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Gabardine is a durable twill worsted wool. It is a tightly woven waterproof Textile and is used to make outerwear and various other garments, such as suits, Overcoat, trousers, , and . Thomas Burberry created the fabric in the late 1870s and patented it in 1888. The name gabardine comes from "gaberdine", a type of long, cape-like dress worn during the Middle Ages.
Since its debut in the late 19th century, gabardine has taken on an important role in military, active, and outerwear due to its durable, breathable, waterproof, and lightweight nature. In particular, its widespread use by the British Armed Forces during World War I produced the garments now widely recognised as the trench coat.
The modern use to describe a fabric rather than a garment dates to Thomas Burberry, founder of the Burberry fashion house in Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, who invented the fabric and revived the name gabardine in 1879. It was introduced by Burberry and patented in 1888. Prior to Burberry's development of gabardine, rubberised cotton (as in the Mackintosh coat) was the most common fabric used for waterproofing, and the material's lack of breathability and heaviness frequently made waterproof clothes uncomfortable. Gabardine, by contrast, was a lightweight, durable, breathable material. Its ability to shed water and Windbreaker while preserving comfortable wearability helped revolutionise outerwear.
This new material, which was lighter of weight, more breathable, and heavily "water-repellent" instead of entirely "water proof"; could be argued to be the first "soft shell" material.
Gabardine is weaving as a warp-faced steep or regular twill, with a prominent diagonal rib on the face and smooth surface on the back. Gabardine always has many more warp than weft yarns.
Burberry clothing of gabardine was also worn by many polar explorers. The fabric's first arctic field test was performed by Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegians scientist, explorer, diplomat, and eventual Nobel Peace Prize recipient who wore gabardine on his 1893 Fram expedition toward the North Pole. Subsequent polar explorers donned gabardine after Nansen's expedition, including Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, in 1911, and Ernest Shackleton, who used the material for clothing, tents, and even engine covers during a 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica. A jacket and plus-fours of this material were worn by George Mallory in his attempt on Mount Everest in 1924. In 2006 a replica of Mallory's suit, recreated by using the fragments recovered from his body, was tested on Everest. The project showed that the clothing was effective at providing protection at high altitude.
In the 1950s, gabardine was used to produce colourful patterned casual jackets, trousers and suits. Companies like J. C. Penney, Sport Chief, Campus, Four Star, Curlee, Towncraft, and Oxford Clothes produced short-waisted gabardine jackets, sometimes reversible, commonly known as "Ricky jackets" or "Gab jackets," along with the Hollywood leisure jackets that had been made since the 1930s.
Cotton gabardine is often used by to make pocket linings for suits, where the pockets' contents would quickly wear holes in flimsy pocket-lining material.
Clothing made from authentic wool gabardine generally requires dry cleaning, as wool likes to shrink in the wash.
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