ROMAN MARS: It’s the fall of 1918. The Great War is raging. More than a million American men have found themselves in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive on the Western Front. It remains, to this day, the deadliest campaign in our military’s history, and the conditions were horrendous.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: So, it’s rainy, it’s muddy, it is freezing, and this is the beginning of trench warfare. These soldiers are hanging out in ditches, in the mud. People are dying everywhere. It’s miserable.
ROMAN MARS: Avery Trufelman is the host of Articles of Interest, a show about fashion and design. So when she thinks about this miserable, awful war, she thinks of what the soldiers are wearing.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: They are in wool overcoats. You know, if you’re going on a walk and it’s cold outside, wool can be a really great fabric. If you’re a soldier fighting and running for your life, a giant wool overcoat is horrible because it gets really wet and it gets really heavy and then you want to take it off and then suddenly you’re freezing. You just have one wool blanket that is usually wet and dirty. And then they were trapped in these awful things.
ROMAN MARS: The very thing that was supposed to keep these soldiers safe and warm instead caused a lot of harm because, back then, the military didn’t consider fashion a technology. They were focused on weapons, artillery, supply lines, and communication. They didn’t think of clothing as something to help or hurt the war effort. It was just what soldiers wore. And beyond that, the American military went into World War I totally unprepared for the climate.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: We had fought a war abroad before, the Spanish-American War, which was a warm weather war. And that’s when we started wearing khaki. But we had never fought in, like, the wilds of northern Europe before. This is extremely cold, exotic climate for the United States, and we didn’t really know what we were doing yet on a large scale. So a lot of soldiers suffered.
ROMAN MARS: Did the military realize they had made a mistake issuing these coats to soldiers?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Absolutely. Once the war ended, they were like, “We’ve got to find a better jacket.” But after the Great War, they’re like, “Let’s not focus on war right now. We’re never going to have a big war ever again. That was really bad.”
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it was the war to end all wars.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: The war to end all wars, yeah. So that was a weird experiment. They didn’t think that they needed to revisit or redesign such a jacket for such an expansive war in Europe.
But when it proved true that we did end up fighting another giant war in Europe, it was time to revisit this jacket problem.
ROMAN MARS: The jacket problem. How should the American military outfit its soldiers to make them as safe and effective as possible? And how should such a jacket be developed? And underneath that, what happens when a symbol of military might gets stripped of its connection to the military and hits the streets?
From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I’m Roman Mars. Today, the incredible origin and evolution of the M43 Army Field Jacket.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: The field jacket changed what it meant to be a soldier and to look like a soldier. And it changed what we all wear, every day–not only Americans, but all around the world.
ROMAN MARS: The United States military did not put their soldiers in wool overcoats because they thought it was the best technology. They did it because other countries put their soldiers in wool overcoats. For more than a century, they had just copied the current military superpower of the moment.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: You can see this very clearly in the Revolutionary War. We’re basically dressing exactly like the British. It’s just like, “They’re wearing red. We’re not.” Then you see this in the Civil War, where we’re actually dressing French. That was the superpower at the time. And it’s funny because, when you look at it, we do kind of look like the soldiers from the Nutcracker. It’s very jaunty little tin soldiers. But that’s what we’re imitating; we’re imitating the French. And then we had this really weird period, which is my favorite in military history, where we were imitating the Prussians. And we wore, like, plumed hats and the helmets with the little spike on top. Like, we wore those. We just copied whoever was the global superpower at the time. And that was the way military fashion worked. It was like, “We want to look like the powerful ones.” And that decision was sort of made top-down.
