Our relationship with wax coating has always been complicated. The Proper office isn’t full of people who have triangular toast, and no one goes shooting on the weekend. It’s impossible to disregard the rich & intriguing heritage of the wax jacket, but it’s also hard to ignore the upper-middle-class stigma that comes with them…
Fortunately, the days of wax jackets’ synonymity with the Jontys’ & Bartys’ of the world seems to be coming to a close, as more and more brands are putting their own spin on the classic garment, and the most recent brand to join this forward-thinking panel is Uskees.
The Manchester-based outfit has been quietly grafting away at redefining workwear for some time now. Their latest launch – the aptly titled 7001 North West Wax Jacket – is as much a wax jacket as it is a quiet act of rebellion, it’s produced in Bolton and perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn’t have anything to do with Land Rovers, pheasants or £8 plastic pints of Guinness.
It’s important to understand that Uskees aren’t reinventing the wax jacket here; they’re simply reimagining it, and doing so in fine fashion, instanced by the jacket’s fabric itself…
The brand has fought to source dry wax cotton from Halley Stevensons, one of the oldest and most revered names in the game, so you’re still getting that uncompromised resistance to British drizzle. But instead of the usual tailored silhouette, the 7001 North West Wax Jacket leans into a much more contemporary, boxy, unstructured cut.
For one of the iterations of the jacket, the brand has kept it traditional with a Pennine Green paintjob, conjuring up visions of moss on a Derbyshire dry stone wall. The other, British Yellow, feels much, much more Uskees, sort of like an old Ordnance Survey map bathed in pints of Wainwrights.
Uskees’ ethos has always skewed toward the practical and the honest – clothing made for people who actually wear it, not hang it up for Sunday best. This waxed jacket offering continues that lineage. It’s not trying to cosplay as countryside chic. It doesn’t want to be photographed at Burghley Horse Trials or hung reverently in the boot room. It wants to be lived in. Worn on your bike, in the rain, to the pub. Passed down, patched up, and taken to bits if needs be.
What Uskees have produced here isn’t simply a wax jacket – it’s a little reshuffling of the style status quo. An item that once whispered about class and land ownership, now shouting clearly about craft, accessibility, and purpose. Same material. Different mindset.
We’re big into everything Uskees, but this jacket might just take the cake – designed in Manchester, produced in Bolton and unmistakably Northern. Take it from us when we say the 7001 North West Wax Jacket looks just at home on the moors of Yorkshire as the streets of Manchester – we shot the jacket against the backdrop of our Ancoats stomping grounds in the images below…
To shop the North West Wax Jacket, visit Uskees.
