A Breton smock and Tabarly's Harley seat | From the workshop #15

The Kohutt Mariner's Smock is now up for pre-order. This project has taken over 18 months to get right, and I'm super proud to finally be getting it out there. It's made for sailors, artists, free thinkers, explorers and those who appreciate craftsmanship. Navy oilskin, sizes S through XL, shipping in the second and third weeks of November.

Yes, we've done sizes, after telling you in June that I never would. This was part of the design delay, working out whether we even wanted to foray into sized apparel. See, a tarp fits everyone and a coat fits one person, which is the whole reason I stayed away from clothing for ten years. A smock is as close as I can get to not having to choose... It goes over the head and hangs, with nothing on it that commits to a particular chest. The pre-order is the other half of the answer. I would rather find out what people actually need than guess and cut.

In 2006 I left Europe in a 26ft boat and the first leg of the long way home ran down the west coast of France. Somewhere along the Breton coast I started paying attention to what the fishermen wore. Heavy cloth, tall at the collar, split at the neck so it goes over the head, deep pockets at the front, nothing to undo. The French call it a vareuse. I was twenty years younger and mostly thinking about the weather, and I did nothing with it for a very long time.

Ashore the same cut picked up buttons and became the bleu de travail, which is how it ended up on mechanics and painters. (I wrote about where that eventually led in issue seven.) The sea version never took the buttons.

What brought it all back was a photograph of Eric Tabarly. If you did not grow up in France the name may mean nothing, and if you did it means something close to everything. He was the naval officer who won the singlehanded transatlantic in 1964, which in France is remembered as beating the English at their own race, and he spent the rest of his life building and sailing the Pen Duicks until he went over the side of the first of them in the Irish Sea in 1998.

Years later I was aboard Pen Duick VI, the aluminium ketch he had built for the first Whitbread, and the thing I remember best is not the rig or the deck. It is the navigator's table. Tabarly had bolted a Harley-Davidson seat in front of it. I sat on it.

A motorcycle seat is sprung, it is shaped for somebody being thrown about, and it is the correct answer to working at a chart table in a seaway. It is also not what anyone would choose if they were thinking about how the interior looked. The smock is the same decision in cloth. You take the thing that already works, you put it where it is needed, and you do not spend much time worrying whether it reads as a sailing garment or a fisherman's one.

Ours is cut from the last of the navy Australian oilskin, and every part of it is the way it is for a reason somebody worked out a long time ago. The collar is tall, because on a deck what you want most is the wind off your neck. The neck is split in the traditional way, which is simply how you get a head through heavy cloth without putting a fastening on it. The front pockets are deep, because a shallow pocket in a loose garment empties itself the first time you bend over. There is a pencil pocket on the chest, which is the sort of detail that only ends up on a garment because somebody kept losing pencils. And there are red bartacks at every point of strain, to stop the cloth tearing where it gets pulled. They happen to look right, which is the correct order for those two things.

Oilskin is a particular choice for clothing. It adds warmth and stops wind, which is most of what you want standing on a deck in a Tasmanian spring. It will mark and soften and take the shape of whatever you do in it, which is the intention rather than a fault, but worth saying plainly before anyone orders one expecting a raincoat.

Good on a deck, good at a bench, and good at an easel, which I mention because the painters worked that out before the rest of us. It is not the thing for running up a mountain. If what you want is light and packable, this is the wrong workshop.

If the size is wrong, send it back and we pay the freight within Australia. That is the cost of asking somebody to buy a garment they cannot try on, and it was settled before any cloth was cut. It is cut loose on purpose, so it is not a garment to size up in.

Pre-order The Mariner's Smock - sizes S to XL, shipping the second and third weeks of November. Free shipping worldwide, free returns within Australia if the size is wrong.

With much appreciation,

Nick.