I recently attended a somewhat formal event with over a hundred other people from around Washington, D.C. It was a cold day, and the coat rack was a sea of formal, black, wool coats. Finding no unused hanger, I lay my sky blue, beat-up, 13-year-old North Face jacket on a chair. As I walked away, I joked with the friend I came with about how unlikely it would be that anyone would take my jacket, given all the better options available.
Talk about tempting fate. We were among the last to leave the event, and despite placing our jackets next to each other when we arrived, only my friend’s jacket remained. There weren’t many left, and all of them were black. I retraced my steps throughout the event space, and even though we hadn’t picked up our jackets during the event, I still checked in every room before starting to give up hope. I had kept my car keys in my jacket pocket with a tracking device attached, and the application on my phone confirmed the keys, and therefore the jacket, were out of range.
Eventually, thanks to a bystander still in the building who saw the jacket placed on an incredibly inebriated young woman, the jacket was located and returned in a hotel lobby several blocks away. In the intervening time, while I wasn’t worrying how I would get home without my car keys, I wondered if this was a sign finally to buy a new jacket.
It would be hard to let go of this one.
When I was a kid and imagined adult life, I pictured getting to spend money however I wanted. If I saw a new skirt or cute bag at Abercrombie — yes, I was a ’90s kid — I could, as an adult, just buy it. Unfortunately, adulthood came earlier than I would’ve liked, and at 19 years old, after the suicide of my father, I found myself a reluctant “grown-up,” responsible for all of my own clothing purchases. I soon discovered adulthood wasn’t about being able to buy the fun pieces of clothing, but instead, the sensible stuff, such as winter jackets.
The first winter after my father died, I couldn’t afford anything warmer than my fall jacket with a sweatshirt underneath. The button fell off, and I replaced it with a giant safety pin, hoping I would look edgy, instead of like a broke orphan. The next year, during a lunch break at my job waitressing at the campus restaurant, a co-worker mentioned she had just bought a North Face jacket on sale on an outdoors website.
That jacket was $180, and when I bought it, I channeled my late mother’s wisdom on big purchases: Buying quality stuff saves you money in the long run. I figured I could spend $180 that year and wear the jacket for a few years, at least through college, instead of buying a new jacket every other year for $50.
After I graduated college and started out in the professional world, I found myself working alongside new graduates whose parents bought them the boring stuff, such as winter coats, while they paid for their own happy hour consumption with their appallingly low starting salaries. I was responsible for everything, from drinks to jackets. I wasn’t embarrassed of my less flashy wardrobe; my increasingly beat-up jacket became a source of pride: I bought this.
And later, when I moved up in the professional world, I still showed up to events in a bright blue ski jacket. I’m proud of it, but now I’m proud because I’ve made it. I actually became a grown-up, not just a teenager forced into adulthood by circumstances outside my control. I could finally buy a new winter jacket if I wanted to, and it wouldn’t cost an entire paycheck anymore. But I don’t want to.
I invested in that jacket in the hopes that I would get my money’s worth by wearing it for as long as possible, envisioning perhaps five years. That $180 spent 13 years ago now equates to having spent about $13 per year. With every passing year, that cost per winter goes down, and that seemingly crazy decision to throw down an entire paycheck on an item of clothing makes more and more financial sense.
And so it may look less and less “grown-up,” but the opposite is true.
Continuing to wear it is a way of honoring that past version of myself. It’s been a strangely comforting object, a constant that has made every move with me and seen me through college graduation, first jobs, my first date with my husband, marriage, pregnancies, and babies. During the winters I’ve been pregnant, I wear it without zipping. In college I cleaned spilled beer off of it, and now I clean mashed banana my baby was holding when I picked him up.
At the end of every season, I put a $20 bill in the pocket, anticipating I’ll be putting it on again the following year. I’ll be doing that again this spring when it’s time to put it away for another season. Finding that money in my pocket always feels like a gift for myself from the past, as does putting on the jacket itself.
Bethany Mandel is a part-time editor at Ricochet and a stay-at-home mother.
