The Only Jacket that Matters

There’s only one jacket that really matters. It’s not James Bond’s Anthony Sinclair DJ. It’s not James Dean’s Baracuta. Not De Niro’s N-1 Deck jacket in Taxi Driver. It’s not Robert Redford’s corduroy in All the President’s Men or McQueen’s in Bullit. All were beautiful. All gorgeous but none with the flat-out Magnum calibre semiotic load of the M41.

You know the jacket, even if you don’t. It’s the standard profile of the Wartime American GI. Cut high in ‘blouson’ style so it sat comfortably on top of a loaded webbing belt. It pouches out making the top part of the body look bigger and, as long as you don’t have an arse the size of a Volkswagen, the lower half trimmer. There has rarely been a shape better designed to effortlessly flatter.

This was a new silhouette. If you think about it, until this point, apart from maybe a few outrageous Regency fops, there had been few occasions when the coat didn’t cover the buttocks. Sure they’d been enhanced by scandalously close-cut frock coats, But the requirement to get everything up and above the gunbelt was very specific.

On the tube today, I noticed how many young men of, how to put it, ‘aggressively masculine demeanour’ were wearing Northface ‘Puffa’ jackets. It wasn’t a cold day but a built-up, literally padded, top is still an extremely functional symbol

The jacket was nicknamed the Eisenhower because the general wore one, rejecting the beribboned dress jacket for the everyday model of his own infantrymen. But even Ike didn’t wear it best. No. That particular medal goes to George Clooney in The Monuments Men. Well he looks good in anything. But an M41? Something totally else.

It’s just old enough in the history of menswear design that somebody still thought a combat jacket should have lapels. Weird, isn’t it? I mean, what the hell are they there for? But the opening V neckline gives space for every kind of shirt-collar/sweater/scarf combination you could want and, weirdly for a coat with zero structure to the shoulders, widens them immensely. Couple that with deep gussets behind the arms making it easier to swing a carbine… it’s beyond perfect.

I’m now on my 3rd.

The first was an original, when you could still pick them up in thrift shops for a tenner and it looked like someone has slept in it through three hard tours before personally liberating Berlin. It had a replacement zip, the original AA ‘airborne’ shoulder flashes and was, if I’m brutally honest, a bit too small for me. It did, however, look sensational on the textiles student from Nottingham to whom I lent it to keep warm on Bournemouth beach one late summer night and who subsequently failed to show for the second date.

If you’re reading this, it was a beauty. Give it to your grandson.

My second was an indulgence borne of vanity and an agency salary. A stitch-perfect replica, made in Japan by Buzz Rickson. Menswear Otaku have such respect for authenticity that they recreate original fabrics on old looms, source and restore original zips and buttons from older jackets that have otherwise ratted away. It was a beauty. Perfect size and had the weird effect of getting better every single time I put it on.

I treated it hard, which it seemed to like, in fact to build its patina, I used to wear it when working on my ancient car. Then one day I carelessly drained the sump onto my chest. Instead of dry cleaning my investment as recommended, I stuck it in a pile of dirty clothes and, yes... it went through a hot wash.

It was like discovering the structure of DNA only far more important to humanity. The shell of the jacket is sanforized cotton poplin. Tight-woven and preshrunk in a completely fruitless effort to be waterproof (It can’t take Soho drizzle, Christ knows how it survived amphibious landing on Juno Beach), but the lining is a kind of rough ‘Melton’ woollen cloth that shrinks like a salted slug.

In a hot wash the inside shrinks, the outside doesn’t. Even the pockets gape massively increasing the ‘blousing’ effect.

I could never lose the smell of 10W-40, but I had achieved perfection in a coat.

About a fortnight later, some light-fingered scumbucket slashed the canvas roof outside a Smithfield boozer and lifted my coat and camera. If you’re reading this, I hope you got stabbed and died, frightened and alone.

My third and latest M41 is a Work-in-Progress.

It turns out that things have changed over the last couple of decades. The huge growth of recreational re-enactment and a seemingly endless number of WW2 based films and TV series means there’s a gratifying number of replicas of all qualities out there. Pace the extraordinary efforts of Buzz Rickson, the original jackets were manufactured in bulk, by workwear manufacturers, not fashion houses. On a good day, an M41 was built like a modern, off-brand Carhartt. On bad days when they needed more jackets or materials were scarce, corners were cut. In truth, the original M41 was rapidly mass produced, of cheap materials and was rarely, if ever ‘stitch perfect’.

So this time I bought a replica from a company in the US that supplies re-enactors and movie companies. It was made in Pakistan, out of sanforised poplin and a Melton wool. The buttons are more plastic than Bakelite and more OD than brown, but it was delivered in 7 days, shipped from the UAE for £60.

It arrived, stiff-as-a-board, box-fresh and wrapped in paper... remarkably like it would have from the Quartermaster the first day of basic training.

Like a thousand costume assistants on a hundred Netflix war series, I took the thing straight out of the bag and threw it into the washing machine along with an old pair of Converse that I keep solely for the purpose. Two consecutive boil washes with extra-long, extra-hard spin cycles. Then block out flat to dry.

It’s going to need more work. I’m not going to bury it for a week, though I know some people favour that approach. I might drive the car over it a few times on a concrete surface. That subtly breaks up the weave in an irregular way. I won’t need the belt sander.

Needs a few stains... and I’m a long way from full Clooney... but I’ll get there.

I know. This was more information than you needed. But, hey. It’s nice to know you can now get the world’s best jacket for so little cash. You just have to spend a lot of years getting there.

(As I’ve probably bored you with elsewhere, Woody Allen wore an M41 for a single scene in Annie Hall. It’s where he meets Annie’s ex, the ‘homunculus’ Jeremiah, played by Wallace Shawn. For the rest of the film it was an M38 all the way - closer to the more recognisable belted ‘combat jacket’ silhouette. The key point here is that the costume designer for the film was a young Ralph Lauren. A man who knew his Coat Semiotics at a profound level)