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What’s Up Everyone
Hello everyone! Happy day, it’s Michael. Thanks for checking out another Iron Snail article. Today, we are talking about how to wax a Barbour jacket – not my jacket, but Christian’s jacket.
Christian from Theo and Harris, by the way, and I just can’t frankly wait to get into how to rewax a Barbour jacket.
This article is about how to wax a Barbour jacket perfectly, make it look like you just bought it, not like you re-waxed it – because sometimes it just looks sticky, or there’s too much wax, or it doesn’t look matte, or just doesn’t look as good. So I think I figured out how to rewax a Barbour jacket well, but we will talk about that.
We will talk about how to fix a Barbour jacket when you ruin it with wax and spill most of the wax on the jacket. And then I followed Barbour’s video on how they did it where there’s this like cool guy walking through the field, and then he, you know, does it, and I need to point out a very important thing that I found out that makes it way easier to do this because I almost ended this article by saying just send this jacket off to Barbour because re-waxing a Barbour jacket is super annoying, but then everything changed, baby.
The Jacket We’re Working With Today
Before we get into anything, though, the specimen that we’re looking at today, like I said, is not my jacket. It is a creature that has pranced around the streets of New Jersey for, I think, three years, and it is worn by Christian Zeron at Theo and Harris.
There are a lot of parts where there’s just no wax, which you can tell by the lighter color, and I can see the texture of the fabric kind of come out because it’s not matted down by wax. And then a cool side note is the aging on some of the buttons on his jacket, which is really cool. I really like that, and I look forward to mine doing that, although I do have about 80 jackets, so I don’t know if mine will ever do that.
Here’s What You Need (And What You’re Up Against)
Okay, so very quickly, here is what you need: a sponge – this is very important, and you can get the wrong thing. Also, I don’t even know if a sponge is the best thing to use, and I’ll tell you why in a little bit. You need a way to heat water and a receptacle to heat water, and then you need hell in a can.
The wax itself. It is my worst enemy – it is trash and garbage. The way it’s constructed, when you put it in water, a big air bubble comes in the bottom of the can, so it flips over and dumps all the wax out. It flipped over again when I put it on the table and spilled all over the jacket, but you do need it, so you should get it.
You definitely need the wax. You also need a hair dryer – technically, you don’t, but in order to get anything close to a factory finish, you definitely need a hair dryer, and you need a lot of paper towels or non-paper towels, but you need to be able to wash them, and I don’t know if the wax is gonna make your washing machine gross or anything like that.
Quick Apartment Update (Plus Tea Time)
I just went to pick up a new couch, and now I’m having a little tea while I write. So now this is a nice, cozy article. It’s one of those cool reupholstered mid-century modern couches. I made green tea because I heard in a podcast that it’s good for your microbiome. It has two scoops of organic sugar, and now let’s talk about Barbour.
Also, I have a funny story to tell you about the couch – I’ll tell you about it in the middle of this article for a little Barbour break.
The Basic Step-by-Step Process
So this is the most basic step-by-step on how to rewax a Barbour jacket, and then we’ll get into details and stuff I missed and stuff I found out. First thing obviously, lay your jacket on the table.
Do a big open space with a jacket if you have a big open space where the jacket can lay completely flat, and put something under it because chances are you’re going to spill wax or some wax will come off onto the jacket onto the table, and unless you’re the guy in the Barbour ad, that’s not good.
Then all you really have to do is heat up some water, put it in a pot or a bowl, which I did in this apartment, and dunk the little can from hell in there, and that wax will melt. A fun thing about the can, like I said before, is that it’ll actually tip over and dump into the bucket of water.
Then, really, all you have to do is, once the wax is melted, you’re just dipping in the sponge – although we need to get into sponges in a second. You dip in the sponge and you just rub it all over the jacket.
Important Temperature Tips
When Barbour says to do this in a hot room or outside during the summer, they really mean that. Do it as hot as you possibly can because it’s like 60 in my house, and the wax was almost dry before hitting the jacket, and right when you put on the jacket, it’s drying.
The harder you can do it, the better. If you can do it in the summer on the hottest day of the year, do it because it dries incredibly fast, and it’s not fun at all to do it like that until this one little thing that I found out changed everything.
