CARHARTT WIP Tiklas (Finland) 70s Deep Notched Lapels Double Topstitching

SUNDAZED & OUTSIDE SOCIETY

…Double topstitched seams, oversized lapels, dual patch pockets, and disciplined panel architecture reflect mid-century industrial tailoring precision and material control.

Tiklas, a Finnish brand rooted in mid-20th-century tailoring and outerwear, produced this jacket as part of its enduring commitment to bridging formalwear and utilitarian functionality. Centered around technical longevity, material resilience, and a restrained design language, Tiklas rejected overt fashion trends in favor of garments engineered to integrate seamlessly into pragmatic, urban-professional lifestyles while maintaining a polished, disciplined visual clarity. Their contributions to Finnish postwar menswear helped modernize the domestic market, particularly through rational minimalism and the integration of durable textile technologies into lightweight tailoring structures—a subtle yet significant influence within Scandinavian sartorial history. This jacket is classified as a mid-weight workwear-style outerwear piece with strong shirt-jacket (shacket) lineage, designed to navigate the transitional demands of spring and early autumn wear. Balancing semi-professional daily functionality with casual adaptability, it features wide, exaggerated lapels, dual chest patch pockets with flaps, visibly reinforced double-topstitched seams, and a mid-hip length optimized for layering or standalone use. The overarching design intent is utilitarian elegance—functionally rigorous yet structurally refined. Constructionally, the garment adheres to a lockstitch-dominant methodology informed by mid-century workwear traditions. Major seams are reinforced with external double topstitching, serving both visual and structural purposes. The back body construction is economically simple, likely comprising a single piece or minimally darted two-piece layout to maximize fabrication efficiency. Partial lining in the upper body and sleeves, executed in a lightweight viscose-nylon twill, secures internal stability while minimizing weight. Buttons are machine-attached with reinforced shank construction, ensuring long-term durability under repeated mechanical stress. Technical detailing across the garment underscores disciplined industrial tailoring. Double topstitching along seamlines—including lapels, collar edges, pocket structures, and side seams—demonstrates controlled sewing tension and clean edge management, critical for visual coherence in utility-driven garments. Box-constructed pocket flaps with neatly turned corners, sharply notched deep lapels, and precisely aligned button placements all reflect manufacturing standards aligned with the technical rigor expected of high-quality mid-century workwear. Stylistically, the jacket sits at the intersection of shacket traditions—emerging robustly in the 1950s to 1970s civilian workwear market—and streamlined safari jacket configurations, albeit stripped of belt and volume excess in favor of Nordic minimalism. Its exaggerated lapels and broad visual balance speak to late-1960s to early-1970s casual tailoring influences, recalibrated through a Finnish lens prioritizing pragmatic restraint. The shell fabric is a 65% polyester, 35% cotton blend woven into a fine twill structure (~220–250 GSM), engineered to balance durability, wrinkle resistance, breathability, and comfort. The twill weave—a probable 2/1 or 3/1 configuration—creates visible diagonal ribbing, enhancing drape while reinforcing abrasion resistance and structural resilience. Polyester improves colorfastness and dimensional stability, while cotton softens the surface hand. The lining, composed of a 60% viscose and 40% nylon blend, provides a friction-reducing interior with sufficient abrasion resistance to withstand long-term layering use. The textile strategy resonates with several heritage fabric traditions: tropical-weight twills developed for military use, postwar poly-cotton battle dress uniforms, and lightweight industrial workwear fabrics engineered for abrasion resistance and structural clarity. Technical finish qualities echo those of textile producers such as Kloppman International, Brisbane Moss, Olmetex, and Tessilstrona—names synonymous with durable, technically refined cotton-synthetic blends. Structurally, the garment exhibits a straightforward panel configuration: vertically divided two-piece front body panels to accommodate integrated pocket structures; a minimally darted back body, possibly executed as a single panel; and two-piece set-in sleeves with a naturally sloped sleeve head. This patterning maximizes cutting efficiency while sustaining a clean, semi-tailored silhouette with adequate chest and shoulder mobility. Dual patch pockets are integrated precisely into the vertical seamlines, maintaining the garment’s structural grid while offering functional storage. Assembly techniques reflect tailored workwear logics: seams are joined by lockstitch, then reinforced with twin parallel topstitching for strength and visual