Croz Jacket – Performance
There’s lots of good stuff about the Croz. For starters, that fabric feels light and tough as well as being comfortable against the skin. Technically, in lab tests, it’s not as outright waterproof as, say, Gore-Tex, but in real life use, we’ve had no issues with water repellency.
The huge, easy-to-open, pit-zip vents give plenty of additional cooling when needed, which is handy and generally the jacket has a nice balance of comfort, lightness and a nice protective feel.
The hood’s decent too. It only has a single adjuster at the back, which doesn’t always bode well, but in this case it not only swallowed a climbing helmet without a single metaphorical burp, it also adjusted nicely to sit on a bare head.
‘Nice fabric! It’s comfortable to wear, but still feels like it would be quite tough if you did, say, drag over rocks when climbing’
It has a wired peak for extra protection too and generally our testers all got on well with it. What they didn’t like so much was the sleek cut. Three of the four women who used it, found that the jacket was tight over the hips and bum and, as a result, rode up irritatingly with use.
The fourth, Emmy, who wore the jacket for our photos, actually preferred it to the other shells precisely because it was cut more closely. One to try before buying we’d suggest.
The other issue we had was with the pockets. The openings are vertical and go right down to the bottom of the pocket bag. That means, with the zips open, stuff can fall out rather too easily. To be fair, you can compensate by not fully lowering the zip, but for at least one of our testers, it was a proper deal-breaker. They do, however, happily accommodate a map.
How important are pockets to you? It’s very much personal preference, but if you’re an inveterate squirreller of gloves, bars and other debris, the design is potentially irksome.
