Ocean Rainwear has been established in 1958 in the small city of Herning in Denmark. The company’s focus has been on producing high quality waders and rainwear, mostly for industrial use like (offshore) fishing. At a later stage the company expanded into related fields like workwear for, among others, forestry, industrial cleaning, construction, and agriculture.
Currently the rainwear available from Ocean can be divided into a light range of products mostly made of modern materials and PU, and a range of heavy gear made out of PVC. My interest clearly goes to the heavy workwear range of Ocean as it stands closest to the origins of the company and consists of real raingear that stands out: there are no doubts what the purpose of this gear is.
The general design of the rainwear is what you can expect from industrial heavy-duty gear; extremely waterproof and durable, but with a wide cut and a lack of little details to make the items fashionable. The sleeves are not narrowed down which is not necessary for workwear as you can wear rubber gloves, but for casual wearers it means the silhouette will look bulky. As PVC is not breathable the wider cut will give some space to control the inside temperature of the raingear, but it won’t look fashionable. Also the range of colors is limited with an emphasis on high-visibility for safety making it hard to successfully combine with other clothing in your wardrobe.
Even for practical use in bad weather the Ocean heavy-duty line has limited usability as the wide cuffs would require gloves when riding a bike. Unlike some other brands that have heavy-duty PVC rainwear in their line-up, I only see limited options of adding Ocean raingear to your wardrobe and being able to use it regularly. Easiest to combine would probably be the classic yellow coat, which will look nice with a pair of stonewashed jeans and either dark rubber rain boots or light colored sneakers. The look you will be going for is simple leisure wear combined with an industrial touch. Let the raincoat do the work, keep the rest simple and basic or it will look too cluttered and strange. I would recommend ordering the coats a size smaller as the cut is quite wide, although this might result in problems with the length of the sleeves. If you want to combine it with accessories, stick to a scarf and leave the handbag at home as it will look strange with the wide cut of the coat. The orange rainwear, or green rainwear, is a bit too much to make it work in an urban setting.
It is clear that the Ocean brand stays loyal to its origin, producing industrial rainwear, and has no plans to make a crossover into daily fashion with heavy rainwear. This also shows as the raingear is hard to come by in most countries; no branded stores in busy shopping streets or advertisement campaigns on billboards, just workwear companies having the catalogue available and willing to order it for you when you request it. There is nothing wrong with sticking to an industrial rainwear line and a lighter range still promoted as workwear. The waterproof coats they do have in their leisure range is just that, waterproof and not really rainwear in my view, and therefore less interesting to discuss here.
For now I will keep the classic yellow heavy-duty raincoat, as shown above, in the back of my head as a brand favourite and accept that the brand will be less interesting from a fashionable rainwear perspective.
Let me know what you think of the brand, their range of rainwear, and the overall look of their heavy-duty range of workwear, by leaving a comment below.