What's It For?
Down is the lightest insulation going, per gram of weight, so this is a jacket to keep you warm in cold conditions, whether you’re visiting the Alps, heading to far northern (or southern) latitudes, or just visiting Scotland over New Year 2009:-)
With 145g of down filling, it’s not the warmest down jacket out there, but what it does do is keep weight to a minimum, so it’s particularly suitable for anyone traveling light. The women’s specific cut also helps you stay warm as it means you don’t lose any precious body heat out of ill-fitting hems, and you don’t trap any large pockets of cold air that take ages to heat up either.
Basically, think cold, fairly dry, and female, and you’ve got the plot.
The Techy Bits
Aside from the techiness of down – with its uber warm, uber light properties (and general dislike of the damp) – there’s a lot of thought gone into the construction of this jacket.
The most obvious feature is the odd alignment of the baffles. Instead of running across the body at regular intervals, the Anti-Freeze Jacket has baffles that sometimes run vertically and sometimes run horizontally, and they differ in width. Not only that, but the jacket combines stitch-through and baffle wall construction.
Why? Well, stitch-through construction means you get slightly cold patches where the seams are – not to mention the danger of a few drops of water through the stitching – whereas baffle wall construction generally helps to spread the down more evenly. On the negative side, it’s a more tricky technique and hence can be a bit pricier.
Montane have come up with a good combination of the two methods by using stitch-through construction for most of the jacket but baffle wall construction on the chest, to keep you really snug.
The baffles are narrower than usual, to stop the down moving around in the baffle-wall sections. The same effect is achieved in the stitch-through sections by dividing the down up into smaller pockets than usual, by using vertical as well as horizontal stitching. Unlike the baffle wall sections though, the extra stitching means there are also lots of areas without any insulation at all. Interesting though.
How It Performed
As we’ve come to expect from Montane clothing, a women’s fit really is a women’s fit. Nothing sack-like here! It’s got a proper waist, it’s not too short - which is a problem we sometimes have with women’s gear - and there are plenty of adjustment options around the waist, hem and cuffs for fine-tuning.
The waist cord is adjustable with your hand cosily tucked in your pocket; the cuffs cater for all wrist-sizes with Velcro fastenings, and although you might need a glove-free hand to adjust the hem cord, the good news is that you won’t need to do it all that often.
All in all, the features are as they should be: the baffle-lined zip, the insulated collar, the soft fleecy material on the inside of it, and so on. But what makes this jacket novel?
Well, there are a few things. We reckon Montane have put a lot of thought into giving this jacket an active cut. There are some down jackets that look like they were designed to be worn when you’re resting – they’re much bulkier than this one, less streamlined, and you just throw them on at the end of the day’s effort. But the Anti-freeze has the same kind of features that you get in Montane’s active mid-layers like the panther jacket. The pockets are high, for example, in case you’re up in the Alps doing an Arctic start and wearing a harness.
The distinctive baffles tie into this ethos too. You want to move your body around but you don’t want the down rumpling up into corners of the jacket and leaving cold, thinly-insulated sections as a result. In this case, that wouldn’t really happen because the baffles and stitching are so closely arranged.
Even the cut, and the amount of insulation that Montane have packed into the jacket, suggest that it’s for dynamic use as well as for keeping you warm at the end of the day. Some jackets are so warm that you can’t imagine wearing them on the move except in really severe, high-altitude conditions, but you can imagine moving across a glacier in the Anti-freeze on an early start in the Alps.
There is the drawback that this means the jacket might not manage to keep particularly cold-blooded folks feeling warm and toasty when the temperatures plummet. But then, it’s all relative, and to be honest, Brits don’t get much exposure to temperatures when you want a seriously warm down jacket – unless they’ve got an enviable budget to travel on – so maybe a slightly lighter, sleeker option isn’t such a bad idea for these temperature parts.
There’s one other innovation, and that’s the stuffsac. It’s no secret that down and water don’t get along too well. It’s also no secret that down jackets don’t like to be stored all packed down into a tiny space – they prefer a larger storage bag where they can loft a bit. Montane have put these two facts together and come up with a waterproof stuffsac with a mesh interior, which opens out to double the volume. That way, you can pack your jacket in a small, waterproof space, while you’re on the move, or put it in your bedroom cupboard with all the breathing space it likes. Rather neat really.
Verdict
As with all down jackets, the most important question is: will the Anti-Freeze make sure you don’t freeze? Well, if serious warmth is what you’re looking for then this isn’t the toastiest jacket you can go for, but it has other strengths that make up for that. It’s very lightweight, if you’re on a gram-budget, and it packs down small into a waterproof stuffsac. But best of all, it’s the kind of jacket that you can wear and still move flexibly and easily, rather than feeling like you’ve been mummified in down. In most UK temperatures you probably won’t want to wear a down jacket on the move, of course, but what more excuse do you need to head to the Alps? Either that, or it’s time for the Scottish weather to grace you
