Landsknecht Jacket Review - Julian Schuetze

Hey all, Julian Schuetze here on behalf of the collective. I'm here to review the super poofy Landsknecht jacket by SupFen, a design that, as far as I can tell, is an original design of theirs. 

​Before I talk about the jacket itself, I'll give my experience with Sup-fen regarding the ordering process. The jacket has little flaps on the bottom to help protect the hip and top of the legs - and unfortunately when they first made the jacket what happened is they took my torso length, and applied it as the total length. So the jacket was comically short. I let them know of the issue, and in the span of a couple weeks I had a new jacket sent to me that fixed the issue. 

Customization was nice and easy, I told them what colour I wanted for the fabric & stitching, and I was given a little graphic to confirm what I wanted. So that was convenient and I appreciated that there was a step to make sure that both the manufacturer and I were on the same page. 

The jacket itself is good, I find myself with not much particularly to say outside of a small series of recommendations, a few observations and one main piece of criticism. It's a fencing jacket, and it does its job well.

The colour matching with their pluderhosen does feel pretty spiffy though, not gunna lie.

If you're planning on ordering this jacket, here are my recommendations if you do order this jacket:

Ask to see if you can get it in 350n. It's 800n, so the jacket itself is pretty heavy. This is a well padded jacket, so I personally do not particularly see the benefit of making the fabric itself heavier for the increased rating. I'd personally recommend asking if you could get it in 350n because then it overall would be much lighter. Unless of course you very specifically need the 800n rating. Although since I've received mine, it seems like a new revision has a mesh section for the back, which means that overall I'm sure the weight is reduced. So this may help a lot - but I'd still prefer to have something lighter than heavier if the level of impact protection is the same.
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The "poofy" sleeves for mine were pretty large, which kinda gave a "bowling ball" appearance to them if I raised my arms at all as they flared out a ton. I'm not a fan of this look personally, I talked to Supfen about it and they said that they can make it "sleeker" and less poofy. So consider how much poof you want your arms to have and specify. (Not a sentence I thought I'd say)

Way too poofy for me, those sleeves get huge.

I found in the first jacket that they sent me that the collar was pretty tight, which made it so if I had a larger gorget (I have the Vytis light) then I couldn't quite close the jacket around it. Make sure to ask them for a bit more room to fit the gorget under there. Especially if you have a big neck like I do.

My biggest criticism of the jacket is that the seam inside the forearm sleeve is extremely large, and where it connects to the elbow is physically hard, and protrudes quite a bit so it pushes into the joint if I'm wearing elbow protection. It's extremely uncomfortable, and if anything is dangerous because if I were to get hit hard, then the force would transfer from the elbow protection, directly into the hard piece of fabric stitching, which would go directly into the joint. I brought this up to them and they said they could improve that aspect - but as it stands with the jacket I have now, this is something I had to trim and clean up myself. ​

​​I'm sure you could imagine how that hard bit of sewn fabric doesn't feel good being pushed directly into your elbow. It basically felt like a small rock.

As you can see, there is a significant amount of leftover material passed the seam. I could trim off a huge amount without affecting anything. All that excess pushes into your arm which was mega uncomfortable. After trimming, the seam in the elbow was still pretty stiff so I hammered it with a hammer for a few minutes to break in the fabric, which softened it significantly. It's now comfortable and I have no issues. It's just annoying that I had to do this.

Outside of those points, this is a case where I don't have much to say - which overall is a pretty good thing. The mobility is good, the protection is good - which is something I was worried about. The poofy parts on the arms are added on top of a regular arm segment, so it's just as padded as everything else and not a weak point. I like that there's a little tab that goes over the top of your delts. It suits the look of the jacket and will help mitigate injury to a pretty delicate area. I also like how much the skirt section helps protect the hip joint and the legs. Overall it's a good jacket and if you like the look then yeah I would recommend it.

The last point on my mind for the purposes of a review is the consistency of SupFen's custom sizing. It's pretty notoriously a mixed bag. What I generally recommend is see if you can stick to standard sizing, and if there's a retailer near you that works with them more regularly, to order through them as opposed to direct. Generally speaking the experience is smoother that way if something does go wrong as retailers have an already long-term working relationship and can mediate for you efficiently.

Update:3/12/2023:
People have asked how likely it is for the poofy sleeves to catch a thrust, out of concern of them being "extra" and tournaments perhaps calling it. I can't say I've had this happen to me while wearing the jacket, but it's definitely a possibility. The sleeves do flare out, so if you just barely, narrowly miss a thrust then the tip could feasibly catch onto the sleeve a bit. I'm not sure how often you get missed by a thrust that closely to your arms however, so if you find that's something that happens to you a lot then I suppose that would be something to consider here. 

As of the time of this review I currently don't wear mine very often as I still favour my Spes Light 800n. I find this jacket is very heavy - a jacket with this much padding IMO does not need to be 800n. I'm also not a very big fan of how poofy the sleeves are (I like the style of the split fabric, but not when it flares out as much as mine). That being said, if my SPES Light were to break down, then I would have no problem swapping to this one instead. If I know however that I'm going to do some hard training and I know that I'll probably get hit more than usual, I will wear this one as the extra padding is welcome.

That's it for my review of this jacket - I hope you found it helpful and we'll catch you next time.

Video TLDR here: https://youtu.be/wP-WmEViC5E​