The Comfort of Jackets
October 1, 2026
Why my interest in jackets? I cannot say, though others are taken by them too, a great tribe of jacket lovers. Of course, people are taken by all sorts of things—jeans, scarves, shoes, hats, suits, winter coats—but I have little interest in those things, except for their utility, and I own only a few.
But jackets are cool. A jacket can be more relaxed than a coat because it has less physically on the line, has only to be pleasantly warm in the pleasantly cool air. Any mountain one might attempt in a jacket is likely to be emotional, not physical, unless it is a ski jacket, and even that relies on you keeping yourself warm.
Jackets are casual, do not go out of style easily, and are protective without smothering. I love that women have worn moto jackets with tough-guy zips for decades as emotional and social armor. Jackets can also be shared or inherited, while there is something uncanny about wearing a hat or shoes broken in by another person.
More than most clothing, jackets last for years, so their most important quality, the accretion of stories, has a chance to build modestly, privately. My first army-issued field jacket held many stories including, as I wrote recently, “the parable of the jacket.” My favorite t-shirts by contrast have no more depth than their origin stories or descriptions: Here is the t-shirt I got at the international film festival, that time I volunteered at the festival; here is the Aquaman t-shirt I have worn so long the neck seams are filigree.
I prize my jackets: a brown leather one—with its quilted lining, perilously close to an actual coat—given to me by my father, which has aged and worn much as I have since that time: some wrinkles, a relaxed middle, shoulders worn down from carrying things. Or my second army-issued field jacket, in camo print this time, from the Reagan-Bush era, which did not get used much because I got stationed in the tropics. My Chinese-made, olive-drab, reproduction field jacket that my sons bought me to replace the original. The corduroy-collared, denim barn jacket that my in-laws bought to help me become a writer like, oh, Sam Shepard. A state-issued work jacket, patches on the arms that say Department of Conservation, which once got me out of a bad spot with some youth toughs, because they thought I was a cop. (That’s what I told them). A long wool peacoat, finely tailored to my form in the glory days. A linen sports jacket that makes me look both sharp and subtropically disreputable. A surplus Royal Mail jacket in red fleece that still smells a little of the route.
It is probably no coincidence that an online etymological dictionary shows a spike in the frequency of the use of the word jacket since the start of this millennium. We need small comforts as we can find them.
