Some Ventiles are grainier than others. Well — one is, and the name by which it goes happens also to be the easiest way to describe why it is so.
Weft-dyed Ventile is the same Ventile that many have come to know and love and talk up very fervently in some birding and most rambling message-boards. Same highly hydrophobic super-powers. Same none-more-dense structure of best-of-the-best cotton fibres, woven so tightly that neither rain nor wind shall pass. Same lightness and crispness and all-round “great cloth to work with — especially for jackets” reputation.
The defining difference here is that its weft has been dyed, but its warp has not. Come to think of it, then, a clearer name would've been “warp-undyed Ventile”. The weft-dyed Ventile used last week for the return of the seam jacket (the four-button one with the button-on peaked hood) has a weft of dyed dark navy-blue, and a warp of unbleached and undyed natural ecru — still with all its unrefined hewn-from-the-earth grainy and slubby qualities. Scholars of elementary colour-theory will know that blue plus off-white (pale yellow, for argument’s sake) equals green. And that, sort of, is what the weft-dyed Ventile we have here is: a type of pale grey-green, which, inspected up close, is covered in characterful and random flecks and marks. It makes for a Ventile with perhaps more personality than usual; it is a less sleek and stoic material, this weft-dyed stuff; earthier.
The new weft-dyed seam jacket, then — which, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, including that of Ventile, is the first thing ever to use the new type of cloth — is here.
