Cold weather sucks. It sucks all the time, no matter what happy lies winter sports enthusiasts and / or Scandinavians might tell you. It is a drug especially during a pandemic, when the safest option for socializing requires being outdoors, exposed to harmful elements. Last weekend, although it was almost freezing in New York, some friends came to spend time on my porch. Despite the cold conditions, we sat 2 meters away and talked for several hours, ignoring our visible breathing and the fact that being outside at 35 degrees is objectively worse than being indoors. Partly because we were hungry for human contact and partly because I took out my secret weapons: an arsenal of warm clothes.
Heated clothes are exactly what they look like: clothes powered by batteries or electricity with heating elements woven throughout. Since this fall, whenever the temperature drops, I wrap myself with a variety of heated equipment to make spending time outdoors more enjoyable. I put on a warm vest and got on a motorcycle to run errands on the first really cold day of November. On New Year’s Eve, I wore heated gloves and held our dog’s paws – makeshift paw warmers! – while drinking beers in the afternoon at a microbrewery picnic table. (Full disclosure: all of these clothes were review units lent to me by three companies: Ororo, Venture Heat and the Warming Store.)
Warm clothes look like normal clothes, except for the on / off buttons, which glow red when they are at maximum. They emanate a level of heat similar to an electric blanket, which is as delicious as it looks, and most have a few different temperature options. When I walk the dog, warm clothes are unusual enough to raise questions from strangers – usually, What are those? and Where can I get them?– but I dream of a world where heated equipment is a household product, not a novelty. He rules.
It also has a longer history than one might expect, dating back to other global pandemic. During the First World War, the French military developed rudimentary, electrically heated flight suits; the United States built its own prototypes based on these models. It was a revolutionary idea, but the execution left something to be desired. “The 1918 ‘electric suits’ consisted mainly of a wire whip attached to the suits and connected to copper pads on the knees, shoulders, etc.,” wrote military historian CG Sweeting in his 1984 book Combat flight clothing: Army air force clothing during World War II. These suits were notoriously unreliable and often caused a short circuit in mid-flight, leaving the pilots with chills. In World War II, General Electric was making more sophisticated heated flight suits.
But while heating clothes originated in military aviation, the versions you can buy today have their roots in the world of motorcycles. “Warm clothing as we know it was invented in the mid-1970s in Washington by a guy named Gordon Gerbing,” says Justin Silverman, co-founder of the Warming Store. Although Gerbing did not ride a motorcycle, he worked in a mechanic shop with a large number of biker employees. After realizing how cold they were after going to work, he assembled a prototype by deconstructing a heated blanket and connecting it to a jacket and a motorcycle. Gerbing was so pleased with the results that he created a parallel jacket company for local motorcyclists, launching the modern warming clothing market as a passion project.
In the 1980s, Gerbing was selling his equipment full time on motorcycle rallies, where it proved extremely popular. “Almost every motorcyclist has heard of heated equipment,” says Andria Yu, a motorcycle trainer and communications director for the Motorcycle Industry Council. “It certainly changed the game.” Gerbing is still one of the best-known warm clothing brands, although the Gerbing family is no longer involved. Instead, they operate another brand of heated clothing, called Gordon’s Family Clothing, and make a point of emphasizing that Gerbing is no longer a family business. (If anyone has additional information about the internal conflicts in the heated world of clothing, get in touch.)