The N1 Deck Jacket: How This Bad Boy Killed the Peacoat

We independently evaluate all recommended products and services. Any products or services put forward appear in no particular order. if you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation.

The Big Question: Why Ditch the Pea Coat?

The lining on the coat we’re talking about today is 50% wool and 50% alpaca. So riddle me this: why does the world’s largest and most powerful navy during the world’s largest and deadliest war switch to this little guy from their woolen fortress of a coat that we all know and love – the pea coat? What gives?

This fabric is pretty sick, and it sucks that we don’t really use it anymore in the 21st century, but it had a very weird job. One of the jobs obviously was to protect you, keep the wind out, and stuff like that, but the other job was to make sure that you didn’t get trapped inside your jacket if you were covered with freezing salt water all day.

I made a rudimentary thermal testing system so we can check just how warm this museum-grade replica of a World War II Navy deck jacket actually is. What was the US Navy outfitting their Navy Personnel in the wettest, wildest, coldest, craziest conditions out there?

I’m curious. The true question is: how good was the N1 deck jacket actually? People goo-goo gaga about this in modern days – everybody who wears big heavy boots and heavy jeans has one of these jackets. I have three now, so I’m no better, but how good are they actually?

And I want to compare it to what we’re seeing today, which is luxury versions of the same jacket. I have a $1,500 jacket – I didn’t pay that much for it, well it’s at $1,300. I’m wearing it right now, which is probably considered to be the greatest interpretation of the N1 deck jacket in history. It is by Dehen 1920, and it is a legendary jacket. I got it for an insane deal on eBay. Thank you, Patrick. It’s like taking candy from a baby.

This is kind of the king until I got a message from a brand called Heat Strap, and they said, “Hey, you have to try ours out.” It weighs 7 lb, probably double the weight of the Dehen jacket, and I just got it. It can honestly stand on its own, and I didn’t precariously place it on anything. It’s just that big of a jacket. How warm is it, actually?

Back to Maine: Let’s Talk Real McCoy’s

What’s poppin’ everybody? It’s young Mikey back with another article. I am still in Maine, and I live here. I hope everybody’s doing well. Quickly, I have the Real McCoy’s N1 deck jacket, which was loaned to me by Standard and Strange – a very cool shop selling peculiar and oddity clothing.

The reason we needed this specific N1 deck jacket, which could have been probably Buzz Rickson as well, is because The Real McCoy’s and Buzz Rickson make some of the most period-accurate pieces that you can possibly get.

We’re looking for that pile because it’s a very specialty pile – it is 50% alpaca, 50% wool, and it’s supposed to have magical wearing properties. The pile on the Dehen jacket is mutton, and it’s three times higher than what we’re seeing on The Real McCoy’s and the Buzz Rickson’s jacket. So, is it still the same warmth because of the alpaca?

The Science Behind My Sketchy Testing Method

So, you already know about my rudimentary thermal testing station, but let me explain the actual methodology behind it. And know that it’s – don’t take these numbers to heart. There is a huge margin for error, and hopefully, it’s not huge enough to totally throw out the results here, but still, there is. Either way, the rudimentary thermal testing kit is as follows:

The first thing you need is an infrared thermometer. The second thing you’ll need is a reptile heating pad. My girlfriend Taylor kept trying to steal it and put her feet on top of it. I placed a heating pad on the ground and put a little temperature gauge on it to let a machine know how hot it should be heated up to. That temperature was 98.6 degrees.

Then I placed a jacket on top of it and saw how long it took to heat to 98.6 degrees, and then took the temperature of the outside of the jacket after 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes and took the averages and got some numbers.

The jacket temperature without the heating pad that I tested a few times in a few different locations was 66°. After the heating pad was placed under it for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and so on and so forth, the average temperature was 81°, meaning there was a change of 15° on the outside. The lower that number, the better insulator the jacket is.

Temperature Change Comparison Table

Pt 1. How And Why The N1 Replaced Everything

So the huge question that everybody’s been asking me constantly – they won’t leave me alone, people coming up to my door: “Excuse me, sir, why did they switch from the pea coat to the N1 deck jacket?” The pea coat is very beautiful, but it’s incredibly heavy, and it’s hard to maneuver compared to something like the N1 deck jacket. It’s hard to put on, it’s hard to take off, and it’s just stiff – although you do look like a million bucks in it.

So, the US Navy bids adieu to their pea coat. Instead, they made the deck zip jacket. It was based on the US Army’s combat winter jacket (I might be getting the name not perfect), but it was based on that because people in the Army really liked their jackets – they were nice and warm, and they basically had a pea coat fabric inside of them. But when you were on the cold seas, the jacket didn’t really make the cut because it had a lot of issues.

