J1B-GT, one year
We now return to the jacket. I promised this after one year. It has been one year and one week.
The jacket is not a year old. It is two days old. It is two days old in jacket life. All zippers hold up. All seams hold up. The stitching is both micro-fine and untouched.
People comment on it less than you would think. They don’t comment on the weird straps on the back, or the orange hood, or the fact that it has so many angular seams on the sleeves. Fine by me; I love to pass undetected.
Mid-apocalypse, the jacket hits different than it must have when it was first released. The same energy that predicted EDC preppers or, god help us, the Cybertruck could also cleanly anticipate Acronym. This despite the creator’s insistence that the jacket is for envisioning a better future, not reacting to a worse one.
And so therefore the durability. I wasn’t expecting to be able to flog this thing on the daily and have it look better over time. In hindsight, of course this would be the case: that is, after all, the case with the best garments out there.
There are weird things about it, which grow more noticeable over time, as things do:
There are two pockets at the front of each sleeve that are supposed to let you store your phone. In practice, though, the pocket lining has a hole in it that lets your phone drop out, making them effectively useless.
The hood is held by only four buttons, not a zipper. Good for easy removal, less good for making sure the hood stays on when you want it to.
The upper zipper, presumably for waterproofing your neck, is too tight on the top third.
Nobody will ever, ever use the collar magnet for holding their AirPods.
I have never cinched the hood.
But then you wonder: at this price point, are we demanding perfection? There is no such thing. The jacket has been through many iterations, but the makers are weirdly proud of the experiments that don’t seem to work in practice, like the AirPod magnets.
The weirdest thing about rocking a hyper-ruggedized object on the regular: it softens. It adapts to you. Presumably the core purpose of the thing fades as a signifier – but you still know, don’t you?