in your body heat and it prevents the cold from going in and affecting your
core.
So down, really hard to beat when it comes to insulation.
There are a few things that can do it, but really for the cost, this is excellent.
Now let's talk about another thing that's really nice, lightweight.
So this jacket, I can tell you, is incredibly light.
It's a bit loud, so if you're kind of a high-speed, low drag military guy or you're a Force Recon,
Navy Seal, Delta Force, you probably don't want to be using this because it gives off
a lot of sound.
You can probably hear that in the video, but it is incredibly lightweight.
So if you are going hiking, this could be an option assuming that you're going hiking
in a dry area, and I'll talk about why, but if you're going to be hiking and there is
going to be no rain for the foreseeable future, great piece of gear, incredibly light.
It will keep you warm.
Let's say you're out in Arizona.
You're hiking through the Grand Canyon at night in the winter.
This is a great piece of gear to take with you also because it can be compressed down.
So during the day, it may be pretty warm and at night, you can pull this out because it
sucks in the air and it forms those pockets.
In a sense, air is all over us, all around us.
So again, you can compress this very small.
Now, the containers that a lot of these are in, and in this one in particular, you can
see this one actually is water-resistant.
I'm not sure if it's fully waterproof, but I know it's water-resistant.
So another thing about these jackets, they usually use a lot of synthetic material on
the outside, so pretty good at water just rolling off.
The other thing is you're going to see these are usually made in bright colors.
Of course, there are parkas and other things that use down and they use more drab colors,
but a lot of the garments in this area, you're going to see maybe with very bright colors.
This is good for safety reasons.
So you're out hiking and you get lost, all of a sudden, you're a lot easier to spot from
an airplane, or if you're out walking on a trail and it's hunting season -- I would advice
just not going out into the woods during hunting season especially here in Wisconsin -- but
a bright color like this is going to separate you from the animals.
We've talked about compressible.
We've talked about basically warm.
Now, let's talk about the negative things.
The first thing, and I alluded to this, if you get down wet, it loses its insulating
properties and it takes a long time to dry out, so down is not a good thing even if it's
water-resistant.
If you fall into a lake or you fall into a river or you get drenched on, you could end
up with a jacket that's very heavy and is not insulating at all, so that is a negative
aspect.
Another one, and I touched this at the beginning, these have been overplayed since the '90s.
And what you've seen, it used to be that if you're wearing something like this, you are
actually going outdoors.
You are maybe from the Seattle area.
You are from Colorado.
Now, you see them all over.
It means that you can walk through any of the major cities and instead of men wearing
stylish gears, most guys look like they're basically packed to go climb Mount Everest
or Mount McKinley or something.
And bright colors, they are not stylish.
It's just a bit too much screamy.
Also with the down -- let me put my arms up here -- it really does not flatter the figure,
so even if you've got a pretty good size chest, you exercise, your waist, you've got the six
packs, no one's going to see it.
I mean, you might as well have a keg underneath this jacket because you basically look like
a marshmallow.
Another thing, it's hard to adjust.
A lot of other pieces of men's wear you can adjust.
This one is a bit harder even for a seamstress or tailor to bring in, so if it doesn’t
fit properly, it's going to be hard to adjust that, and even on the sleeves simply because
they use a lot of -- right here on these sleeves, they've got an elastic around the wrist, which
is supposed to help keep in heat, but it's going to be hard for a seamstress to shorten
or lengthen.
In fact, she can't even lengthen these sleeves.
So no shape to the body, if they get wet, it loses insulation, so those are the negatives,
but you saw there are a lot of positives.
For the right man, this could be an essential wardrobe piece, but for some of you, there's
really no room for this.
I like to keep something like this tight, wrapped up inside my truck for an emergency
jacket to be able to pull out, but that's probably about it for my use.
Okay guys, this is the lightweight down jacket.
Let me know what you think down on the comments below and I will see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.