How Barbour Actually Does It (And Why We Can’t)
So the first thing you need to do is take your Barbour jacket and throw it in an industrial laundry machine with some heavy detergent – that is a joke. That is actually the one thing you can’t do. So the fabric is waxed with Barbour jackets, and it runs through these two cylinders that are hot with wax on them, which melts them into the fabric, and then the jacket is stitched.
So, since the jacket is already stitched, you can’t really get wax perfectly embedded into the fabric, so really, when you’re re-waxing a Barbour jacket, you are putting a second layer over that original layer that wore down a little bit.
The Hair Dryer Trick
Okay, so technically, you can stop there, and that’s totally fine. But unless you do it really perfectly with the perfect amount of wax, your jacket’s going to look very shiny and waxy, kind of wet, and generally not that good, kind of like a trash bag instead of a nice jacket.
So the big tip that Barbour has on the can and that a lot of people say is that you should blow dry the jacket, and what that does obviously is melt the wax, and then the wax sinks into the fibers of the jacket, so it kind of goes deeper in, but you could still over wax and have a problem, which I did.
The Couch Story (Finally)
So I was getting this couch, and the guy was delivering it, and he had a Perfecto on, or I guess a motorcycle jacket because it wasn’t Schott, but he had a leather jacket on, and I said, “Hey, I like that jacket,” and he said, “Thanks, I really like leather,” and I said, “Wait a minute, that’s crazy – I think we like leather for two different reasons.” And then, yeah, then he gave me this couch, so I was pretty glad that the seats were not leather.
The Blow Drying Technique
When you’re blow drying, have a paper towel or towel – whatever you’re using – and as you blow dry, you’re basically doing a circular motion, briefly just getting it on the fabric. You can do it two different ways. I did it a heavier way where I took up more wax because I wanted it to look pretty dry.
I didn’t want it to have any stickiness or anything to it because I know Christian, at the end of the day, wants form over function a little bit more with his jacket, so I didn’t want it to be greasy and getting on his seats or anything. You could favor water resistance, but I favored the style and a flat look instead.
The Big Mistake (And How I Fixed It)
And then a tragedy happened, which – it’s always better when you tell a friend of yours “Hey, I’ll do this for you as a favor,” and then you ruin their jacket. So, I basically spilled a third of the can of wax on this part of the jacket. So that wasn’t good.
But that’s actually how I found out about using a paper towel and melting and sopping it up, and it basically blends in with the rest now, so you really can’t mess up and over wax, which is something from what I’ve seen on forms and stuff people are worried about. It looks like you’re all good.
The Truth About Sponges
The tip that I have with the sponges is actually also pretty simple: don’t use a sponge. That’s my tip. Thanks for reading the article.
The sponge that they used in the Barbour video is different than the one I use, so maybe those ones are better, and the sponge is a sponge so it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and it soaks up the wax immediately, and it makes it tougher to spread, and you can’t really slide it around on the jacket because it’s just sucking all that wax back up.
The Paper Towel Game-Changer
I ended up just trying it with a paper towel, and it was leaps and bounds better than a sponge. The paper towel basically just ended up getting clogged with wax and then kind of acted as a squeegee the whole time, so I was just sliding around on the jacket. It cut the time it took to cover the jacket and wax in half or more, and it also made it 10 times easier to spread out the wax onto the jacket, and it was like night and day.
Doing that, actually, a paper towel made me want to try it with a squeegee, and I would pour the wax on the jacket and pull it across with a squeegee. I think that would have been super satisfying, and I think it would have worked, but I didn’t have a squeegee, so I just used a paper towel.
Watch This Review
Wrap Up
So anyways, though, that’s about it on how to wax a Barbour jacket. Thanks so much for reading. I hope you’re all doing well!
This article was adapted from Michael Kristy’s video on The Iron Snail, with edits from Fashion’s Digest, and was reviewed by Michael to ensure the integrity of his original content. Watch the full video here.
The Iron Snail is a men’s fashion vlog (and now article series!) starring a young man named Michael and featuring a snail no bigger than a quarter. The two are set on taking over the world of fashion by creating a clothing line to end all clothing lines. Until then, we’re here to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the best clothing out there, from the highest quality raw denim jeans to the warmest jackets to the sturdiest boots…the Iron Snail has got you covered.