The Davis Jacket is a lightweight windbreaker made by mountain bikers, for anyone who needs an emergency layer—according to gear testers at Outside Magazine.
In a review of his favorite summertime jackets, Outside gear tester Jakob Schiller calls the Davis Jacket a "standout summer jacket that gets the job done—rain, shine, or suffocating heat." Here's what else he had to say:
Made from a DWR-coated, stretchy ripstop nylon, the Davis summer jacket balls up to the size of an apple so it takes up almost no room in my running pack and adds almost zero weight at just over six ounces. In the summit wind, it created immediate warmth and endured getting scraped over rocks without showing any signs of wear. Just as importantly, since the Flylow Davis doesn’t block all the breeze, I was also able to keep it on as I started my descent and didn’t overheat as I worked my way back into warmer temps.
Flylow co-founder Dan Abrams told me that the company spent an obsessive amount of time picking the fabric for the Davis because they wanted to find the perfect mix of wind resistance and breathability. An avid mountain biker himself, he designed the jacket so he could wear it to keep warm while ripping down singletrack, cruising on the flats, or pushing during the next climb.
“Just like it’s easy to make a ski jacket waterproof but harder to make it breathable, it’s easy to make a wind jacket windproof but much harder to create the right balance of breathability,” Abrams said.
Flylow considers breathability so important that they list the jacket’s air permeability rating on their website. CFM stands for “cubic feet per minute,” and it relates to how much air can pass through fabric—one component of breathability. For context, a trashbag’s CFM is zero, a cotton t-shirt has a CFM of around 60, and the most permeable tech running shirt we’ve tested came in at 464 CFM. The Davis’s CFM, listed at 22.8 (verified by the Outside Lab), clearly blocks wind better than a shirt, but is far enough away from a trashbag that you really notice the airflow when it’s needed.