Last week we brought you the Patagonia down vest review, this week we’re taking an in depth look at the newest Patagonia down coat. Patagonia is a legendary outdoors brand, I’m sorry to say however, that their down coat is far from legendary. Lets take a look at why.
“The Patagonia down coat offers very little, if anything, in the way of redeeming qualities.”
The arms are cut tight, although I started with a large and ended up with an XXL, there was hardly a change in size. The torso was certainly larger in the XXL, but the sleeves, hood and shoulders fit nearly identical. The cuffs are elastic, with loose fabric overhanging the elastic cuff. This means your cuffs are not adjustable and if they don’t fit too bad. It also means you’re more likely to melt the cuff when working with a campfire or stove, as there’s loose fabric hanging over the wrist. The fit of the cuffs was tight on me, and I have skinny wrists. In a down sweater the cuffs would be acceptable, but on a coat a adjustable cuff would be great. The torso hangs low, which would be great if the XXL body wasn’t huge on me. A 36 waist, 210lbs, 6.2′ man and the XXL was huge in an alpine coat. There’s something I never thought I’d see. There’s zero reinforcement in the shoulders, so don’t plan on a long life backpacking in this. The shoulders will wear out, the stitching pull apart and it’ll be off for repair.
“I had assumed that like the vest this was high quality goose down, I was sadly mistaken. “
The inside pocket doubles as a stuff sack, which is a standard feature for insolation pieces like a down coat. I had a rather hard time getting the whole jacket stuffed into the pocket, much more difficult than it should’ve been. Even after trying a few ways to stuff it down, rolling it, folding it or simply smashing it down into the pocket… It wasn’t with ease and I couldn’t get the zipper to close unless I fought with it some more. A simple extra 2 inches of pocket would’ve fixed this issue. I noticed while packing it in that the fill felt rough and poked me, this led me to look at the fill tag. I had assumed that like the vest this was high quality goose down, I was mistaken.
The premier down coat from Patagonia features, of all things, duck down. Duck down isn’t as warm, wears out much faster, isn’t as packable and breaks up inside of the coat as well as pokes out/escapes through even good fabrics like Pertex. Here in the cheaper, less awesome fabric used by Patagonia in the down coat, we find the pokey duck down escapes with ease. So Patagonia has again cut corners with their build quality, features, fabric, but they’re also cutting corners with their fill as well. Not only did Patagonia choose to go with duck fill over goose, but there’s only 75% down fill, that means up to a 25% feather count. Feathers do nothing for warmth and a 25% fill ratio is far too high for any down coat, let alone a high end one like this.
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