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Military research reports—available in Doriot’s papers at the Library of Congress—confirmed that the jacket and its accompanying layers kept soldiers warm in weather as cold as 0 degrees Fahrenheit. The reports also suggested that the jacket system worked well in the rain. Moreover, the tight weave of its cotton fabric meant that it kept out cold blasts of air on windy days.
But convincing other military officials and soldiers of its benefits took a concerted effort. For the M-43 layering system to work, soldiers had to know how to use it. So military experts developed a layering-education curriculum, which shows how the M-43 became both a popular style and a model for dressing according to scientific principles. During one 90-minute indoctrination class, soldiers listened to a lecture on how to stay alive in the cold and watched a demonstration of how to wear and adjust each item in the M-43 uniform assembly.
In interviews conducted by the Quartermaster Corps, soldiers during the war said they liked the M-43, but not always for the reasons the scientists had expected they would. The soldiers cared as much about the look of the jacket as they did about its practical details, such as the length and pocket space. One soldier said, “This uniform makes us feel like soldiers. The old one didn’t.”
Layering was familiar to outdoors enthusiasts long before Yvon Chouinard and Patagonia came along in the 1970s. In fact, earlier outdoor-industry professionals played an important role in proliferating the layering principle. L. L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, and Harold Hirsch (of Hirsch-Weis and its skiwear brand, White Stag) were among the many civilians who worked as wartime consultants on equipment and clothing design. After the war, they brought design innovations and clothing-science concepts from military research to civilian product lines at their eponymous companies. White Stag’s advertising campaigns, for example, proudly pointed to the military origins of its new civilian styles. The 1943 4-Season “Off-Duty” Jacket, featuring the big pockets and loose fit of the M-43—a “leisure jacket gone military!”—not only capitalized on the cachet of association with a victorious army, but also continued to spread the Army’s lessons on the science of dress to everyday American life.
Hirsch reflected on the original olive jacket as a versatile and technically sophisticated innovation during an interview in the late ’80s, near the end of his life: “The soldier could be more active, more mobile, with light weight clothing” such as the M-43, he said.
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Walk into a research facility at an outdoor-clothing manufacturer today, and you will find modern versions of the Cold Chamber and the Copper Man. Similarly, military R&D labs still rely on approaches to studying clothing and human bodies that were developed during World War II.