One of my earliest memories is watching Harrison Ford whip someone to death and realising I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I still think it's the best ambition I've ever entertained. A man of science, of action, and of such effortless cool that his signature style has never really gone out of vogue – from punching Nazis to building your entire look around a leather jacket.
Over time I've tempered my ambitions. I realise I'll probably never look that good falling off a tank, but I was sure I could work some of that swagger into my personal brand as I meekly filed into a pitch-meeting if I could just find the perfect black leather jacket. So began a quest that took, give or take, 30 years.
The hunt for perfection
I travelled the world looking for the right jacket for me: I trawled flea markets in old Soviet town squares and haggled for an old American military jacket in downtown Seoul. I once, hand on heart, climbed a mountain in Argentina because I heard there was a legendary leathersmith up there who worked for cheap.
Still, none of them were right. The sleeves on this one were a little too long, the leather on that one too pristine, or too beat up. This one made me look like a rent-boy, while the next didn't make me look enough like a rent-boy. I spent a lifetime searching, and only succeeded in amassing a vast portfolio of ill-fitting contenders, and the growing suspicion that my quest was foolish, that it was naïve to think that I could buy happiness. I couldn't help but wonder if tying together my identity around a garment would destroy me, as well as my bank balance.
Finding the perfect black leather jacket is the white whale of a man's wardrobe.
Back where I started
But then it found me. In the end, in a rom-com finish, I found it in a boutique two doors down from my home, that designed jackets to look like those worn by rock stars through history; Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, David Bowie. The shopgirl showed me a classic black motorcycle jacket based on the one Lou Reed wore in Berlin, to which the only dignified response was weeping and joyfully throwing fistfuls of cash at her.
The jacket was perfect. Reader, I could marry it — indeed, I've had marriages that cost me less money. For the price I paid, I could have built a school, a piece of lifesaving infrastructure in the developing world – or paid rent on a townhouse in Sydney for several hours. It's an absurd amount to spend on a garment – a wild and indefensibly expensive purchase; but worth every penny. It's impossible to justify spending so much on a piece of outerwear until you are inside it, after which it all makes sense.
To own the jacket makes a statement; I am the kind of man who is capable of dropping a thousand dollars on an impractical piece of outerwear. I am foolish enough to do so.
I am captain of my fate, master of my soul, but not of my spiralling credit-card debt.
A cachet of cool
Still, there's no describing how soothing it is to own a cool leather jacket.
You need a certain panache to pull off a cool leather jacket, but in heavenly irony, the cool leather jacket lends you all the panache you need. It's a perpetual motion machine for producing smugness. Beautiful young men and women turned to look at me on the street. Strangers complimented me on it. I wore it for a publicity shoot for my last book, and on seeing the photos my friends said, in disbelieving wonder, "You look … good."
Soon I was more or less living in the thing, less the owner of the jacket as its symbiont – we needed each other to live. It becomes a positive feedback loop — you feel like a better person in the jacket and so you rise to the occasion afforded by the jacket.
I crossed the road to help little old ladies carry groceries and kept one eye open for any neighbourhood switchblade fights I could join. On any given day, I felt ready for anything. I feel like I could fall off a motorcycle in a Nazi-punching incident and get up unfazed, admiring the broken-in look it had given my jacket.
A jacket's immortality
That, perhaps, is the magical appeal of the cool leather jacket – it only gets cooler as the years pass. The logic of it runs contrary to the rest of life; that no matter how beat up it gets; how high the mileage, it will only grow more valuable. It is masculinity from a mirror universe where time is kind, where aesthetics will only appreciate with age. A black leather jacket is a blue-chip stock for self-esteem.
Even after my days on earth are over, my jacket will go on its journey, and long after I am dust, it will adorn the racks of some post-apocalyptic thrift-store, waiting to change the life of another diffident youth on sartorial satori – because youth, like fashion, is fleeting, but a really cool leather jacket, that will last forever.