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Reversible Chore Jacket: Development #1
Before there was a jacket, there was just an idea and a source of inspiration we kept coming back to: the chore coat.
What drew us to it wasn't nostalgia. It was the restraint — a design where nothing was arbitrary, built entirely around function. That's the design language we wanted to bring into The Foundations, reinterpreted rather than recreated.
Designing for "Work and Play"
With its roots in labour, the original coat only ever had one occasion to serve. We wanted ours to make sense across a range of moments, dressed up or down.
That's where the idea to make it reversible came from. The original earned every detail through function. We just pushed that instinct one step further — looking to design a jacket that didn't have to compromise between two occasions, because it could genuinely serve both.
The two goals we set from the start:
- Preserve the function the chore coat was originally built for
- Give one side a more elegant form than the original ever had
Choosing the Fabric
Before anything else was decided, we went back into the history of the coat itself — covered properly in the Research piece linked above — and found two fabrics typically used for the design: moleskin and herringbone twill (HBT).
We went with herringbone. Here's why:
- Moleskin is an excellent option, but built for one climate — heavy, insulating, wind-resistant
- Herringbone's durability comes from the weave itself rather than its density, which lets it scale across a much wider range of conditions
- A Foundations piece needs to earn its place across multiple seasons, not just one
Moleskin wasn't wrong for the job — it just wasn't the right job for a piece that needed to work year-round.
Choosing the Colours
With the fabric settled, colour came next — and each side already had a role to fill:
- One carrying the coat's original, working character,
- The other reading sleeker and more elegant.
Olive suited the functional side because it carries real history there — rooted in military and workwear, a colour genuinely associated with utility rather than style. It reads as working gear because, historically, it was.
Black suited the elegant side since it's traditionally a colour worn for more formal, dressy occasions — the natural choice for the side meant to read as elevated rather than working.
That contrast is where the real challenge started. A chore coat reads as utilitarian largely because of its patch pockets — sewn onto the surface, fully open, fully visible. We didn't want the black side to repeat that look in a different colour. Which meant one thing: no patch pockets on the elegant face at all...
Which left a real problem. The chore coat's function depends almost entirely on those pockets. Lose them, and you lose the thing that makes it a chore coat in the first place.
In Duality
We weren't looking to redesign a chore coat. We were looking to ask it to do something it had never had to do before — serve two very different occasions without giving up what made it useful in the first place.
Solving that turned into its own story — covered next.
FAQ
Why reversible, specifically, rather than just two separate jackets? Because the whole point was one piece doing the work of two — a separate jacket for each occasion would have defeated the idea before it started.
Was moleskin ever seriously considered? Yes — it's a traditional chore coat fabric, and a strong one. It lost out specifically on range, not on merit.