articulation. Pocket assemblies feature pleated bodies with top-stitched flaps, maintaining clean dimensional stability. Collar and lapel constructions are separately built with fusible interfacing, then attached and perimeter-topstitched to preserve sharp form retention. Sleeves are inserted flat prior to side seam closure, enhancing production efficiency and optimizing underarm articulation control. Seam finishing strategies blend industrial durability with efficient cleanliness: external seams are topstitched for strength and aesthetic articulation; internal seams are likely serged, consistent with Northern European industrial standards of the 1960s–70s. The hem and sleeve ends employ double-folded simple turns secured by external topstitching, balancing strength with visual discretion. Reinforcement is methodically executed across stress points: double rows of stitching at pocket attachments, sleevehead joins, and side seam terminations ensure load-bearing reliability. Button areas utilize lockstitched buttonholes reinforced internally, while collar and placket areas are supported with lightweight fusible interfacings to prevent deformation over time. Pocket pleats are secured at the top to resist sagging or ballooning during wear. The jacket’s sewing execution demonstrates remarkable precision: topstitching is uniformly tensioned even across curved areas such as lapels, indicating controlled fabric feed and machine calibration. While pattern matching across seams is not critical due to the solid fabric, seamline symmetry and balance are exemplary. The garment achieves a rare combination of casual ease and technical sharpness, reflecting disciplined pattern grading and production expertise typical of high-end Finnish outerwear of the period. The wide, sharply notched lapel, constructed with light interfacing to maintain crisp edges without structural overload, speaks to late-1960s stylistic exuberance, while the cleanly set-in sleeves with moderate sleevehead fullness prioritize mobility without distorting the garment’s silhouette. Seams are pressed flat and externally articulated through double topstitching, visualizing the garment’s skeleton and reinforcing its utilitarian narrative. Edge finishing throughout—turned and double-topstitched—emphasizes durability and visual continuity. The neckline is internally faced for structure; cuffs are left open without fastening, suggesting a casual drape; and the hem is clean-finished with internal folding and topstitching, reinforcing the jacket’s pragmatic yet semi-formal design vocabulary. Conceptually, the jacket projects a psychologically resonant image of practical sophistication: structural clarity and visible technical articulation convey competence and readiness, while the deep lapels introduce a calculated flourish that signals cultural engagement beyond strict utilitarianism. Its clean geometry and functionalist restraint reflect postwar Nordic ideals of democratic design, where material truth and technical rationalism become aesthetic virtues. Artistically, it operates within the post-functionalist Scandinavian design tradition, merging Bauhaus-descended rationalism with late-1960s casual tailoring codes. Functional detailing—utility pockets, technical topstitching, durable cloth—interlocks seamlessly with proportionally expressive features like the oversized lapels, achieving a controlled tension between pragmatism and stylistic expression. The muted blue coloration deepens this narrative, reinforcing understated individuality within a systemized design logic. Historically, the garment aligns with late-1960s to mid-1970s Scandinavian menswear evolution, a period when ready-to-wear industrialization, new fiber technologies, and social casualization reshaped male dress codes. The polyester-cotton shell, viscose-nylon lining, and relaxed tailoring construction reflect technological, cultural, and aesthetic shifts occurring across Northern Europe’s urban fashion landscape. Contemporarily, this Tiklas jacket resonates strongly with the ongoing revival of archival workwear, hybrid tailoring, and utility-driven casualwear. Brands like Arpenteur, A Kind of Guise, Our Legacy, and Engineered Garments explore similar intersections, reframing mid-century utility garments into refined urban wardrobes. While exaggerated lapels would likely be moderated in modern interpretations, the garment’s clarity of construction, material pragmatism, and formal-casual balance position it favorably for vintage collectors, heritage wearers, and archival-inspired designers. In final evaluation, the Tiklas jacket exemplifies high-level technical precision, rationalized patterning, and superior material management, achieving its original goal of bridging urban outerwear with semi-professional casualwear. In today’s market, it holds strong niche viability among vintage workwear specialists, heritage collectors, and contemporary audiences seeking authentic, culturally resonant, technically disciplined garments that embody post-functionalist Scandinavian design ideals.

