For a long time, dressing for a winter in this city meant choosing. You could wear something that handled the weather, or you could wear something you actually liked the look of. The technical shell kept the rain off and announced itself doing it: the sheen, the taped seams, the faint rustle when you moved. Wool looked and felt better and gave up at the first serious shower.
That trade-off has quietly gone. Not because anyone invented a new fibre, but because the mills spent a decade learning to make wool behave. The AW26 rails at Union 22 are the clearest evidence of it we have had. Across six or seven of the houses we buy, the same idea keeps appearing from different directions — wool asked to do the work a shell used to do, without looking like one.
Here is how that idea arrives, and where we would start.
Cloth that is treated rather than coated
The simplest version of the story is on the new LP.S rail, which landed with us this week.
Loro Piana's weatherproofing works at the level of the fibre rather than the surface. Rather than laminating a membrane onto the back of the cloth or spraying a finish across the face of it, the treatment goes into the wool itself. The practical consequence is the one that matters when you put it on: the cloth still handles like wool. It drapes, it has weight in the right places, it does not crackle. Rain runs off it anyway.
We have taken three pieces:
- LP.S Loro Piana Tech Wool Green System Bomber Jacket, black, £550
- LP.S Loro Piana Wool Rain System Bomber Jacket, navy, £775
- LP.S Loro Piana Rain System Wool Quilted Hooded Parka, navy, £1,100
The two bombers are cut short and easy, which is the point of them. A wool bomber that sits close to the body will go over a jumper without the shoulders fighting you, and it reads as a jacket rather than as weather gear. The parka is the deep-winter answer — longline, quilted, hooded, cut long enough to cover a jacket underneath rather than compete with it.
The chest piece
The second idea is a piece of construction rather than a cloth, and it is the one customers ask us about most once they have seen it.
A chest piece is a quilted panel that sits inside the coat and comes out. Zip it in and you have a winter coat. Take it out and you have a mid-season one. It is a genuinely useful piece of engineering in a climate where November and March ask for different garments but nobody wants to own both.
The best example on the floor is the Corneliani TechTouch Over Coat With Chest Piece in navy, at £1,270. It is a properly tailored overcoat — clean Milanese lines, nothing fussy — cut in Corneliani's TechTouch stretch cloth, so it moves with you in a way an overcoat historically did not. It runs slim, so take a size up. There are three left.
The same system appears in two shorter shapes: the Corneliani TechTouch Bomber Jacket With Chest Piece in navy at £850, and the Montecore Quilted Jacket With Detachable Chest Piece at £870, in dark blue and forrest green.
Tech and wool in the same garment
The third approach is to stop choosing and blend the two, or panel one against the other.
The Corneliani Quilted Gravity Tech & Wool Hooded Jacket at £860, in navy and grey, is a polyamide and cashmere blend — twenty per cent cashmere — which is an odd thing to read on a spec sheet and an obvious thing once it is in your hands. It has the lightness of a technical jacket and the handle of knitwear. Slim fit again, so size up.
The Herno Waffle Merino & Quilted Tech Bomber Jacket in dark navy, £685, does it by panelling: waffle merino set against quilted tech, so the warmth and the weather protection sit in different parts of the garment. The Montecore Reversible Tech Quilted & Padded Wool Jacket in dark blue and beige, £845, which also arrived this week, simply gives you both and lets you turn it inside out.
Ferilli have taken the thinking further than most, and below the waist, which almost nobody does:
- Paradise Tech Wool Zip Jacket, blue navy, £510
- Fisherman Tech Wool Full Zip Funnel Neck Jacket, black, £460
- Weekender Tech Wool Hoodie, black, £435
- Weekender Tech Wool Elasticated Pant, wide fit, black, £380
- Uni Tech Wool Fastener Pant, blue navy, £380
A tech wool trouser sounds like a contradiction until you have worn one through a wet Tuesday.
Knitwear asked to do a jacket's job
The last version of the idea runs the other way. Instead of making outerwear softer, it makes knitwear structural enough to wear as outerwear.
The C.P. Company Extrafine Merino Wool Knitted Jacket in black, £750, is the clearest case: a jacket that has been knitted rather than cut and sewn. It has the shoulder and the front of a jacket and the give of a jumper. Its lighter companion, the Extrafine Merino Wool Lens Half Zip Jumper in black, is £315.
Corneliani's Silk & Cashmere Herringbone Pocket Overshirt in grey, £1,200, is the most indulgent thing in this part of the shop and there are two of them. Their Extra Fine Merino Quarter Zip Knitted Jumper at £470, in navy and burgundy, is the one that will get worn most.
Our own label
Zattura is ours. We make it to our own specification and we put it on the same rail as the houses above rather than on a shelf of its own, because that is the only honest test of whether it is any good.
Three pieces belong in this story:
- Zattura Superfine Loro Piana Merino Wool Quarter Zip Jumper, £245, in navy and black — Loro Piana merino, under £250, which is the whole argument for making our own
- Zattura TechWool Knitted Button Over Shirt, £275, in green and navy
- Zattura Wool & Cashmere Over Coat, charcoal grey, £600
Where to start
If you want the idea without committing to a coat, start with the Zattura quarter zip at £245 or the TechWool overshirt at £275.
If you want one jacket to carry the season, the LP.S Tech Wool Green System bomber at £550 is the most useful thing on this page.
If you are buying a coat to keep for ten years, it is the Rain System parka at £1,100 or the Corneliani TechTouch over coat at £1,270, and the decision between them is really a decision about whether you wear tailoring.
The rest of the season is in outerwear and knitwear, and each of the houses above has its own page: LP.S, Zattura, Montecore, Ferilli, C.P. Company and Corneliani.
Come and feel it
Everything named here is on the floor at Union House on Victoria Street as well as on the site. Cloth of this sort is difficult to photograph and easy to understand the moment you have it in your hands — the weight of the Loro Piana wool, the way the Corneliani cloth moves, what twenty per cent cashmere actually feels like. We are five minutes from Liverpool One and there is no obligation to buy anything.