ROMAN MARS: So by 1941, it’s clear that the U.S. is going to join World War II. And the military knows it needs a better jacket. So how does it approach this problem?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: So there were a few kind of improvised solutions that were made. This one general, General Parsons, was like, “My boys need something a little lighter just to wear when they’re going out, when it’s just a little windy and they don’t want a full wool coat.” And so what he did was he ordered, like, 300 golf jackets, like members-only jackets, and he picked the parts he liked. And he was like, “Sew these all together.” And then they made this golf jacket, which was, like, so cool. So it’s like a zip-up jacket, basically. It’s like a windbreaker. It comes in a khaki-ish color, little slip pockets on the side. It looks very modern. And this cool windbreaker became known colloquially as the “Parsons jacket,” after General Parsons. All the soldiers wanted one, although they were terrible for soldiers. If you raised your arm, your belly would get exposed. It really didn’t work if it was a little cold outside. It was not a very pragmatic, practical, soldier-looking jacket. And so, eventually, all these battalions, one by one, were like, “Well, we want our version of the Parsons jacket. Can we make one for parachuting? Can we make one for tankers? Can we make one that’s lined for cold environments?” And then the government is, like, issuing all these limited edition drops of this jacket for all these different battalians. And it is so impractical. It’s like jacket chaos.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah. So there’s an effort to streamline this to make the one perfect jacket. So, talk to me about how you take on that monumental task.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: This grand task was taken on by a professor named Georges Doriot. He was a business professor at Harvard. He was an immigrant. He was French, and he was a high-ranking official in the French military. And he was like, “I can feel this war coming. I’m probably going to be put in charge of some big thing because I’m a business professor and a veteran.” And so he kind of decided to work in the logistics arm. He was like, “I’ll do this.” And he sort of volunteered himself. He was like, “They need someone who knows how to organize things.” The funny thing is, Georges Doriot is not famous for his work in jacket organizing. He is famous for being the inventor of venture capital. This whole thing is a giant footnote in his life. It’s very funny that this whole story is just, like, a fun fact about this guy.
Anyway, so he takes on whatever projects the military needs help doing. And this big project that they present to him is, okay, we need a jacket. We need one superior jacket that will look great, work in every environment for every job that a soldier has to do. Huge task. And Doriot does this amazing thing. He starts working from first principles. Again, this sounds so obvious now, but before this, the military was just being like, “Who’s the most powerful military or what does some general want?” This guy is like, “Well, what does keep people warm? What does repel the rain?” And even though the field of physiology was budding and, yeah, there were all these labs at Harvard that were putting students on treadmills and testing how much they could sweat and body heat retention, no one had done this to clothing yet. He was like, “Well, let’s spray water at this jacket. Let’s blow wind at this jacket. Let’s use laboratories. Let’s really figure out objectively what the best jacket is.” And Georges Doriot was so invested in finding the objectively greatest jacket that he was like, “Human test subjects aren’t even enough anymore because what’s cold to you? What’s warm to you?” So he ordered a copper dummy that was fitted out with sensors. And then they put the dummy in the cold and in the heat and overnight and put different jackets on the dummy and tested which jacket keeps the dummy the warmest. I mean, rigorous, rigorous repeated tests….
ROMAN MARS: And the copper mannequin had a name?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yes. The mannequin’s name was Chauncey. Very important point.
And this is what makes me live out, you know? He was like, “What will make the boys the most comfortable?” How beautiful is that? It wasn’t about emulating some other army. It wasn’t about what some high-ranking general wanted. It was about the people, the army of the people, and making sure they were comfortable and they were safe and they were protected. And it just makes me want to tear up a little. This is what we were supposed to be doing the whole time. It’s so cool. And this was wild at the time to be like, “We’re going to treat clothes like a technology. This is as important as developing a tank or a bomb or anything else. This is military technology.”
ROMAN MARS: Okay, so after putting Chauncey through rigorous testing, what did they find?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: They found that there is no one perfect jacket. They found that the best way to get different temperatures for different environments is to use a radical new concept called “layering.” I could have told you that. But they discovered that! That’s what they discovered!
ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLES] But you couldn’t have told us that in 1941.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: I definitely could not have told you that because they were like, “Oh, we just have this one wool jacket and this one lighter jacket.” No, this was so revolutionary. This idea of layering.
ROMAN MARS: The layers that Georges Doriot’s team came up with included a liner for warmth, a parka for the cold, and a waterproof shell for rain. It was all part of a system, and at the heart of this system was a jacket.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: It is a cotton sateen olive drab floppy field jacket, four large cargo pockets, two at the hip, two at the breast. It’s got adjustable cuffs. It’s about hip-length, drawstrings around the waist so that you could tighten all the layers around yourself. It had this collar that you can turn up against the wind. It had all these features. But it wasn’t about the jacket. It was about the layers of the jacket and the system of the jacket. And this scientific system of a jacket was called the “M43.” And the “M” stands for “model.” 1943–year it was made. M43 jacket, which is a scientific name for this, like, piece of science. It was so radical-looking. I mean, now it doesn’t look so weird because all modern outdoor clothes look like this. They’re all modular. They’re all a little baggy. They all have these different layers and hoods and elements and drawstrings and stuff like that. This was so complete– I mean, this was alien. Early jackets came with instructions printed on the inside. “When it’s raining, put on your hood, and tighten it with the drawstrings.”