This 1970s men’s jacket by Tiklas, manufactured in Finland, stands as a definitive exemplar of Cold War-era civilian outerwear, forged at the intersection of state-industrial tailoring and climate-responsive design. Constructed from a rigid polycotton plain weave, the fabric reveals a high thread density and compact compression, engineered explicitly for wind-blocking, water-shedding, and maintaining architectural silhouette—textile behaviors critical to garments developed amid geopolitical austerity and the harsh demands of Nordic climates. The sharply notched lapels, symmetrical buttoned chest pockets, and uninterrupted topstitching along all vertical seams establish a rigid chassis that draws heavily from mid-century military and colonial fieldwear archetypes, notably the U.S. M-43 field jacket, early German safari coats, and contemporaneous Finnish institutional uniforms. A matte-finished, snap-secured inner pocket and full synthetic lining underscore the garment’s thermoregulatory imperative and mass-production intent, reinforcing its alignment with Cold War manufacturing ideologies that prioritized climate-adapted durability for wide civilian use. In both material logic and structural language, the garment echoes the post-military pragmatism of Willis & Geiger and the climate-resilient craftsmanship of Private White VC, while paralleling the Alpine-geometric textile intelligence of Bergfabel—whose engineering philosophy hinges on regional authenticity and structural integrity. This ethos extends through the textile restraint and silhouette control seen in Auralee and Invertere, both of whom elevate utilitarian outerwear through dense technical weaves and architectonic minimalism. Barena Venezia and Cordings Piccadilly transport the military-functional lineage into countryside tailoring traditions, translating field-coded silhouettes into idioms of rural civility, while Bernard Weatherill and Wax London maintain this dual register through heritage-informed fabrics structured for contemporary thermal needs. Labor-centric construction cues—clearly delineated paneling, strategic seam placements, and a silhouette devised for longevity—establish a direct affinity with the methodical workwear logic of TCB, Fujito, and Beams Plus, whose approach treats functionality not as retro fetishism but as a living grammar of form and resistance. The jacket’s disciplined construction reflects the design economies pursued by Officine Générale, where structured clarity meets restrained elegance, while Harris Wharf London and Hardy Amies reinterpret its industrial silhouette within frameworks of metropolitan softness and urban civic wear. Loop & Weft and Natalino further contextualize the jacket’s material typology, merging engineering precision with tactile modesty to craft garments of understated function. This continuum is reinforced by Bleu de Paname and Neighborhood, brands that mine industrial-socialist archetypes and reconfigure them into contemporary metropolitan formats, while Carhartt WIP and Uskees push the fusion of workwear-standard fabrication with silhouette modulation—allowing garments like this Tiklas jacket to straddle blue-collar resilience and urban stylization. Norse Projects channels Nordic minimalism with textile austerity, whereas Kamakura Shirts invokes the rigors of Japanese heritage tailoring—each extending the jacket’s language across cross-cultural, structurally coherent narratives rooted in utilitarianism and fabrication integrity. Ziggy Chen and Geoffrey B. Small distill the jacket’s architectural intelligence into post-functional material philosophies—treating form as a vessel for silhouette clarity and material austerity—while Kolor and Issey Miyake amplify this structural intent toward sculptural abstraction, rendering field-derived chassis into expressions of proportion and gravity. Within this architectural and ideological framework, Tiklas functions less as a brand than as an industrial conduit for articulating the design imperatives of Finland’s postwar civilian wardrobe—where uniformity, austerity, and durability are transmuted through local material culture and manufacturing logic into garments of enduring clarity. The result is a civic outerwear idiom wherein every seam, fiber, and form cue reflects necessity reframed through textile intellect and silhouette discipline. The jacket’s tightly structured silhouette and compressed polycotton density position it squarely within the design philosophy of Veilance, whose climate-pragmatic modularity and material engineering reimagine outerwear as infrastructural systems for urban and alpine extremes. S.K. Manor Hill and MHL. by Margaret Howell uphold the garment’s aesthetic restraint through labor-informed geometry and tactile austerity, pursuing a design language that privileges pragmatic elegance over embellishment. The hybridization of military, workwear, and civic typologies recalls the North American technical heritage distilled in Daiki Suzuki’s Engineered Garments, where form-functional layering activates archival fieldwear as narrative design. Snow Peak introduces a climate-agnostic performance counterpoint, recasting the jacket within a broader ecosystem of thermoregulative infrastructure. Nigel Cabourn extends the jacket’s Cold War referentiality through archival reconstruction, situating it within a lineage of reissued fieldwear that preserves symbolic continuity through meticulous material fidelity. In this expanded reading, the Tiklas jacket transcends mere historical reproduction and emerges as a structural template in the evolution of fieldwear—from martial prototype to domesticated urban utility—where silhouette fidelity, technical compression, and labor-informed engineering converge into a statement of quiet, exacting authority.

Measurements (cm):
Chest: 54
Length: 71
Shoulder: 44
Sleeve: 59



Size Conversion (approximate)
US Men’s Size: M–L
EU Men’s Size: 48–50


SKU: 015052