One of the biggest issues that Navy personnel were facing was that they were either getting trapped inside of their jacket or trapped outside of their jacket – both of those not good. The immediate problem was that if you’re getting covered with salt spray, the salt spray freezes in your zipper, and you can’t zip it up, or you can’t unzip it afterward if you need to take it off if you’re overheating.

The second thing is the base of World War II zippers was brass, and they corroded in salt water, and when they were getting sprayed, they broke, which obviously sucks for the person that is wearing the jacket and wants to be warm or take the jacket off ’cause they’re too warm.

But at the same time, if you’re the US military, you’re thinking, “Wow, this is very expensive – we have a lot of jackets that need to be repaired constantly because they’re all breaking.”

So, the main thing that the Navy tackled first was the zipper. So they said, “Okay, who, what profession wears big gloves, has a big coat, and needs to put it on and take it off very quickly?” Accountants! Weirdly enough, accountants in the 1940s wore huge accounting jackets and also leather accounting gloves while they did your taxes, and on the side of them, so they could take them off quickly and easily when they were done with your taxes, they put hooks on the side.

So the US Navy said, “Hey accountants, can we borrow that technology?” and they said, “Absolutely!” So, the US Navy made the deck hook jacket, which is an interesting system because typically, you have a jacket and two pieces of fabric, both sides of the jacket secured by a zipper.

The deck jacket worked like this: you had fabric on this side in a C-shape and fabric on this side that was just kind of a flat shape, and they came together so your jacket could resist the elements. They secured all of that with those accounting hooks up on the side.

This version of the jacket was good but still not 100% perfect. It’s just because there’s still metal on the outside, so you still have the same base issue. Also, there were some other problems with the jacket. One of them was the exposed storm cuffs, which were getting caught on things that sailors were trying to move and stuff, so that would also rip the jacket, be inconvenient, and be very dangerous as well.

Also, did I do that thing where I say accountant again instead of firefighter? It happens all the time – you would not believe who I called when my fire alarm went off!

Pt. 2 Breaking Down The N1

So the US Navy looked at the zip jacket, the hook jacket, and they said, “Okay, got it. We know what works now.” So, the first thing that we need to focus on is the fabric of the N1 deck jacket. Grosgrain is the category Bedford cord falls into. There’s also jungle cloth because jungle cloth is a type of Bedford cord – they’re all kind of like classification systems, they’re all kind of cousins, I guess I should say that’s a little bit better way of putting it.

Essentially, what you can do is think of a plain weave – it’s just very boring, it’s very plain, that’s why it’s called that, just up and down, very easy-going, chill. Think of the Grosgrain family as basically a plain weave (it depends on the specific fabric we’re talking about, of course), but instead of both yarns being the same size, one is a big beefy daddy one.

So when it goes over, it creates an actual rib, and sometimes you could add more yarns to make it thicker and stuff like that, but that thicker yarn is what gives us a lot of texture and a lot more durability. And by having a lot of those yarns very close together, we get a very tough, beefy fabric.

Pt. 3 Armoring Up The Jacket

So there are two main things that we need to fix: number one, storm cuffs are still getting caught on everything. It’s also great along the hem – we have all of this knit fabric that will keep the cold air from coming in, but it’s kind of getting destroyed at all times.

So the first thing we can do with the storm cuffs is simply pull the fabric over the storm cuffs and extend that fabric so they’re protected, but they’re still there keeping the cold out. The second thing, though, was the closure system. The answer was never a one-system closure system. What I really like about this update again is that you could see how the designers were thinking.

The first two times, they were thinking, “What is that one solution that will fix it?” but the third time, they thought to themselves, “Perhaps instead of there being one fix-all solution, we need to break the solution up.”

So we have the zipper that closes the jacket, but then we need to protect the zipper with a placket on the outside, and that placket cannot be secured with metal, or else it will corrode, and it’s harder to repair. It can be secured with a button, and if a button pops off, we can sew it back on – easy peasy, it’s gone, it’s done, it’s fixed.

The zip jacket and the deck jacket basically had a pea coat fabric inside of them. But not really. It’s not pea coat fabric because it’s very heavily brushed by these big metal hooks that pull the fabric out, and they make it fluffy because when it’s fluffy, you have better insulation properties.

A big encompassing thing of all of this is the loft. So you can brush a woven fabric and get some decent loft – think of like a flannel. Or you can do what you see on sweatshirts a lot is you have a terry, you burst all of those loops, and it fluffs up and makes a fleece.

Or you can use an animal skin that has fur on it, AKA mutton, and you have a fleece there. And finally, you can do what they’re doing on the Real McCoy’s deck jacket, which is sliver knitting.

