3. Hanging Pockets And Un-Ending Storage

The jacket that I got, called the THREE.0 FineTex system, consists of an outer shell and a fleece inner coat that zips into it. The outer jacket was waterproof and very sporty looking. The interior features a fabric called Coolmax from the chemical tinkerers at Dupont. Coolmax is designed to keep you cool and dry while allowing your body to breathe.

Like clothes of the future... except you can buy them today. (And they don't look like they are made of tinfoil!)

The outer jacket features a whopping 30 hidden pockets and compartments while the fleece inner has twelve more. That is what the literature says anyways. While wearing mine, I was constantly finding cubby-holes, pockets, and slots shown neither on the list nor on their very informative website. I expect to find more as I keep looking, too! And even if I do find every hidden compartment, I don't ever expect to exhaust the number of different ways I can use them.

So many pockets it is almost overwhelming.

One of the things that makes the ScotteVest clothing so ingenious is not just the cartload of pockets. After all, any tailor can add extra pockets to your clothes (for a hefty price, mind you.) The intelligence lies in the types of pockets: hanging pockets and the PIPs (Pocket-in-Pockets).

If you wore regular clothes and loaded yourself down with most of the items you use throughout the day at one time you would look like your clothes were painted on by Picasso. Your silhouette would be a cubist's dream - a series of angular bulges and bumps. This is because normal pockets are usually sown around the exterior of the clothing they are in, and thus entirely fastened to the frame, if you will.

ScotteVest's hanging pockets are only attached to the body of the garment at the mouth or opening. This design allows the contents to hang freely in the interior space of the clothing, instead of creating lines of stress as they are held against the exterior. I admit that this is hard to explain, but it easy to see if you try to shove a book, your Pocket PC, or a DVD into your pants or jacket.

Normally, putting large devices in your pockets can cause unsightly bulges.