There are very few things—and very few people, in fact—that can pass gracefully between formality and informality. Like music, life has its registers, and as we compose our days it can be easy to settle comfortably into one of them. This troublesome tendency can undermine even very professional people: there’s nothing more degrading than going to a work party where the lead partner of the firm or the CFO of the company gets up, taps his wine glass, and then proceeds to ramble on in a pointless speech that accomplishes nothing but to bore us to tears and prove he has never really read a good book.
This problem of mismatched decorum can work in the opposite direction, too. We all have that friend who overdresses on principle. Among the vices you can develop in life, this is one of the most forgivable. But it’s still a vice. You don’t want to wear shorts to a wedding; you also don’t want to wear a tie to the beach. Unless it’s a beach wedding in which case you’re cooked, metaphorically and literally, no matter what you wear. Impossible situations like that are echoes of life’s biggest dilemmas, in which we look back on the past and wish we’d better equipped ourselves for the incomprehensible and the unforeseen—the sudden rain shower or the four o’clock dinner party.
Into this cosmic breach steps one of my favorite articles of clothing: the Barbour jacket. Originally developed for motorcyclists, this oiled jacket with a corduroy collar and heavy metal hardware has become synonymous with a sort of fantasy of the English country gentleman. Yet for all the cultural baggage it evokes, it somehow transcends them, too. It looks great on men or women. It’s replete with pockets that are big enough for a hefty coil of keys or a paperback book. It’s nearly waterproof. Best of all, the Barbour jacket has the almost miraculous quality of coming off equally well in formal or informal settings. I have worn mine to both fancy parties and impromptu bonfires without ever drawing a skeptical eye in my direction. I wear it to restaurants; I also go hiking in it. It is that rarest of things: an object for all contexts, a fixed point amongst the vicissitudes of rain, wind, and wedding invitations that don’t specify a dress code.
There are many models of Barbour but, generally speaking, you will be going one of two directions: the green Ashby or the black Bedale. Since I wear a lot of sports coats to work, I have long been an Ashby man: its longer cut keeps my tails out of the rain. But I hope to get a Bedale someday soon, if only so that I can look a little more like Peter O’Toole riding his motorcycle in Lawrence of Arabia (I know he doesn’t actually wear a Barbour jacket in that scene but the atmosphere is right for it and he always has in my imagination).
After a few years of hard wearing and intentional neglect, my Barbour jacket has developed a warm patina of splotches and fading. I should get it rewaxed soon, but I’m going to hold out as long as possible. It doesn’t matter that it no longer really keeps out the rain; the stains are memories, like the oxidization on a brass sculpture or fingerprints on the pages of an old book. I bought that jacket when I couldn’t really afford it, and I have always relished the splurge.
The world tends to divide itself into the town and the country, parsing values and sensibilities as neatly as it can into each. But we all know that things don’t entirely work that way, that not everyone who reads the New Yorker is a college professor, and that not everyone who drives a big truck is a Christian nationalist. My Barbour jacket is a reminder to me that those hard divisions often betray reality; that we are all living, whether we know it or not, both within and without.
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