The Jacket That Represents How Everyone’s Feeling Right Now
A coat that would come to define every feeling I have about being a Millennial in 2020
I first spotted it during a night out in Paris, on the back of a fast-walking German Fashion Student, that I was struggling to keep up with.
She pauses, pulls out her flip phone, snaps a photo —
I make a comment of some sort and she replies back by telling me she doesn’t do smartphones. “Doesn’t do smartphones” — whaaaa — new level unlocked.
Between the long matrix-like jacket, slicked-back hair, and flip phone I feel like I’ve just stepped straight into the Berlin underground and into the next generation.
By now I’m completely fangirling over this rebel with a cause. I decided to follow wherever she and her uber cool friends were going. I needed to know everything.
Shortly after that night, I ended my 3-month backpacking trip. And I left Paris on a cold November day.
Back in New York City, I began hunting for the perfect jacket of my own. But magically It found me while I was shopping with my grandmother inside a consignment shop in rural Indiana.
I bought it for only $15. I expected It would fall out of trend; however, I was determined to make it a permanent fixture in my wardrobe.
Little did I know —
The longline leather jacket is here to stay. I might go even further to say it will come to define a style-tribe. A group made up of young Millennials and Gen Z who are rejecting the fast-paced nature of an increasingly wasteful society, that abuses authority, and personal freedoms.
They will be the ones to demand Sustainable Fashion, transparency, reject big media, and authoritarian control. In this way, they will create better interactions between themselves and the world.
A Trend To Define 2020
Maybe giving up your smartphone isn’t on your to-do-list, but you have to admit it is fan-girl worthy.It’s what Fashion Trade Journal, Sourcing Journal, is calling the Transform Trend-
“The Transform trend embraces modernist styling that projects a “light at the end of the tunnel” during a time of global crisis.”
In short, the German woman in Paris (holding her flip phone and dressed head-to-toe in thrifted apparel) exudes the feeling of the times or…
— the zeitgeist.
Sourcing Journal cites the Transform Trend as being fed by a “survivalist outlook,” but I would call it something else. I would say the Transform trend (and what could become or already is a part of the underground culture)is a power move to take back our lives from Capitalistic Corporations. Companies who seem to only care about racking in a dollar at the expense of our humanity.
Like I said…you’re going to desperately want this jacket in your closet.