With sliver knitting, essentially picture someone knitting like a very, very tight fabric, like a t-shirt fabric, for example, and as those loops are being formed and pulled, someone is on the side shoving little fibers into them – sliver, shoving them in there.

As the loop tightens, it grabs around that sliver, and when you put that all together, and you do that a lot, that t-shirt fabric has all these things coming out of it, and bing bang boom, that is a pile. That’s what you’re seeing on the Real McCoy’s, and you can see there’s usually mesh backing that stabilizes everything.

You may have noticed that alpaca is getting, I feel like, more and more popular every day. It’s in t-shirts, it’s in pants, it’s in jackets, it’s everywhere for a bunch of different reasons, but the big reason that we’re focusing on today and the main reason is that it’s an incredible insulator.

There are two things you really need to focus on with fibers when we’re talking about pure insulation properties: one, how fine is the fiber, and two, is it hollow? Alpaca is fine and hollow, so it’s very, very warm, which means that your coat, your jacket, or whatever it may be can be warmer without a lot of added weight.

Pt. 4 The Monster N1

I think it’s time we transition to the big mama – the Heat Strap’s N1 deck jacket (their interpretation of it). The big thing that you need to know is that the pockets are double-lined – there is lining inside of the pockets and on the jacket. I can feel the heat; it’s a classic Heat Strap build. I look like I could tackle a truck right now! This is a 24 oz canvas, so that is 2 and a half times heavier canvas on the outer than the Dehen.

I will say it feels a lot warmer, and I think that’s because the inside, instead of being just the fleece fabric that’s inside Dehen (nothing wrong with that; I was very warm all day), is a quilted wool batting. So we have a little bit more loft, and it’s a slightly different build.

Okay, so this final section is really just a bunch of cool little rapid-fire fun facts that I think you would like because I really like them:

The first one is that I think Iron Heart might be the only brand that does this intentionally – some brands may do it by accident with fusing or something – but they have an interliner on their jacket, a very tightly woven fabric between the outer body fabric and the actual insulation layer on the inside to further stop the wind. That’s what we (The Iron Snail) are doing with The Mammoth – they were using another layer of wool in between so you get more warmth.

As I was saying before, the N1 was an entire system. The deck jacket is just what got really popular, but there were big pants that had suspenders on them and everything like that. I think there was also a bib as well. Those loops were placed on your shoulders and at your hips so you could secure the suspenders to your jacket so they wouldn’t fall down as you were running around. Also, your pants had little flaps that you could wrap around the inside loops. From my research, that is the best I could find. It was very hard to find an exact answer to that.

Okay, so bing bang boom, put everything together, and the birth of an icon is here – the N1 deck jacket! Everybody loves it, and nylon gets really popular, and the US Navy is like, “Oh, we’ll just use that!”

Pt. 5 The Warmth Championship!

And finally, the warmth championship! What is the warmest jacket that I have worn today? Obviously, it’s one from Fjallraven. We have an even bigger jacket from Fjallraven, but the change in temperature outside of the jacket when I put the reptile heater in (this is why I need a water bottle) was basically nothing. It basically didn’t change at all.

In second place, oh no, sorry, second to last place – I wanted to test something that wasn’t an N1 deck jacket just in case you wanted different suggestions, so I tested a ’90s Levi’s Sherpa jacket that I gave to Taylor when I first met her in college, and I wrote her a little love note on the inside which she still has – how cute is that? Either way, the Levi’s denim Sherpa jacket was actually warmer than The Real McCoy’s jacket by just two degrees, so again, it’s still within the margin of error.

That being said, there is something we need to touch on at the end, but before that, Dehen 1920 comes in third to last. Dehen’s change in temperature was 11°, and then finally, the warmest jacket that we tested today was Heat Strap’s – they came in with 10°.

In reality, the big thing that matters is the actual design of the jacket with the materials being used, so The Real McCoy’s is warmer than the Levi’s Sherpa jacket just because of the storm cuffs alone – it’s longer, it seals out the wind, there’s a bunch of different factors.

Watch This Review

Wrapping It Up (Got Hot Chocolate Waiting)

Okie dokie, that is just about my time, so I’m going to go home and have a big cup of hot chocolate. Either way, ta ta!

This article was adapted from Michael Kristy’s video on The Iron Snail, with edits from FashionBeans, and was reviewed by Michael to ensure the integrity of his original content. Watch the full video here.

The Iron Snail is a men’s fashion vlog (and now article series!) starring a young man named Michael and featuring a snail no bigger than a quarter. The two are set on taking over the world of fashion by creating a clothing line to end all clothing lines. Until then, we’re here to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the best clothing out there, from the highest quality raw denim jeans to the warmest jackets to the sturdiest boots…the Iron Snail has got you covered.