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it is kind of frumpy. Like, it’s sort of born with wrinkles.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: And it’s not the tight, soldierly look. And you were supposed to live in this thing. And it had been tested not only in the laboratory, but they also took later prototypes of it out into the field, into a battle in Italy. They sent it to a thousand troops and got their feedback. And the pockets were specifically designed to fit a ration pack. You know, you could really live out of these things. They were sort of perfectly designed for the life of the average foot soldier.
ROMAN MARS: I mean, the product testing with actual soldiers in the field and also the focus on function and comfort seems completely new.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Super new. Super duper new. It was not about looks. It was not a costume. It was scientific, democratic. And it treated the soldier as kind of this new job in this new kind of war.
ROMAN MARS: So it’s called M43, which means it was developed in 1943. Was this this Eureka moment? They found the jacket, therefore it was outfitted with everyone and therefore “we won the war, hooray?”
AVERY TRUFELMAN: You’d think. You’d be like, “‘Yay! You did it! Georges Doriot, you found the perfect jacket!”‘ Nope. Nope,nope. Because this is the part where we encounter the villain of our story. And his name was General Robert McGowan Littlejohn. And General LittleJohn is a career soldier. He went to West Point. You know, he played it all completely by the book. He rose up the ranks, and he ended up as the quartermaster for the European Theater of Operations. And the quartermaster is basically the one in charge of logistics. They’re in charge of boots, beans, and bullets, getting supplies to the boys in Europe. And in 1943, this meant England and Italy.
Pretend we haven’t talked about the M43, right?
ROMAN MARS: Okay. Yeah. So in 1941 and ’42, the military has the Parsons jacket, which is very cool-looking but not practical. And different divisions want their own versions.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Okay, so we’re back in jacket chaos early on. Littlejohn is over in Europe, and he sees all this jacket chaos. And he’s like, “I’m going to fix it.” He doesn’t really know that the government is planning this giant–
ROMAN MARS: It’s like Manhattan Project of Jackets. It’s happening, yeah.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: He doesn’t know. He doesn’t realize that. And he’s doing it the old-school way, where he’s like, “I’m a high-ranking general, I’m going to take matters into my own hands, I’m going to make a jacket. And I’m going to make the one jacket that every soldier will need.” So he functionally likes the look of the British battle dress jacket. And based on that, he goes to a factory in England, and he’s like, “Make me one of those with a few little tweaks.” And he makes, admittedly, a very sharp-looking jacket. I love it. It’s like a wool jacket, but it’s short-waisted. It’s very tight. It’s very dignified. It’s very General Eisenhower. You gotta be shaped like a Dorito chip to pull this off. It’s, like, a very tight-fitting, elegant jacket.
And for him, he’s like, “Oh great, now this is, like, a more practical version of the wool jacket. Soldiers don’t have to change back and forth between their fancy dress and their battle dress. This will be the one jacket to rule them all.” He calls it the “ETO jacket,” “ETO,” standing for European Theater of Operations. And it has, like, a tie. Compared to what was happening with all the jacket chaos, it is more practical. But when you know that the M43 jacket is secretly being developed in a laboratory, the ETO jacket kind of looks like a joke.
ROMAN MARS: Because, you know, he’s a general. So his version of a versatile jacket is that you stand out on a battlefield occasionally and then you go to a dinner occasionally or something like that. You know what I mean? Like, those are his versions. It’s not like a trench or, you know, jumping out of a plane or…
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, I think it’d been a while since he’d been, like, boots on the ground. He didn’t really know what had been… A lot of change in his time.
ROMAN MARS: But what is his thinking? He must have some recognition that this is not the most practical jacket in the world. So what does Littlejohn like about this?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, so a big part of his logic, which I am sympathetic to: this is a time–World War II–it’s a huge draft. There are men pouring into the European theater who have never fought before. They’ve never known this kind of discipline. And to Littlejohn, he sees the jacket as this soldier-making tool. “You want to be a soldier? You gotta dress like a soldier.” In the same way that you gotta make your bed and you gotta stand up straight, you gotta wear this nice jacket. You gotta come correct. You’ve got to look good. You know, this is not about being comfortable. We’re at war. And also, I think a lot of it was presenting the American military to a European audience looking good–looking classy.
