The first signature piece of outerwear I remember having was a jacket covered in patches. All sorts of patches – shuttle mission patches, military squadron patches, a UPS logo, the patch of my dad’s hunting club, you name it. That stuck around for most of elementary school, to the point that the whole load of patches got transferred to a new jacket when the old one got to be too small.
After that – inevitably – came the Members Only jackets – first a copper-colored JC Penney knockoff, then an actual dark-teal one, then another in a sort of slate blue, right up through the end of high school. If you want the iconic look for me in the “great years” phase from 1988-90, it’s that last Members Only jacket with the sleeves jammed up over a short-sleeve highly-purple madras button-up, with jeans and white Reebok Phase 1s topped off with a gray fedora – as often as not with several cards jammed in the band depending on how the team was doing. (By May of 1989, there were four aces.) There are pictures. But none that are going online, I can assure you.
There was also the first leather jacket – a gray number with a ridiculously huge square collar, my only significant Christmas present from the 1986 worst-Christmas-ever debacle. It stuck around through the end of college, believe it or not. Actually I suppose college is when the real madness took over – one attempt after another at finding the one perfect standout piece of outerwear. There was the plain black jacket that I can only assume was meant to be somewhat nautical, there was a huge lightweight but sweltering-warm Helly Hansen number bought for the trip to Central Europe in January 1992, there was the throwback Redskins jacket that hangs in my closet to this day, there was a Braves windbreaker that was a birthday present, there was the black-and-white varsity letterman jacket bought my senior year with the express purpose of making it some sort of heirloom for my progeny (see how that worked)…just a lot of nonsense all around.
And then Vanderbilt – where I did buy the huge bulky Starter pullover jacket, and the famously monstrous mid-length hooded leather coat known as “the Elk”. But the main go-to were the sport coats, of which I can remember five without even thinking hard. I suppose it’s what I expected grad students to dress like, and I did the best I could with them, but ultimately they didn’t really fit what I needed.
The standout item of my DC years was the birthday gift from my last ex-girlfriend on my last birthday with her: a USWings-brand Indiana Jones jacket. I wore other things – still used the Elk in snowy weather, bought a big black oilcloth duster for the rainy season, took over the oversized Vanderbilt ski jacket I had given my dad – but that Indy jacket is the thing people think of when they remember my appearance in DC. And given where I was working, I suppose it was an appropriate item.
That jacket’s in the closet now, along with the suede jean-jacket I bought in a fit of madness at Christmastime 2004, because leather jackets are too much bulk for the purpose when the temperature never drops below 40 degrees and winter always comes with rain. Honestly, the simple black shell does for most everything, and if not, there’s the peacoat. Or the multi-layered Eddie Bauer rig that carried me through two trips to Britain.
But now I’m on my third sport coat – in addition to the mandatory blue blazer, I have the Saboteur Invincible that I bought a while back with some of my gunrunning proceeds. Gray, red silk lining, functional buttons, waterproof, invisibly taped seams…yeah, high tech fashion. But now I have splashed out and bought the much-debated seersucker jacket, after about a decade of beating around it.
Ultimately, I haven’t really found a definitive jacket out here, unless you count that shell – and not least because it’s rare that you need heavier than that. It’s lightweight, it ties around the waist or stuffs in your backpack without a fight – I even took it to Europe last summer where it proved to be all I needed the whole two weeks. Everyone out here has the shell. Maybe that’s why I resist it – I’m looking for something more…well, me.
And it hasn’t worked. I have the Vanderbilt softshell, which is nice but not actually rainproof and is impossible to stuff in a bag. I have a light canvas sort of jacket which is nice and roomy, but is just the wrong shade of off-white and suggests a light poplin coat on a senior citizen in a peaked white gimme cap sitting at Jack’s waiting on a sausage biscuit of a morning. And I have, on diverse occasions, actively contemplated trying to manufacture the modern version of the patch jacket, being as I have patches from DC Job and Government Contract Job and could probably find a jacket that already has the Apple logo on it somewhere. Hell, I tried on a tall-size MA-1 bomber jacket to see if it would do, but it doesn’t. No handwarmer pockets and the elasticated-waist look just doesn’t suit me anymore.
In the end, I think the search for the perfect jacket is, like the quest for the ideal all-purpose footwear or the perfect pen or THE watch, a surrogate for the search for an identity. The costume, the armor, the signifier that probably imprinted on my brain in the age of the Fonz and stuck around ever since. I don’t know why I keep casting about for it, but there you go – I’m sure something that would work is out there, assuming it’s not in my closet already…