Spot the Frippet: gaberdine. Or gabardine.

 A gabardine today is usually a raincoat:

As you can see, it's traditionally made of wool, tightly woven, water-proof (and fish-hook-proof) and very hard-wearing - though if you can find someone over the age of about, ooh, a hundred or so, then that person might refer to any raincoat as a gabardine.

It was Burberry (or Burberrys as it was then), and a particular Burberry called Thomas who borrowed the name gabardine from an ancient garment and applied it in 1879 to a type of cloth he'd invented and patented. This fabric was made of wool waterproofed with lanolin (which is the natural water-proofing of a sheep). His resultant advertising campaign was so successful that someone wearing gabardine (Roald Amundsen) was the first person to reach the South Pole.

The British explorers Ernest Shackleton and George Mallory wore gabardine, too, though poor Mallory wasn't such a good advertisement: his gabardine-clad corpse is yet to be discovered on the slopes of Mount Everest.

Where will you find gabardine nowadays? Well, any cloth raincoat can be called a gabardine, even one made of a synthetic fibre such as rayon; and the pockets of well-made suits are sometimes made of cotton gabardine, too.

To be honest, though, the real reason for this post is the word's cool origin.

Spot the Frippet: gabardine. This Old French gauvardine described a pilgrim's long coat. The word has also been associated with a coat worn by men, especially Jewish men, in the Middle Ages, and, later, with the protective smock worn by shepherds and agricultural labourers. 

The origin of the word is the German wallewart, which means pilgrimage.