ROMAN MARS: So this ambition does not a villain make. What makes General Littlejohn a villain?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: What makes a villain a villain is vindictiveness. And what’s really fitting is I met this incredible military historian named Joshua Kerner. Kerner is really, really into archives and research almost obsessively. And he’s uncovered a lot of this story of the field jacket that I’m about to tell you. But basically, Kerner was going through old documents and realized General Littlejohn did something really terrible.
ROMAN MARS: So what did General Littlejohn do?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Littlejohn first catches wind of the M43 jacket. He was like, “These look sloppy. What is this? What is this thing that the government back at home is making without consulting me? My jackets are so much better than this frumpy ugly stuff.” He makes a vow, then and there, that he will stop the M43 jacket from ever reaching the wider military.
ROMAN MARS: Wow. So how does he go about stopping this?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: He has a tremendous amount of power, you know? He’s in charge of all the supplies going into the European theater. And as the M43 jacket is slowly getting rolled out and Doriot’s like, “Here you go, here’s this jacket that I lovingly made and it’s perfect,” Littlejohn’s like, “No. Get those away from me. Over my dead body. Never.” Our man of science, Doriot, is begging Littlejohn, “Please. Please take these jackets. Winter is coming, and you have to order these in advance. And this is a serious winter.” And he just refuses to order them. In fact, there reaches a point where M43 jackets are packed up, ready to go to Europe, and he was like, “Nope! We got it. I made a jacket. I’m fine. We’re just going to wear my jacket over here. We don’t need that.” And he’s making excuses. He’s dragging his feet. He’s putting it off for so long. And he is not really being transparent about like, “I hate these jackets.” He’s just like, “No. No thanks. We don’t need these.” So in the fall of 1944, it doesn’t seem like the war is slowing down any time soon. It’s expanding throughout Europe. And all the quartermasters throughout the European Theater of Operations under Littlejohn are turning to Littlejohn. And they’re like, “Hey, we don’t have those new jackets that we heard about. We’re probably unprepared.” Kerner found this letter from someone to Littlejohn, and you can see how they have to tiptoe around him. It’s like, “Just maybe, possibly, it will be colder than you think. I know that you think you don’t need these jackets, but maybe you do.” You can tell what a tyrant he is. No one feels comfortable being like, “Please order the jackets.”
ROMAN MARS: Finally, in the fall of 1944, Littlejohn gives in to the undeniable superiority of the M43 jacket.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, Littlejohn acquiesces and is like, “Okay, fine. Fine! Let the jackets in. I don’t even care, whatever.”
ROMAN MARS: But all that gear is waiting back in the United States, so it takes months to reach the troops in Europe.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Most troops will not begin receiving M43 jackets and adequate sleeping bags and footwear and all the other stuff Doriot designed until January 1945. They had to go through September, October, November, December, freezing. So by the time winter hits, they’re in ETO jackets. They’re in dress jackets. And it’s horrible. They were freezing. Many of them developed trench foot, which is disgusting. I don’t want to gross anybody out, but your skin falls off. It’s nasty. And this is World War II. Communication technology has gotten really good. People know; Americans are getting notes from their sons being like, “Mom? Dad? I’m freezing out here. I’m given inadequate jackets.” There’s a sense of outrage that is building back at home of like, “Why aren’t our boys being taken care of? They’re going to freeze to death out here.” They start complaining. They turn to the press. They turn to the New York Times and the Washington Post. And this becomes a massive scandal.
It’s called the “cold weather crisis.” It’s a huge deal. Joshua Kerner brought me into the quartermaster archives, and we were looking at old newspapers that were covering this. It was on, like, page four of the Washington Post. This is not style section stuff. It’s just unignorable.
ROMAN MARS: So does Littlejohn ever get his comeuppance? Like, does he ever get blamed for this?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: No. No one pins this on General Littlejohn at all. He completely gets away with it.
ROMAN MARS: How does he manage that?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Because it’s great to be friends with Dwight D. Eisenhower, who essentially ran interference for his buddy from West Point. And, you know, Eisenhower also loved the ETO jacket. He understood where his friend was coming from. And he issues a press moratorium. You can’t say anything bad about the ETO jackets. And he’s like, “This is for morale. We have to support the troops. And we can’t gang up on leadership.” But we all know why. It was friend nepotism.
