London Fog

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Waterproof Clothing and the Removable Liner

London Fog was founded in 1923 as the Londontown clothing company by Israel Myers, in Baltimore, Maryland, where its factory stood in the Meadow Mills area. The company proving ground was military work: during World War II it was known for making waterproof clothing for the United States Navy, production that demands sealed seams, durable coatings and consistent sizing at government scale. Waterproofing is unforgiving work, because a rain garment fails at its weakest point — a seam, a closure, a worn patch of coating — so a maker trusted with naval waterproof clothing had demonstrated the core skill of the rainwear trade before it ever sold a civilian coat.

After the war the company partnered with DuPont to make material for use in raincoats, applying chemical-industry fabric technology to consumer outerwear. The resulting coats were the first to have a patented removable liner, and they were sold in Philadelphia, where they were a big hit. The removable liner is a genuinely useful invention rather than a styling detail: a lined raincoat is warm in winter rain and far too warm in summer rain, so a coat whose insulation unbuttons or unzips converts one garment into two seasons of wear, and it remains a standard feature of better raincoats and trench-style coats.

Two-Thirds of America's Raincoats

The company went public in the 1960s, and by the 1970s it had its own stores and was manufacturing not only raincoats but also other types of clothes and accessories. Its position in its core category was extraordinary: at the time, two-thirds of all raincoats sold in the United States were London Fog. Dominance on that scale turns a brand name into the generic word for the product in shoppers minds, so that a customer asking for a London Fog often meant any good raincoat, and the trademark carried the sale either way. Running its own stores alongside wholesale accounts let the company present the widening range — coats first, then broader clothing and accessories — under its own control of display and price.

London Fog expanded internationally during the 1990s, selling in places like the United Kingdom and China. The factory, meanwhile, had moved from Baltimore to Eldersburg, Maryland, on Londontown Boulevard — a street name that kept the founding company name in daily use — and in 1994 the company left its 465,000 square feet of building space in Eldersburg for Darien, Connecticut. That move closed the Maryland manufacturing chapter of a company whose name, through Londontown and London Fog alike, had always traded on place: Baltimore workmanship wearing a London promise of weather beaten in style.

The raincoat itself explains the company durability. Unlike most fashion garments, a raincoat is bought for a function first — staying dry — and judged every time it rains, so a maker that gets the cloth, the seams and the liner right earns repeat purchases and word-of-mouth that styling alone cannot buy. London Fog layered fashion on top of that function only after the function was proven, adding its own stores, broader clothing and accessories in the 1970s from the security of a category it already dominated.

International expansion in the 1990s, into the United Kingdom and China among other markets, took the brand in two telling directions at once: to Britain, the spiritual home of the raincoat its name evokes, and to China, by then central to the world's clothing production and a fast-growing consumer market. A name built on London weather, founded in Baltimore as Londontown, selling on several continents, is a neat summary of how twentieth-century American clothing brands were made — a place name, a functional product, and decades of consistent manufacture behind both.

The Eldersburg plant figures give the scale behind the brand at its height: 465,000 square feet of building space is a factory complex, not a workshop, and a company leaves a site of that size only when its manufacturing geography has fundamentally changed. The 1994 move to Darien, Connecticut closed that chapter, but the products that built it — waterproof naval clothing, DuPont-material raincoats and the patented removable liner — remain the facts by which London Fog is defined, and the reason its name still stands for the raincoat category it once supplied almost single-handed.