It was a Christmas gift a couple of years ago. A Harris tweed sport coat. Two button, double vent, no elbow patches, in a neutral sort of tweed between tan and brown with colorful streaks through it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It feels like something out of another life, or maybe another time. Like something I would have worn as an asssistant professor in the late 90s, or something my dad had when I was younger. The lapels especially have a thick and rough feel to them that almost suggests upholstery somehow. There\u2019s the thought that if you wore this out in a heavy rain, you would stay dry but it would smell like a wet sheep.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It feels almost too nice for daily wear. It was an artifact of a time when I was trying to buy things that would last the rest of my life, and in its way it\u2019s a perfect match for the Alden Indy boots I got for my birthday some years earlier. In both cases, a function piece of working apparel, recontextualized by time and economics in a world where workwear is churned out quick and cheap in some distant country\u2019s factory for pennies a day. Where craft and care and durability have been sidelined by the imperative to stack it high and sell it cheap.<\/p>\n
Like so many things in my life, it\u2019s an aspirational<\/em> artifact. I want to live in a place and in a way that this is a climate-appropriate and practical garment. The same way I want my iPhone SE to be enough as a general computing device capable of going around the world, or the way I want my mechanical watch to be all the timepiece I need without calendar reminders or two-factor authentication. The same way the Moto X was an artifact from a world I wished I lived in. \u00a0Time was, I wanted to need<\/em> the things I wanted. Now I just want the things that will let me pretend I\u2019m living the life I want. And there really aren\u2019t that many left. Here a work shirt, there a Nerf pistol, and I\u2019ll find an excuse for something if I fly over an ocean be it a sweater or a pair of flip-flops, but always in the service of the same thing. A world where I can eschew contacts or socks, or where I need a global timekeeping standard and an international chat app, or whether the fabric of 19th century gamekeepers is the perfect outerwear solution for my place and time.<\/p>\n Maybe if I have all the stuff I need, it\u2019s time to do the things I want with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was a Christmas gift a couple of years ago. A Harris tweed sport coat. Two button, double vent, no elbow patches, in a neutral sort of tweed between tan and brown with colorful streaks through it.\u00a0 It feels like something out of another life, or maybe another time. Like something I would have worn … <\/p>\n