ROMAN MARS: So the M43 field jacket finally makes its way to soldiers in Europe in 1945, no thanks to Littlejohn. What happens next?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Everybody is wearing these amazing jackets. And the military is cranking these things out, especially because we are in the thick of World War II and you and I both know, as people of the future, that there will be an atomic bomb and it will end World War II. But no one knows that the real Manhattan Project is actually happening. And most people in the military did not know that. It’s widely believed that this war is just going to go on for years.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, like, even after the theater of Europe is sort of won.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, people thought we were going to invade Japan, like this was going to be, like, five more years.
ROMAN MARS: Just outfitting soldiers to go into Japan and occupy that as best they possibly could.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, again, the scale of this draft is massive. There’s, like, 12 million men. It’s huge. And so every domestic manufacturing company in the United States is just cranking out these jackets, stockpiling them for this future war that’s going to go on and on and and on and on. And then it ends really suddenly and really horrifically. And in the wake of the destruction and the existential crisis created by the atomic bomb–way lower on the scale of problems but still a problem–is the fact that the United States government has all these clothes they made. They made so, so many clothes, like warehouses and warehouses and warehouses.
ROMAN MARS: And so what do they do?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: They gotta get rid of it. They gotta get rid of it as quickly as possible. And fun fact, the person in charge of getting rid of it was none other than General Robert McGowan Littlejohn, which is so funny. And so this is where military surplus stores come in. And granted, we had had military surplus stores before, but they were little. They were little specialty stores. We had never had industrial scale mass manufacturing cranking out millions of jackets on this scale before. And for a generation of Americans that had grown up during the Great Depression and didn’t have big closets, this was amazing. The military surplus store–most of the stuff had never been worn, and they would stock these things for a song. It’s just how everybody dressed. Everybody dressed this way. It wasn’t even considered a style. It wasn’t considered, like, “Oh, this military style stuff.” It was just where you went to get your basics. Before there was Walmart, there was the military surplus store.
ROMAN MARS: And now they have this scientifically tested jacket that can serve a lot of people in a lot of different climates, and it’s actually really great.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah. Now it’s like this jacket that was the height of sophistication is available for everyone for really cheap. I will say so much of menswear comes from this era. Whenever we’re like, “Oh, this is classic menswear,” it’s military surplus style. You can ask any brand, even ones that just seem like they make normal basic clothes. They will all tell you that it comes from the military. It’s the blueprint. This is what’s considered the bedrock of classic menswear style in the 20th century. And yet, the military is still making clothes and still scientifically iterating on them. The evolution doesn’t stop.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, because wars don’t stop.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: They just keep coming.
[AD BREAK]
ROMAN MARS: It’s now the mid-1960s. The draft is in effect for the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands of men who have never been to war are getting turned into soldiers. And part of that transformation still includes the field jacket.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: They’re wearing a new version of it, the souped up version called the M65. It has some rad new features, like a rolled up hood and it’s got Velcro on the sleeves. But the interesting thing is, now there is this sort of pipeline where the military is making new clothes and sort of ending up in surplus stores almost immediately. It’s really interesting. Like, we’d never had this before where anyone can just kind of waltz in and buy something that is or looks pretty similarly to what soldiers are actually wearing, like, all around the country. This is a weird moment in American fashion history, at a weird moment in American military history.
ROMAN MARS: And what is particularly interesting about this moment is that people have the ability to look like soldiers at the same time that soldiers are looking like soldiers–the exact same clothes–when our collective feeling about those wars is really complicated.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Really, really complicated. And the thing that’s so fascinating is, as civilians and soldiers kind of start to dress alike, they have not dissimilar opinions, you know? The draft was still going on. People were being drafted into Vietnam who didn’t want to be there. The military-civilian divide is not a gaping crevasse like we might think of it today. So, a lot of soldiers return home from Vietnam still wearing their field jackets. And you start to see them wear their field jackets to protests. And then they start defacing their jackets with peace signs and patches. And this is really new because, again, after World War II, these have just been standard jackets. The stuff in the military surplus stores–good clothes–nice quality clothes. They weren’t making a statement about the military. They were just basics. And now the people who are subverting the field jacket know what they’re doing. They’re taking the military’s imagery away from them. They turn it into a symbol of the anti-war movement. And it was so offensive to deface these things and draw on them in this way.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah. You know, this adoption becomes so complete that, in a way, seeing a person in a military jacket indicates a radical almost. You know, it becomes like an outsider. It is not a buttoned-up General Littlejohn soldier. It is a different type of character.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, yeah, exactly. After the draft ends in 1973, the jacket just straight up doesn’t mean soldier anymore. It means, like, young, disaffected, probably socially unstable young veteran. Like, you can see this in Serpico, in Taxi Driver. Like, it replaces the denim or the leather jacket. It’s what tough guys wear. It becomes radical. It’s this shocking punk thing.
