Note: this item was provided for review.
When I was offered this jacket to review, I thought it would be a pretty neat looking jacket, but maybe not the most versatile. However, shortly after this jacket arrived, Fall with spurts of Winter hit the Boulder area. And the Rampart Jacket quickly became my “easy” go to for covering a hugely variable ‘feels like’ in temps here.
This jacket is far more versatile and easy to wear than I thought, and is fantastic.
Materials
Before I dive into the materials, you need to understand how this jacket is built. This is essentially a puffer vest with sweatshirt sleeves. That sounds weird, but this jacket pulls it off. So there’s two setups for the materials.
The main body of the jacket is 70D nylon (93gsm) with a DWR treatment. It has the nylon taped style button strip that Triple Aught Design uses in most garments. There’s two hand warmer pockets and two zipped chest pockets. It’s also insulated.
The body insulation is special stuff. It is “Thindown” which I am sure you know what it is, but on the off chance you do not, it’s an actual down feather fabric. In this application it is 45gsm of 75% Pure White Duck Down, 15% Polyester, 10% Pure White Duck Feather. Simple! In practice it feels like synthetic insulation, but is actually down.
The sleeves are best described as terry sweatshirt cloth with standard sweatshirt style ribbed cuffs. Here we have an upgraded material in a Cordura Nylon French Terry (86% cotton and 16%(?) Cordura according the website) this comes in at 390gsm. The stretch is from the weave. The cuffs are 95% cotton and 5% elastane.
Basically, the materials are top notch and slightly upgraded for performance.
But let’s circle back to that Thindown material. Here’s what Triple Aught Design says about it on the site:
THINDOWN® offers all the outstanding natural advantages of down such as lightness, warmth, wicking, breathability, and absolute thermal insulation in the thinnest possible profile. Thanks to the exclusive processing, the fabric is characterized by a uniform distribution of down that enables the absence of horizontal stitching sections and prevents cold spots and leakage of down.
Independent laboratory tests have proved THINDOWN® to be 2 times warmer than loose down and 4 times warmer than polyester.
Again, this is a very thin layer, which feels like a synthetic down without the loft, but in practice weighs nothing and insulates well. It’s pretty wild, and in practice you don’t need to think about it much, but you will notice how well it performs.
All of this is cut and sewn in the USA. Good stuff.
Wear & Fit
A jacket with the coolest materials is nothing if it doesn’t wear and perform well. But here we have a jacket which consistently punches above its weight, and offers a really large range of comfort when wearing it.
I’ve worn this as low as 32°F and as warm as 60°F (standing in the sun). While I’ve not worn this hiking, I regularly wear it on thirty minute walks to and from my kids’ schools. Through it all, it’s proven to be a fantastic jacket to wear, and a very comfortable one as well.
Wearing the jacket feels a lot like wearing a vest, but with the addition of sleeves to help keep from the dreaded ‘vest bro’ looks which infect offices nationwide. And because the sleeves are essentially a sweatshirt material, you get some warmth without it being over bearing, and it is generally very comfortable.
I found that the jacket weighs less than you expect it to every time you pick it up, and feels very light on your body. At the same time, buttoning up the jacket creates an impressive amount of warmth. Not enough warmth where it will be a cold weather jacket, but certainly enough to handle cooler temps.
All in all, this jacket wears most comfortably between 45°F and 65°F and in light-to-no wind conditions. I’ve worn it colder, but found that my arms were quite chilled. In wind, you’ll feel it pass right through the sleeves, while your body stays protected enough to not be chilled.
The one primary downside to this jacket is the sleeves. I’ve found that they often leave some black fuzz on my shirts when I pull my arms out. While this should dissipate over time, it’s something to know going into it. I turned the jacket inside out and used a lint roller to reduce this issue after the first wear, which did help considerably.
Triple Aight Design positions this as a jacket you can wear in the outdoors, as well as around the city, and to that end I think they struck that balance well. The collar is nicely cut to keep your neck protected, while not being so overbearing that it looks out of place in a coffee shop.
In fact the overall cut and fit of the jacket is quite good. It hits my body well, and has enough room that you can wear some heavier shirts under it, while still being trim enough that you can toss an overcoat over the top. In fact, if you toss a rain jacket over the top, you significantly increase the temps you can wear this jacket in, and I did this in feels like 28°F weather and was quite comfortable for a short walk (roughly 10 minutes).
The biggest benefit for this jacket is how large the comfortable temp wear range is. For most jackets, I’ve found that I’ll often get too warm when moving in the jacket, while being too cold when stationary. Th Rampart bucks that trend for me, and is one of those jackets which you can button up and stay warm when it’s cooler, and wear open when it warms up while still keeping a comfortable core temperature. A lot of this has to do with the sleeves being more sweatshirt than insulator, but also the ease of wearing this is a huge win.
That’s what makes this jacket so easy to grab and wear.
Overall
A few years ago, I stopped wearing and buying black clothing. This is now the second black jacket I’ve tested from Triple Aught Design, where I find myself saying: it’s so very good, that even in black I wear it all the time. The Rampart jacket is one of the more versatile jackets I own.
It’s casual, but not tactical/outdoorsy in vibe. It wears well, and over a very large range of temperatures. Toss a wind layer over the top, and you can take this jacket even colder. At the same time you can go sit and have coffee indoors, and not feel an immediate need to tear the jacket off to cool down.
I am going to get a lot of wear out of this jacket, and it’ll find itself being packed again and again. Fantastic all around, highly recommended.