How to dress like a man: the semantics of the Brokeback jacket

From My So-Called Life to the Marlboro Man, the sherpa is the ultimate coming of age jacket

When I was 15, I spent two paychecks-worth of cash on my first big clothing purchase: a Levi’s sherpa trucker jacket. Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life had one, and I thought that I could wrap myself up in a cloak of his nonchalant cool if I got one, too. It was the early 90s – nonchalant cool still had a certain currency.

Like its sartorial counterpart, the leather jacket, the sherpa was more than an item of clothing: it was awash with meaning. If the leather jacket was wild and rebellious, the sherpa was a loner and an alpha. The jacket was the dude, like Catalano, smoking solo in the darkest corners of the school. The solidness of the fleece lining and the sturdiness of the corduroy spoke of a pensive thoughtfulness and an unspoken longing.

The jacket reappeared in last year’s collections – Instagram celebrity model Lucky Blue Smith modelled one in the Tom Ford campaign, and it has trickled down on to the high street.

“All shearling styles have been really successful,” says John Little, Asos’s menswear’s outerwear designer. “The influence of 70s style and a lean towards luxury fabrics and outerwear pieces have meant there has been a prevalence of them on the catwalk.”

“It’s a classic,” says Helen Seamons, the Observer’s menswear editor. “It’s the kind of jacket that never really goes out of style. It’s a style that suits most body shapes and it’s ageless. It’s something that would work on guys from 20 to 70.”

The jacket’s style (and connotations of being a loner) meant it was a natural fit for Brokeback Mountain. Costume designer Marit Allen used the item as a sartorial centrepiece of the quashed-love opus, explaining the jacket’s emotional significance like so: “Heath [Ledger] worked with his clothes, using everything he wears to convey Ennis’s repression – the jackets, done up; the cowboy hats, to hide behind.”

Allen was using the visual cues of Richard Avedon’s Photographs of the American West, but also other pop-culture ghosts of the US terrain. The farmer in American Gothic; Martin Sheen in Badlands; the Marlboro Man: unreconstructed males who were made of mettle.

In Brokeback Mountain, the sherpa leaned heavily on these associations. But for boy-men, such as Catalano and 15-year-old me, it was more than a jacket – it was a rite of passage