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Behind the seams
The timeless tailored jacket is this year's runway hit.
By Nathalie Atkinson
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The jacket, in all its guises, is the wardrobe staple of this - and every - season. Pea jackets, anoraks, spencers, jerkins, boleros, Nehru jackets, bombers, trench coats and tuxedos-they've all come to us from menswear, where jackets have historically denoted social status, military rank or profession. (And they're still how we distinguish a chef from a bellboy.)
For women, jackets are a layer of armour and a fashion statement all in one, whether it's Amelia Earhart's tailored men's flight bomber or Betty Rizzo's pink satin number in Grease. Great moments in jacket history include the empowering moment in 1966 when Yves Saint Laurent created Le Smoking evening pantsuit for women-an androgynous take on the men's tuxedo; later, Saint Laurent introduced the saharienne, or African safari jacket, into high fashion circles. In the '80s, the jacket's extreme, padded shoulder seam coincided with women taking on the corporate world: They needed bulk to feel powerful.
Well before Saint Laurent, Coco Chanel was championing the jacket. For his spring haute couture collection, Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld created a monument - quite literally - to the house's iconic garment when he erected a statue of a 20-metre cardigan jacket on the runway. Mademoiselle Chanel was fond of adapting men's wardrobe staples, like the yachting and sportsmen blazers of her boyfriend, the Duke of Westminster. Taking her cue from a traditional Tyrolean country jacket, Chanel created her first slouchy, unstructured wool cardigan jacket in 1954. Just as she liberated Jazz Age gamines with a little black jersey dress decades earlier, her casual jacket was in direct reaction to the constricting silhouette of the prevailing trend of Christian Dior's corseted and cinchedwaist New Look. Its blatant ease, embellished
with contrasting braid trim and stripped of interfacing, shoulder pads and bust seams, quickly became the house signature. Lagerfeld reinterprets the jacket every season, rendering it in lambskin, faux fur and shimmering hand-set sequins resembling neoprene surf suits, terry cloth or denim. This fall, the jacket gets a deconstructed, neo-grunge treatment in Mademoiselle's emblematic black and white, using three-dimensional tweed bouclé hand-loomed at Lesage.
When Christie Smythe and Andrea Lenczner started their jackets-only Canadian label, Smythe, five years ago, they were drawn to the idea of mastering the category. "A jacket can be so many things, it's almost cheating in a way," says Lenczner. "It's like having a fantastic shoe or bag: It finishes your outfit, so you can be in your Gap T-shirt and your boyfriend's jeans and immediately look pulled together," says Smythe. "In the beginning we even considered naming our company ‘Third Piece,' which is what you call a jacket or finishing piece in retail," adds Lenczner.
Image of French actress Marie-Helene Arnaud in a Chanel tweed jacket in 1959; Peter Fink, courtesy of Chanel
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