ROMAN MARS: And so what does this mean for the field jacket? This is, as described, the most perfect military piece of fashion that’s ever been created. And now it is associated with totally different things.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah. I mean, it essentially becomes fashion, which… That’s the stereotypical way that fashion works, right? Outsiders and rebels and punks wear it. And then as people start seeing it in, like, Serpico and Taxi Driver, it starts to edge into the mainstream. And in the ’70s, you really start seeing the yuppification of the field jacket. You can see Woody Allen wearing it in Annie Hall as he’s waiting to go see an independent movie at Film Forum. And Dustin Hoffman is a dad on the Upper West Side wearing it in Kramer vs. Kramer. And army surplus stores realize that this is now fashion, this field jacket. And they start billing themselves as more of a fashion outpost.
ROMAN MARS: And the field jacket gets even further from its military origins. Surplus stores begin to cater directly to this fashion crowd. They dye their field jackets, style them with belts, even draw on them. Soon the trend goes beyond the traditional surplus industry. Boutiques start popping up with the specific purpose of putting their own spin on military surplus.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: And one of these people is a lady named Patricia Ziegler. She was an artist in San Francisco in the ’70s. And one day, her husband came home from a reporting trip to Australia.
PATRICIA ZIEGLER: And when he came back, he was wearing this British Burma jacket.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: A military surplus jacket from Australia.
PATRICIA ZIEGLER: I noticed it right away, not because it looked military. It looked really safari rugged.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: It was kind of exotic and swashbuckling-looking. And she was like, “Maybe other people would want to buy it, too.” So they found a way to buy 500 surplus Spanish paratrooper jackets. But you know, they’re, like, these weird, old, used jackets. They didn’t really sell until Patricia started styling them a little bit.
PATRICIA ZIEGLER: I put one on Mel with the sleeves rolled up and the collar turned up. And I put on one with tight jeans and belted it. And we sold over a hundred.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: So she went home and she took two of these shirts apart and she sewed them together and she turned them into a dress.
PATRICIA ZIEGLER: Some other ones, I took off the epaulets and made a waistband. Took off the arms, I said, “Doing our part for disarmament here.” And we made a skirt. And so Mel said, “Oh, we’ve got a business. I gotta find a place to open a store.”
AVERY TRUFELMAN: They found this tiny store that was 400 square feet, and they were like, “This will be our thing. We’ll take military surplus from all over the world, and we will put our own spin on it, and make a fashionable, adventurous, little bohemian line of clothes.” And they opened their store in 1978, and they call it Banana Republic. Isn’t that crazy?
ROMAN MARS: So Banana Republic started as sort of an international army surplus store?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, basically. But early on in the ’70s, Patricia realized that they were running up against a fundamental problem with their business model, which is that it was the late ’70s and early ’80s, and the global supply of military surplus was dwindling. And, like, this is a good thing. You only get military surplus when you have a giant military and wars and huge groups of people that you have to clothe. Like, by the ’80s, the United States’ supply of their own military surplus was kind of dwindling. And slowly other countries were joining the fold of liberal capitalist democracies and ending their drafts. And this is a great problem for the world. It was very horrible for Patricia. She would be up late at night being like, “I don’t think we have enough clothes. This stuff is getting harder to find. This is a huge, huge problem.”
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, if your business is built on international army surplus, this is a huge problem.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: They were like, “I think we have to start making these clothes. I think that we have to start making them from scratch.” And that was part of the reason that they were acquired by the Gap in 1983. And that’s how you start getting stores popping up all over the world, keeping the ethos of the original store. But they were mass producing new versions of surplus, including the field jacket. Like, the Gap is making versions of field jackets with Banana Republic.
