Why arming yourself with a gilet / sleeveless vest will add the most versatile anti weather weapon to your riding wardrobe.
If you’ve not tried one, trying to explain why a vest can be so good is actually pretty hard. Especially if it’s your arms that seem to get most obviously wet and your hands generally get cold first.
One way of looking at it is that a gilet works like the boiler of your personal central heating system. Guaranteeing your core warmth to making sure your blood pumps out to your extremities piping hot. It does it with a much smaller pack size, easier temperature regulation, and far less fit faff than a full jacket.
Think about it another way. What normally annoys you about jackets? It’s rarely the body is it? It’s sleeves not being long enough, being too tight around the cuffs or pulling around your shoulders and neck. Getting rid of sleeves automatically gets rid of all those worries and it cuts down on weight, material, complexity and cost. So, you get a more easily affordable and packable product with far less fit worries. In fact, our Aratus and Lumea gilets pack up so small they not only disappear into their own back pockets but come with straps to attach straight onto your bars or frame. Perfect for taking just in case, or pulling on or off as the weather changes throughout the day - as it normally does.
While it’s hard to explain theoretically the practical wins of a gilet, its weather-beating benefits are obvious the moment you start using one. As we said at the start your sleeves nearly always wet out first - check yourself on the next wet ride if you don’t believe us. That’s because they get brushed against bushes etc. that force water through or wipe off the DWR protective coating. And if you’ve got a wicking base layer underneath, it’ll happily suck water straight up from the cuffs. So, chances are if you’re wearing a jacket, your arms will get wet very quickly anyway. And once you’re wet inside a jacket, it takes an age to dry out and warm back up, unlike a jersey sleeve left out in the open that can steam itself dry in no time.
In contrast a gilet insulates your body consistently for cosy comfort and core temperature protection without any worries about mobility or slow drying, sealed sleeves after climbs or showers. And even if you’re wearing a jacket for protection in really bad weather, adding a thermal gilet underneath will provide a whole load of extra warmth. Again, without complicating the sleeve fit and arm movement we’ve already talked about even more.
Finally, a gilet can still give you all the pocket options of a jacket and jersey, adding cargo capacity as well as cosiness to your riding in the most effective, cost and space efficient way possible.
Or maybe I should just say that gilets - over a jersey/base layer, under a jacket, or just tucked neatly away ready to wear - are the favourite piece of kit for pretty much everyone on the Polaris team. So why not just try one and find out what makes armless so awesome yourself?
