Sporting Your Jacket

Beyond physical touch or romantic gesture, there exists a form of intimacy between partners in the donning, sharing, interacting with, or shedding of clothing.

We attempted to capture the many ways couples express love and intimacy with clothing and fashion.

Scuffed heels in hand, mascara smeared below my eyes, and voice hoarse from screaming the words to “September” for likely the fourth time that night, I ambled, shivering, out of my junior prom. My date offered me his suit jacket, and judging from his drenched undershirt, he surely didn’t need it—so I accepted. I regarded it as a gesture of platonic chivalry, unbothered by questions of significance. We were just friends, anyway. I wore the jacket until he drove away from my best friend’s house that night.

That summer, my date became my boyfriend.

I wrapped his blanket around me in June, threw his undershirt over my drenched lingerie after our friends decided to run into the ocean at midnight in November, and stole a pair of socks in January.

After all of that sharing and washing and returning, I still wasn’t prepared for the night he outstretched his arm and offered me his old track jacket—with no conditions, no expectation that I would return it at the end of the evening or after I did another load of laundry, but indefinitely. Taking what he held meant acknowledging that we both wanted to stay. It wouldn’t be a quick return. I hesitated, but I took it.

I spent the entire drive home wondering if I’d made the wrong choice.

The idea of sporting a man’s jacket had previously struck me as antithetical to feminism—it was a literal representation of being claimed. A girl says no to a guy, and he insists; a guy sees another guy’s name on her back, and he concedes. I wanted to hold my own.

Anyway, wouldn’t it just make the end that much more brutal? Somehow I even managed to think that I seemed clingy by taking it—when he had literally offered it himself, unprompted.

But I kept the jacket and soon after gave him an old sweatshirt. People had opinions and oppositions to this part—

“What’s a guy going to do with a girl’s sweatshirt?”

“Isn’t that kind of backwards?”

“Was his family not weirded out by that?”

I didn’t care. We were happy. The clothing allowed closeness in spite of distance—home was building itself elsewhere, outside of me. I’d made him a duplicate key, invited him in, told him he could use the chestnut lotion in the bathroom, all by letting go of a lintball-coated sweatshirt.

Undressing is intimate and vulnerable, of course, but there’s something even more sacred about dressing each other, bounding ourselves in what belonged to the other. The jacket quickly became inadequate for my craving; I wanted to be covered from head to toe in the socks from ski trips, pajama pants from last Christmas, sweatshirts from college trips.

Seeing someone you love dressed like you, dressed in you, is an intimacy of spiritual nature. It is a universal practice charged with memories, nostalgia, and hope. The clothing likely will never be touched again without releasing a bit of them. Even after they give it back, you know better than to ignore the fact that some of the possession remains. This frightened me when I viewed it as one-sided predation, especially given the tendency of men feeling the manifest destiny to conquer and provide. But in mutualism, in sharing with each other rather than claiming each other, it was uniquely beautiful. It was generosity, not territorialism. He wouldn’t be keeping me safe as I cowered in the cold; I’d be keeping him safe too. It was defiance, but a gentle kind.

modeled by Brandon Simmons & Breeana Fairley

modeled by Esther Tsvayg & Syd Westley

modeled by Pilli De Jesus & Emily Elliot

modeled by Neville Muringayi & Chakia Hall-Watley

Fluid ownership, as manifested the communal sports bras or cocktail dresses in your high school friend group, is all the more weighty when it is romantic. It means allowing yourself to be unfolded, seen, and then folded up again with more intentionality and form. Sharing means surrendering some control, and when both partners choose this route, it constructs more space for growth together in vulnerability.

Clothing has a unique ability to absorb—the fabric adopts its experiences, like songs adopt associations, and allowing someone to deliberately weave in whatever they want requires trust like no other. Wearing someone’s clothing gives you access to the past they lived in it as well as the future of its significance. To be content in those pieces is to assure them your cravings are for more than physicality, but for full envelopment in each other—falling into the gaps between the two of you and building them up even if they may eventually crumble.

We broke up, and that burgundy Jack’s Surfboards sweatshirt is not just my bargain from the outlets at home; it’s the sweatshirt that belonged to him for months. His smell left in it was so brutally tangible that I even had to wash the sweatshirt when he gave it back.

I’m sure his jacket is as polluted with me.

Still, I won’t change my mind. When I love someone that much again, I won’t mind the process. I won’t mind the new gravity, the woven memories, the giving and getting; all of it is worth it for that night he’s away and I listen to the first date song wrapped in his jacket (blanket, shirt, sweatshirt). Sharing is surrendering in confidence that I can trust you with pieces of me, and you with me.

photographed by Olivia Panarella & Paul Phan

written by Malia Mendez