ROMAN MARS: So the evolution of this goes into eventually, like, you get a Banana Republic that has sort of no association with army surplus whatsoever. You would never guess that association. So, where does that leave us in terms of the field jacket? Where would you find a field jacket today?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Literally everywhere. Everywhere! Everywhere. Prada makes a version of it. Old Navy makes a version of it. Sometimes I like to look on the street and be like, “How many of these are military jackets?” Even if they’re not dark green, it’s, like, a four-pocket jacket with some sort of cinching in the middle. That’s just the design of a jacket that works really, really well. I was just sent a bunch of clothes from a new designer and they’re like, “Check out our designs.” And it was a field jacket. I was like, “Are you kidding me?” They are everywhere these days. It’s a classic. It’s barely even associated with the military anymore. It’s just a jacket.
ROMAN MARS: The field jacket started as a tool for the military to win wars. It became the symbol of a soldier. It evolved from there to something radical and then became something stripped of meaning altogether because it’s just a great looking jacket. And the field jacket endures today, not just because of how good it looks, but how well it functions and the scientific and thoughtful way it was designed.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Yeah, in addition to the fact that you see it everywhere and every brand makes a version of it, the fact that this was a jacket that was designed and tested in a laboratory–specifically on Chauncey the copper dummy–this is just how clothes are made now. You know, we can’t imagine a world without this. Outdoor brands, especially, live and die by testing. So, I got to visit REI. They have testing facilities for their gear that are so similar to the kinds of testing facilities that the government used. They have a cold room, a rain room. They even had a mannequin covered with sensors; it’s like their own version of Chauncey. And so, the interesting thing is, like, beyond the practicality, this is a look. This crunchy, technical style was invented by the field jacket. This scientifically tested-looking gear–we all dress like technical soldiers now. And it’s not just in the United States. We swallowed up everybody else’s outdoor culture because it works and it looks cool. So in the battle between Georges Doriot and General Littlejohn… Even though General Littlejohn was not blamed and really took no fall, he was fighting for a world that was dying, you know? No one was going to dress in suits anymore, not soldiers, not any of us. We live in Doriot’s world of scientific testing.
ROMAN MARS: You know, when you were first doing this or, at some point in the process, when you were talking to me about the field jacket, you were like, “This might be the thing that makes me the proudest to be an American.” Could you expand on that?
AVERY TRUFELMAN: So I do like that this was a moment when the U.S. government took clothing really, really seriously and made really good stuff and when our domestic manufacturing was very robust and we made these beautiful jackets that were accessible to everybody. That’s point one. I really love that. And I love that they embody the democratic ideals of not looking like a European country or serving a king; it was just about individual soldier comfort. But I also love what it gave to America. I mean, people went to military surplus stores and they bought these jackets and they brought tents and backpacks and other things and they went hiking. This is before outdoor stores were prominent. It helped expand our relationship with the outdoors. Like, it was mitigated through these clothes that were suddenly available to everybody. And I love that moment in the 1970s and I think about it a lot now. The people who are rebelling against the war… You know, the jacket was a very strong anti-war statement, but it wasn’t anti-soldier. They were sort of all wearing it together. Speaking out against the actions of the government but not of their fellow citizens, it’s truly a jacket for the people. And then of course, it’s a great design. So, I just think this is the best thing since sliced bread. This is, like, the most amazing invention. And the fact that it’s so incredible and we don’t even notice it–as you know–that’s a sign of great design. I had never thought about it before.
ROMAN MARS: Well, this has been a really fun tour through the field jacket. Thank you so much, Avery Trufelman. I really appreciate it.
AVERY TRUFELMAN: Thanks, Roman.
ROMAN MARS: The story of the field jacket comes from Avery’s fantastic show, Articles of Interest. She devoted the entire sixth season to gear, and the field jacket’s just one part of it. The whole thing is amazing. Check it out at articlesofinterest.co.
Special thanks to costume historian Charles McFarlane for his research on the topic.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC studios. It’s hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Isabel Angell. Our series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorph, and Ellie Lightfoot. Our Associate Producer is Isaac Fisher. The series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Ivor Manley. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real.
From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our Production coordinator is Shan Pill-ay and production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.
99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. BBC studios is headquartered in beautiful… White City… West London.
If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected]
Leave a Comment
Share