gabardine

The etymology of gabardine involves a layered chain of borrowings that remains partially uncertain. The most compelling account traces the English gabardine (also spelled gaberdine) through the Spanish gabardina or Old Spanish gavardina — a long, loose outer garment or cloak, the kind worn by travelers and pilgrims on the road. The Spanish term may derive from the Middle High German Wallfahrt (pilgrimage) combined with a garment suffix, but the more often-cited derivation traces it to the Hebrew garment term gavardina, from a Hebrew root meaning a coat or outer garment. Medieval Jewish men in Spain wore a long, loose outer garment — a form of smock or cloak — that the Hebrew-influenced Spanish terminology called by a form of this name. Shylock's famous complaint in The Merchant of Venice — 'You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine' — places the gaberdine specifically as Jewish dress in medieval and Renaissance European imagination.

The garment sense of gabardine — the loose cloak or overcoat — is distinct from the fabric sense, which developed later and is the sense in current use. The transition from garment-name to fabric-name was accomplished primarily by Thomas Burberry, the English draper who in 1879 developed and patented a tightly woven, water-resistant twill fabric for outerwear. Burberry named this new fabric gabardine, presumably because of its association with traveling garments and outerwear — the gaberdine cloak was the prototypical traveling outer garment, and his new weatherproof fabric was designed for exactly the same purpose. Burberry's gabardine is a twill weave with a very high thread count, the tightly packed threads and diagonal twill structure creating a surface that sheds water without a waterproof coating and that is both durable and smooth.

Burberry's gabardine became the standard fabric for military and civilian outerwear in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Burberry trench coat — developed for British officers in the First World War — used gabardine for its weatherproof properties and its lightweight durability compared to the heavy rubber-coated macintosh of the Victorian era. After the war, the trench coat and its gabardine fabric entered civilian fashion, becoming the defining outerwear silhouette of the twentieth century. The association of gabardine with the trench coat, and of the trench coat with detectives, noir fiction, and a certain quality of urban watchfulness, gave gabardine a cultural register far more loaded than its technical properties would suggest.

Contemporary gabardine is woven in wool, cotton, polyester, and blended fibers. Wool gabardine is the premium version — used for tailored suits, trousers, and coats — while polyester gabardine appears in lower-priced suiting and uniform manufacturing. The fabric's characteristic properties remain constant across fiber types: the firm, smooth surface created by the steep twill angle (typically a 2:1 or 2:2 twill), the moderate to heavy weight, and the resistance to wrinkling and surface distortion that make it ideal for tailored garments that must hold their shape. Thomas Burberry's 1879 patent on the weave construction expired long ago, and gabardine is now produced worldwide by any number of mills, but the Burberry brand name has remained so strongly associated with the fabric that the company's gabardine trench coat is perhaps the most recognized garment in the history of outerwear.