I also still have a Karrimor Jaguar from circa 1987 in my loft, the one without the side pockets but with rails to attach the extra ones if you wanted to an 80L backbreaker… had to get this one as really wanted the Alpiniste but my mate had one in the purple and just had to be different. Anyway, it would still be perfectly usable today – and one of the reasons for that if my early stage product obsessive geekery serves me right is that it was made with Cordura fabric. This fabric was so good, so tough and felt pleasing to hand, even today I would regard these types of fabric as a gold standard. And yet the reason modern equivalents disappoint is the unnecessary light-weighting of any outdoor products for marketing goals, to the point that you rarely see fabrics like Cordura being used- and instead get a ‘high performance’ pack that gets a hole in the base on your second trip out just because you took it off near a rock.
