Every house has a hook by the back door, and on that hook from October to March hangs one jacket that does most of the work. It is rarely the expensive one. It is the one you grab to take the trash out, split wood, drive to the hardware store, stand at the edge of a soccer field at eight on a Saturday morning with a coffee going cold in your hand.
For a lot of people that jacket is buffalo plaid.
The pattern is about as simple as a pattern gets: two colors, big squares, one darker block where they cross. It has been lumberjack shorthand for well over a century, and it has outlasted every attempt to make it fashionable or unfashionable. It doesn't show dirt. It can be seen across a field. It looks the same on a nineteen-year-old as on his grandfather, which you can say about very few things.
Ours, the M9109, is 330-gram polar fleece on the outside and white sherpa on the inside, with a metal zipper, two flap pockets on the chest and two hand pockets below. That puts it in the useful middle ground between a shirt and a coat. On a cool day it is the outer layer. On a cold one it goes under a canvas shell and you stop thinking about the weather. Fleece dries fast and weighs little, so it is also the jacket that ends up living behind the truck seat.
It comes in seven colorways. Red is the one everybody pictures. Charcoal is the one to buy if you think plaid is not for you. Hunter green and brown look best with denim. Sizes run S to 5XL.
There is also a small one. The K9309 is the same jacket cut for kids, toddler 4 through youth XL, in four of the colors. We mention this without comment, except to say that matching jackets on a parent and a six-year-old is the rare photo that everybody in it will still like in twenty years.
M9109 Regular Buffalo Plaid Polar Fleece Jacket, Sherpa Lined
K9309 Buffalo Plaid Sherpa Lined Jacket
M9109T Big & Tall Buffalo Plaid Polar Fleece Jacket, Sherpa Lined
Wash it cold, hang it up, put it back on the hook. See everything in Outerwear.