Electrolicious

Five years ago, Andreas bought a jacket at a flea market in France. This is him wearing it on the day it was purchased in May of 2003. Andreas loved that jacket. It was hemp, had two asymmetrical zippers, and a fabulous double kangaroo pouch in the front.

The jacket went on many adventures. It traveled across countries! It shuffled around Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. It went to parties and work, dinners and parks. It went everywhere Andreas went because it was his favorite jacket.

Naturally, the jacket slowly started falling apart. I did what I could to mend it, re-stitching the cotton lining, mending split seams. When its zipper failed, a new zipper was installed. But eventually it started to disintegrate in ways that couldn’t be fixed. The elbows blew out. The lining went so threadbare that whole sections came loose.

Enter The New Jacket. Andreas found a black North Face snowboarding jacket on sale at REI a few months ago. It’s also got front ‘roo pockets and an asymmetrical zipper, but it’s not a fashion statement. It’s a piece of hardcore outdoor gear, a coat designed to climb up a mountain and ride down the other side. It’s stiff and boxy, designed to break your fall when you hit ice-encrusted snow going 25 miles an hour.

It is not a jacket to be worn to the grocery store. Wearing that jacket around town is extreme overkill, along the same lines as buying an all terrain, all wheel drive SUV with fog lights and a kayak rack to drive you around the corner to the mall.

I did my best to just deal with it. Sure: I didn’t like the new jacket, but I wasn’t the one wearing it, so who cares? It’s none of my business!

…of course that only worked for a few weeks before I was reduced to admitting to Dre, “I hate that coat.”

His response, quite rationally, was this: “I like this coat. Fuck off.”

I started mulling my options. Realistically, I could see that Andreas had purchased the new coat in an attempt to replace his old beloved jacket. If I hated the new coat so much, I should be proactive and help him address the core issue, which was that he was trying to find a replacement jacket.

…But how to replace a jacket purchased at a stall in Paris five years ago? I WOULD MAKE IT HAPPEN! I checked with Andreas — if I could get him an exact replacement, would he wear it? Would that be a decent compromise? He agreed.

Enter Etsy’s Alchemy tool, which lets you post projects for indie craftsfolks to bid upon and produce. I posted a listing titled Remake a beloved cotton jacket, seeking someone who would make a pattern from the old jacket, and remake Andreas a new one. Within a few hours had several bids from interested seamstress types. Andreas helped me pick the seamstress (a seller named Crescentwench) who ultimately made the jacket — he liked her Steampunk Sleeping Beauty outfit.

And so Andreas said his fond farewells to the beloved old jacket, and we packed it up and mailed it off to Indiana, where it was hacked up. I’d given Crescentwench a couple tweaks to consider (the jacket was always about an inch too short in the sleeves and torso, and the hood was sort of oddly small) and she came back with a couple of her own suggestions — most notably using an amazing gold Victorian patterned fabric for the inside of the hood. It adds more steampunk to the jacket, and Dre loves his steampunk.

Saturday morning, we picked up the finished jacket at the post office. There was much grinning and smiling and oohing and ahhing as Dre pulled the new/old jacket out of the box and put it on. It was the exact same! Only it fit a little better and had cool gold-detailed lining in the hood.

Here’s Dre rocking his new/old coat at Fort Worden:

The best part? Crescentwench sent us the pattern she made she made from the old jacket, so that Andreas can just keep having this beloved jacket remade over and over and over again until the end of time.