This ordinary-looking black Haglöfs fleece could change the way outdoor clothing is made

Black outdoor clothing may look roughly the same, but making it is far less standardised than you might think.

Haglöfs and Polartec are trying to change that with Standard Issue Black, a single shared shade of black designed to reduce unnecessary resource use in producing enormous quantities of almost-identical dark outdoor clothing.

As a proof of concept, Haglöfs has launched the Buteo Mid II Jacket, its first commercially available product made using fabric dyed in Standard Issue Black, alongside a couple of accessories, including scarves and hats.

Outdoor companies produce tens of thousands of black fleece garments every year, but each slightly different shade can require a separate dye batch, chemical mix and minimum order quantity.

Standard Issue Black is pre-dyed at scale and, importantly, Haglöfs and Polartec aren't keeping it to themselves.

It's intended to be openly available to the wider industry, potentially allowing multiple manufacturers to draw from the same standardised material rather than commissioning their own marginally different blacks.

According to an internal production assessment cited by Haglöfs, the approach reduces water use by more than 50% and cuts energy consumption by at least 20% compared with traditional piece-dyed black fabrics.

Those figures are company-supplied rather than independently verified, but they illustrate why something as mundane as agreeing on a shade could have a meaningful impact at scale.

One black to rule them all

Haglöfs introduced the concept earlier this year with its Black Capsule, which combined three shades of leftover black fleece into individual garments to highlight just how similar these supposedly different fabrics can be.

With the Buteo Mid II, Haglöfs says it deliberately chose one of its higher-volume designs for the first Standard Issue Black product.

It has also upgraded the fleece jacket itself, with the new Buteo using lightweight Polartec microfleece made from 100% recycled polyester.

The full-zip jacket is designed to work either as an outer layer or as an insulating midlayer, so aesthetically there isn't anything particularly radical going on here.

By choosing one of its normal, high-volume outdoor garments, the brand made it clear it's not an eco concept piece for a museum display.

Of course, the effort is commendable, but a looming design question hangs over the project: would every outdoor company using exactly the same black make everything look even more alike?

Haglöfs' Head of Design and R&D, Eva Weiss, argues that standardisation doesn't need to restrict creativity, with brands still able to differentiate products through their cuts, other colours and design details while simplifying one particularly resource-heavy part of the process.

Whether other outdoor brands actually adopt Standard Issue Black is the bigger question.

But given how much black fleece the industry produces, this seemingly tiny change could become far more important if enough companies agree to use it.

The Haglöfs Buteo Mid II Jacket in Standard Issue Black is available now at Haglöfs UK and Haglöfs EU for a remarkably low price of £70 / €70 (~$81 / AU$113).