#100wears is the most beloved garment section where I show off the longevity of items I’ve worn at least 100 times and urge to elevate the rather low #30wears aspiration. Basically, a love song, a poem, a “there are some garments so good I can’t stop wearing them”… You know how sometimes you wear something intensely, then kind of forget about that garment just to go back to it some time later? This is one of those stories, my 10+ year affair with this Street One ‘military’ jacket.
This is a story of a double resurrection of the same garment… The first photographic evidence I can find is from May 2005. Makes sense. It was bought new (thanks, mom!) but not in a shop. Although Latvia was in the EU already and second-hand shops weren’t call ‘humanitarian aid’ anymore, there were still people doing funny business from their garages. I really don’t know how they did it – was it deadstock, was it just reselling? (if you know, let me know in the comments – but there were ladies who had houses full of mid-range brands that didn’t have shops in Latvia and were just selling them. For very reasonable prices. No receipts. No VAT was paid. Access only by recommendation. Street One and Noa Noa were one of those that used to appear in these garages.
So on May 1, 2005 I took my first picture with it. You cannot sea it very clearly but those two little ‘ventilation’ rivets are a key design element of this jacket. Olive green 80% cotton and 20% poly mix, hip length (what we then thought to be waist, oh, 2000s!), with two capacious breast pockets, quality finishes. No information about the country of production. Functionally for me then, a summer jacket that can be stretched into spring/autumn by wearing a hoodie underneath it.
And I took it for a major adventure right away. We went hitchhiking to Paris with Marina, and I’m wearing this jacket throughout the trip: along the German and French highways, in Paris and in Berlin.
A year later – May 2006 – I was clearly wearing it for school, just lounging outside and having yogurt for breakfast. I still occasionally think about that golden skirt, though. It would have been so easy to fix it and wear for so much longer than I did… But, as I believe George W. said during the 2000 campaign but can’t find a source, ‘when I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid’.
And in spring 2007 this jacket was still one of my go-tos:
Then it appears in my packing pile preparing to move to Brussels in July 2008… I sucked at packing back then, and no photos of my 6-month stint in Brussels show me wearing it. It could be that I never did.
If you know a garment intimately, you can recognize it by a trimming… which suggests that this jacket was with me in the Lithuanian seaside on July 2011. There are no photos between 2008 and 2011, a clear indication that I wasn’t wearing it.
And then again *no wears*, apparently, until June 2017… when, inspired to finally prune my Rīga capsule, decided to wear it in order to decide, giving it a trial period (a whole meditation on trial periods for wardrobe acquisitions, here). Those first outfits:
But I wasn’t 100% happy with it… felt too long, too gray, too meh!
I wore it some 70 times before intervening it – that’s described here – and now there have been quite some more since then… and nobody knows how many wears before I started counting. All that 2005-2007 have to count for something!
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Do you have garments that you’ve had for more than a decade, half of your life maybe? If so, is it more about the function or the sentimental attachment now? Have they changed / have you changed updated them to serve your current needs? Have you had such hiatuses of love-abandon-love again with some of your garments?