Why Wool Still Travels Best

We went to the Sahara expecting heat. We did not expect to spend quite so much of the journey reaching for wool.

Perhaps we should have known better.

When most of us picture the Sahara, we imagine an endless sea of sand beneath an equally endless blue sky. It is hot, dry and unforgiving, and naturally that influences what you imagine packing. Lightweight shirts, thin trousers and anything designed to keep the sun away from your skin seem the obvious choices.

We packed plenty of those things.

The reality, as we discovered very quickly, was rather more complicated.

The Sahara is not one landscape and it certainly does not have one climate. Our route took us through great open plains, mountain ranges and along hundreds of miles of Atlantic coastline, with conditions changing considerably as we travelled.

There were afternoons when the sun was every bit as fierce as we had expected. There were also mornings when we climbed into the Jeeps wearing jumpers and wool jackets, gloves and wool caps.

Then there was the wind.

An open Jeep travelling at forty-five miles an hour creates its own weather. Add the Atlantic wind coming in from the coast and even a warm day could become surprisingly cool after several hours behind the wheel. As the sun disappeared in the evening, the temperature changed again.

We soon stopped dressing for the Sahara we had imagined and started dressing for the one we were actually travelling through.

And wool kept finding its way to the top of the bag.

Dressing for the Day, Not the Forecast

One of the pleasures of travelling in an old vehicle is that there is very little separation between you and the landscape around you.

There is no climate control. Not even a roof in our case.

You feel the morning air, the heat of the afternoon and the wind as the landscape changes around you. Dust finds its way into everything and, after enough miles, both you and your clothes begin to take on much the same colour as the road.

It quickly changes what you value in a garment.

We were not interested in keeping things pristine. What mattered was whether something remained comfortable after hours in the Jeep, whether another layer could be added when the temperature dropped and whether it could be worn again the following morning without requiring much thought.

Heavy cotton shirts became something of a daily uniform. They were comfortable, protective and robust enough to withstand the dust, sun and repeated wear.

But it was wool that surprised us most.

The Stanley V-neck travelled with us, as did the Bronte Gansey, and both were worn far more frequently than we had anticipated before leaving Britain.

They weren't packed as costume for the photographs, nor because we wanted to prove some point about traditional clothing.

They were packed because we wear them at home.

We continued wearing them because they worked.

An Old Solution to an Old Problem

There is nothing particularly revolutionary about wool, which is rather the point.

People have been relying upon it for thousands of years, and its usefulness to sailors, soldiers, farmers, mountaineers and travellers was understood long before anyone thought to describe clothing as "technical".

Wool fibres can trap insulating air while also absorbing water vapour, which helps the wearer remain comfortable across a surprisingly broad range of conditions. Unlike many fibres, wool also retains useful insulating properties when damp and is naturally resistant to the build-up of odours.

Those characteristics matter when your wardrobe is whatever you can fit into the back of a Jeep.

But there is something else about wool that is harder to quantify.

It is forgiving.

A good wool jumper doesn't need to be treated delicately. It can be pulled on in the cold of the morning, taken off and thrown into the back of the vehicle when the day warms, then retrieved again as the sun begins to fall. It can gather dust, be aired overnight and be ready to go again the following day.

That uncomplicated usefulness becomes very appealing when travelling.

The further we went, the easier it became to understand why generations before us had relied so heavily upon natural fibres. Their clothing may appear simple when viewed through modern eyes, but simplicity should not be mistaken for a lack of understanding.

Quite the opposite.

The materials had been selected because experience had shown that they worked.

Clothing That Earns Its Place

This is one of the things that continues to fascinate us about historic clothing.

We have never been particularly interested in reproducing the past simply because it is old. Age alone does not make something good.

What interests us are the things that survived.

The garments, materials and ideas that remained in use because generation after generation found them useful.

Military clothing is full of examples. So is work-wear. So is the clothing associated with sailing, motoring and exploration. These garments were shaped by people actually wearing them, often in circumstances where failure was considerably more consequential than simply being uncomfortable for an afternoon.

Details evolved. Materials were tested. Things that didn't work disappeared.

The good ideas remained.

Wool is one of them.

Modern technical clothing is extraordinary and there are circumstances where it can outperform anything available to previous generations. The lesson from the Sahara was not that modern materials are unnecessary.

It was simply that newer does not automatically make everything that came before it obsolete.

Sometimes the old answer remains the right, and sustainable, answer.

What Came Home

By the end of the journey our clothes looked rather different from when they had left England.

There was Saharan dust in seams and pockets. Sand appeared from places where sand had no reasonable business being. Shirts were creased, boots were battered and the knitwear had spent days being pulled on, taken off, rolled up and thrown into the Jeeps.

It had been used and that is entirely what we wanted.

Because the journey reinforced something that sits at the heart of what we try to do at Stanley Biggs.

Clothes should be lived in.

A jumper does not become less valuable because it carries evidence of where it has been. Quite often the opposite is true. The things we grow most attached to are rarely those we have protected in a wardrobe. They are the things that have travelled with us, kept us warm, acquired the odd mark and gradually become our own.

When we unpacked after returning home, the woollens came out carrying dust from the Sahara.

A few months later, some of those same ideas followed us onto the roads of Lincolnshire for The Drive.

Different landscape. Different journey. The same materials continued to make sense.

Perhaps that is why wool still travels so well.

Not because we are nostalgic for the world in which it first proved itself, but because the fundamental requirements haven't changed very much.

The wind is still cold. The morning still arrives before the warmth of the day. Travellers still need clothing that can adapt when conditions change.

And after thousands of years, wool still quietly gets on with the job.