Decathlon FR 900 Leather Gloves
Price
£34.99
Gender
Unisex
Brand // Manufacturers
Decathlon
What we liked …
Warm, dry and pretty durable for the price!
What we didn’t …
Gap between inners at the finger-ends and the external shell - can make it hard to do fiddly manipulation.
The Verdict
Our Rating
4 out of 5 (when factoring in price strongly)
the Short Read…
Amazing value-for-money for actual leather gloves.
The Long read …
For the price (be warned, I might go on about the price) these things are incredible value. I’m on my second pair now, the first pair having lasted two full seasons without issue and which are still in my kit bag as a back-up pair, replaced with a new pair of the same. These gloves are not perfect, though and I’ll try to lay the good, bad and ugly below:
Ruggedness - Some time in their third season, the finger stitching started to undo. Not catastrophically but enough to need a bit of leather glue and sewing work (check out my handiwork, here). The actual leather surfaces are fine, no sign of holes or even much wear. The leather is nice and supple (maybe because I waxed them regularly).
Fit - For sure not as good as the £100+ gloves like the BD Guide, but ok. My main gripe is that the finger outer (leather) length is a tad longer than the finger inner-length, meaning you have a bit of extra material at the tip. This can get in the way of some more fiddly tasks involving thumb and forefinger, reducing your ability to do some fine-adjustment jobs. For my second pair, I downsized from L to M to help overcome this (I’m banking on the inner stretching a bit over time to take up the spare volume) though at the cost of a very slightly shorter gauntlet (see that point below). Otherwise, it’s a good fit, at least for a bloke...
Waterproofing - There’s a water-proof membrane inner, and the leather has been coated with some kind of water repellent that needs topping up after a few months (according to the instructions). I’ve done that instead by rubbing bees’-wax in every few weeks. By the way, the wax turned them a nicely deeper shade of brown, from the more ‘camel’ or ‘mustard’ or whatever the box-fresh colour actually is. No real issues with the waterproofing inner so far - any water on the inside usually comes from sweaty hands, or bits of snowing getting inside during transition!
Warmth - As you’d expect with the price, these won’t take you to extremes, but they are admirably warm for mid-range days - the leather stops the wind, there’s microfleece on the inside, a wrist strap to trap more heat and a gauntlet draw-cord to keep moisture/drafts out. If it’s particularly parky out there, I’ll wear some thin silk inners under them, but f you are somewhere properly arctic, you’ll probably need a more industrial pair of gloves. I did get super cold in them once, on an avi course in Tignes, in biting cold and snow, standing for ages around watching a bloke point at snow layers in a pit, so at the extremes, maybe the lesson is: don’t hang around too much!
There is no removable inner on this glove. Which limits how cool you can stay in them (and your options for washing them). To cool down, you can loosen the wrist strap and the gauntlet drawcord but at a certain point you may need to just put some thinner gloves on, if in walk mode, say.
Gauntlet - A nice feature this, without the bulk or weight of the full-leather approach something like the BD Guide takes. It’s basically just polyester cuff with a drawcord, but it works. I like to have my gloves over my sky jacket sleeves, not the other way around. With these, I can cinch the jacket’s cuff velcro nice and tight, insert my hand in the glove and the gauntlet will come up over the jacket sleeve and the drawcord then tightens over the sleeve material to keep snow out. This still works even when I’m wearing my bulky Suunto watch (primarily for logging a GPX track only), as the gauntlet is long enough to cover the watch as well. The elasticated drawcord is just long enough, when really cinched up, to be able to stretch right back over your hand and so be secured around your wrist, out of the way and won’t then get caught on anything.
Wrist strap - A nice feature for snowboarders, I think - a wide and stiff-ish strap that when cinched up acts as a kind of semi-wrist-guard, adding some resistance to the bending of your wrist backwards, but not restricting you fully like a proper wrist guard does. Also useful for trapping more heat in the main part of the glove.
Security - They come with those little plastic clip/hook thingy on the sides for clipping them together, but I seldom use that. Some would find it very useful, I’m sure. I do use the elasticated wrist loops that allow you to take the main glove off but still be connected to your wrist so you don’t lose your glove! Super useful.
All in all, an amazing pair of gloves for the price - I recommend them as a solid, inexpensive pair of pretty rugged, warm, dry gloves, with lots of thoughtful features, for those non-extreme days at either end of the temperature scale.