Read on Twitter
I mean this deserves a thread with a serious answer https://twitter.com/pirate_bob96/status/1295499700989308929
So in That World War Two, the British Army wore what they called Battle Dress, this all khaki wool outfit. Like, to fight in, thus ‘Battle Dress’
This was an improvement on big red coats, but not by that much, and during the war every country fucks around experimenting with camouflage. In Britain the drivers of that experimentation are the people most likely to need it, the newly formed airborne troops
the British paratroopers rip off an idea from the German ones called a Knochensack - the idea is, you wear a loose camouflaged garment over all your webbing so it doesn’t snag on parachute rigging on the way into the plane and then out again. they call this a Denison smock
other fun detail: it has a crotch flap. if you wear this unbuttoned, which you do for comfort most of the time, it looks like you have a tail - the locals in North Africa therefore called paratroopers ‘men with tails’
this is cool, though, because elite units use it, so it’s a status symbol. well after the war, you still have paratroopers running around in these things, which are hopelessly out of date, because they refuse to wear the new camouflage jackets
eventually this becomes so inconvenient that they indulge the paras and make a Smock, Parachutist - you can tell it apart because it has the woollen stretchy cuffs and the slanted pockets and it’s longer than the regular jacket
again because these are an issue item they’re technically approved wear for anyone and so lots of young impressionable soldiers buy one themselves to wear around and look cool. you can still get one in MTP, for some fucking reason
anyway the SAS are even bigger show-offs than the paras and decide they need an even fancier smock, which they get. this has a hood, even. it’s got rank tabs on the front and the back, and a big pocket that goes all across the back for storing your flashbang grenades etc etc
these again become a cool thing to private purchase and wear to look cool when you are a REME LCpl, and remain so. cops also love them, so they started making them in plain black as well. they’re exceptionally good in the wind and snow and so forth
the standard issue jacket is honestly fine, is the thing. it’s fine. this only really still exists as a status symbol. nobody knows if the SAS still wear them because they’ve only been in hot countries, hanging out in T-shirts and flip-flops all the time for the last 20 years
oh, one other legacy of the para smock is that because it doesn’t have a rank tab paras picked up this habit of sewing a rank patch onto their sleeve like it’s 1941 still. this looks dumb as hell in my opinion. like so
do like the fancy little scarf though
