#24 Jacket Lore
I check the weather app every morning from the first day of fall to the last day of winter. I don't get out of the house if it's over 65 degrees, as it is on most mornings in Austin. If it's less than 65 degrees, I make sure to go out for coffee in a jacket. 55-65 is for the Levis denim trucker jacket with a brown collar and rectangular frame, which makes it just different enough from standard denim jackets. I know this cause I walked into a honky tonk wearing it and the guy at the door said, "that's a cool denim jacket. You don't see a lot of good denim jackets these days." I smiled, thanked him for the compliment, and walked into the bar to a sea of men wearing denim jackets.
Anything below 55 means it's going to be an exciting day. I could layer a blue cashmere sweater with a light brown field jacket. The other option would be to wear a 1970s hunter jacket by a defunct texas workwear brand, which I got from eBay. The best $50 I've spent.
Sometimes I relegate a jacket to the deep end of the closet for a long time. Such as this black plaid Filson jacket I haven't worn for most of this fall. I felt my relationship with it change over time. It went from familiarity breeds contempt to distance makes the heart go fonder. I started wearing it again because I noticed new things, such as how the black plaid matches the texture of my long curly hair. It is quite possible that the best relationship advice quotes I have came from my relationship with jackets.
The irony and the narcissism of a relationship with a material object is not lost on me. In fact, it makes it more amusing. In the documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Wim Wenders describes wearing a Yohji Yamamoto jacket as recreating the feeling of father. "Everything about this jacket makes me think about the idea of father" he says in his strong German accent. I laugh at how artists need to make narratives about everything around them to survive and then go about doing the same thing.
My favorite jacket is a boxy work jacket made by Xenia Teleunts. It's made in Britain with organic cotton from Kerala, where I was raised. My first instinct was to examine the weirdness of wearing a jacket made in a formal imperial power from the very material that the imperial power exploited my homeland for. This disappeared when I wore it for the first time. The jacket's texture reminded me of clothes my mom used to wear when I was young. They were likely made from the same material. The jacket has a firmness to it that felt the same way my mother's churidar would feel after she had starched it.
My mom was always good at matching colors and patterns in her clothing. She picked out clothes for me until I was 10 and still kept making occasional executive decisions on what I should wear until I was 16. I felt uncomfortable in most articles she picked out for me. They were too bright and odd and made me stand out in a group. However, my relationship with the clothes would change after I'd worn them a few times. It was like wearing them made my identity grow into the person who would wear those clothes - like how simulating an emotion makes you feel some of it. This is why I do not resonate with any style advice that falls along the lines of "Be who you are." The point of style is to reach for an identity that feels slightly uncomfortable to inhabit.
I've never asked where and how my mom developed her taste in fashion, and likely never will. However, the other day a friend sent a pic to the group chat with him wearing colors that he would usually shy away from with the caption, "channeling my inner Sachin today." So I know some of my mother's influence will flow through me as an unspoken pattern knowledge.