Barbour Coats Are Made to Look Worn. Here’s How to Age One in a Day.

Wear and tear is embraced by true preppies – if not by the Vineyard Vines new money aspirants. One does not simply consume. One inherits. As such, some preppy staples feel gauche when crispy. The A Brooks Brothers university striped shirt is supposed to have been torn by the washing machines in a Princeton residence hall. […]

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Wear and tear is embraced by true preppies – if not by the Vineyard Vines new money aspirants. One does not simply consume. One inherits. As such, some preppy staples feel gauche when crispy. The A Brooks Brothers university striped shirt is supposed to have been torn by the washing machines in a Princeton residence hall. A pair of L.L Bean duck boots is supposed to be coming apart at the seams because Grandpa insisted on one too many walks in the Acadia woods. 

The ultimate example: The Barbour coat, recognizable to those unfamiliar as those coats the Royal Family wear around Balmoral Castle on The Crown. New Barbours are waxed thoroughly and meant to be a rain repellant; this gives them a sturdy monochromatic look. But over the years, wind, sun, rain, snow, and saltwater (“spray” would be the preferred term) breaks down the wax and scratching starts to texture the fabric. This absolutely makes the coat look cooler. The question becomes how to break in a Barbour without spending years on the project. 

There’s a process and it involves giving the garment a bath. Looking for expertise, SPY reached out to Lingua Franca, the New York brand best known for their hand-embroidered sweaters. LF’s Head of Design provided some quick intel on the art of “aging” a garment with a tea bath. Here’s the process.

SPY did as instructed. Some notes on that process:

If one of the core ideas of preppiness is that garments (and items generally) should have backstories, it’s more or less inevitable that fully embracing the aesthetic means doing some light, Hollywood-style costume work. As Jackie Kennedy, the Patron Saint of Prep, put it: “One should always dress like a marble column.” A two-word addendum might add clarity: “Left outside.”

Next, producing that much tea requires a bigger to-do.

The tea bath was filled to about 70% of the basket’s volume, and relocated to the shower in my apartment. That way, the Barbour could be pushed down into the tea without risk of things running over. As the jacket was smushed downward into the bath though, it quickly began taking on water, soaking it up like a sponge. 

One hour into the bath, the Barbour was pulled out and had become a darker color just by nature of holding all that liquid in it. The exterior of the coat had started to form a white residue in patches of it—the wax starting to melt and break from the heat of the bath. The overall color was not very different though than its original dye. 

A little after the two-hour mark. I hoisted the coat out of the still-warm bath. It came out substantially darker, but that’s just the absorbed water. I hunt it on the showerhead, something sturdy enough to support that much weight. My bathroom also now smelled of tea, which is quite nice. 

By morning, the coat had more or less dried, apart from some wet patches around the pockets. The color had faded heavily with the wax beginning to shift off of some parts. There is a slight red hue to it, although it’s somewhat faint. If anything, what this process has done is peel back the wax in a way that could only have happened in an organic setting rather than intentionally stripping it back. Now, it looks like an older Barbour that I’ve attempted to rewax myself. And, in the end, what could a more preppy activity than rewaxing a Barbour?