100 Objects #17: M43 Field Jacket

How should the military outfit its soldiers to make them as safe and effective as possible?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:32Roman Mars?

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• 1:16Roman Mars?

  Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel. That flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision crafted performance. It's the fall of 1918. The Great War is raging. More than a million American men have found themselves in the Muzargon Offensive on the Western Front. It remains to this day, the deadliest campaign in our military's history. And the conditions were horrendous.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  So it's rainy, it's muddy, it's 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.

• 2:18Roman 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 about what the soldiers are wearing.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  They are in wool overcoats, which, 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.

• 3:02Roman 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, 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.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  We had fought a war abroad before the Spanish American War, which was like 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 like 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.

• 3:54Roman Mars?

  Did the military realize they had made a mistake issuing these coats to soldiers?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Once the war ended, they were like, we've got to find a better jacket. But after the Great War, they were like, let's not focus on war right now. We're never going to have a big war ever again. That was really bad.

• 4:09Roman Mars?

  Yeah, it was the war to end all wars.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  The war to end all wars. Yeah. So like, that was a weird experiment. They, they didn't think that they needed to revisit or redesign such a jacket for such an expansive war in Europe.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  But when it proved true that we did end up fighting another giant war in Europe, it was time to revisit this jacket problem.

• 4:34Roman 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?

• 4:54Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible in 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.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:27Roman 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 just copied the current military superpower of the moment.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  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 and we're not. Then you see this in the Civil War where we're actually dressing French. Like 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 like 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, 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 the way, and that was the way military fashion worked.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  It was like, we want to look like the powerful ones. And that decision was sort of made top down.

• 6:31Roman Mars?

  So by 1941, it's clear that the US is going to join World War II. And the military knows it needs a better jacket. So how does it approach this problem?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:55Roman Mars?

  Right.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  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, comes in like 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. Really didn't work if it was a little cold outside.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  It was not a very pragmatic, practical, like soldier looking jacket. And so eventually all these battalions, one by one, were like, well, we want our version of the Parsons jacket. Like, 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 battalions. And it is so impractical. It's like jacket chaos.

• 8:09Roman 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.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  This grand task was taken on by a professor named George D'Orio. He was a business professor at Harvard. He was an immigrant. He was, 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, 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 George D'Orio 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, which is, I mean,

• 9:05Speaker 01

  it's very funny that this, this is, 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 like, 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 D'Orio 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? You know, like what does repel the rain?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And even though the field of physiology was budding and yeah, there are 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. You know, let's blow wind at this jacket. Let's use laboratories. Let's really figure out objectively what the best jacket is. And George D'Orio 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, okay,

• 10:33Speaker 01

  which jacket keeps the dummy the warmest? I mean, rigorous, rigorous, repeated tests.

• 10:40Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And the copper mannequin had a name?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yes. The mannequin's name was Chauncey.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Very important point.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  And this is what makes me live out. You know, he was like, what will make the boys the most comfortable? Like, 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 like making sure they were comfortable and they were safe and they were protected. And it just makes me want to like tear up a little. I'm like, 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.

• 11:35Roman Mars?

  Okay, so after putting Chauncey through, you know, rigorous testing, what did they find?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  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, which is like womp womp, I could have told you that. But they discovered that, that's what they discovered.

• 12:03Roman Mars?

  But you couldn't have told us that in 1941.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I definitely could not have told you that. Cause 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.

• 12:18Roman Mars?

  The layers that George D'Orio'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.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  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. Draw strings around the waist so that you could tighten all the layers around yourself. It had this collar that you could turn up against the wind. It had all these features, but it wasn't about the jacket. It was about like the layers of the jacket and the, the system of the jacket. And this, the scientific system of a jacket was called the M43. And the M stands for model, 1943, year it was made, M43 jacket,

• 13:15Speaker 01

  which is a, you know, 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 completely, I mean, this was alien. Early jackets came with instructions printed on the inside of like, when it's raining, put on your hood and, you know, tighten it with the drawstrings.

• 13:48Roman Mars?

  Yeah. It is kind of frumpy, like it, it's sort of like, it's sort of born with wrinkles and the wrinkles never come back.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  It's not the tight soldierly, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 14:26Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the product testing with actual soldiers in the field and also the focus on function and comfort seems completely new.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Super new, super duper new. It was not about looks. It was not a costume. It was scientific, democratic, and it treated this soldier as kind of this new job in this new kind of war.

• 14:53Roman 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.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  You'd think, you'd think, you'd be like, yay, you did it. George D'Orio, 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 Little John.

• 15:20Roman Mars?

  General Little John.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And General Little John 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. And like, pretend we haven't talked about the M43, right?

• 15:51Roman 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.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so we're back in jacket chaos early on. Little John 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.

• 16:13Roman Mars?

  It's like Manhattan Project of jackets.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:16Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  He doesn't know, he doesn't, he doesn't realize that. And he is doing it the old school way where it'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.

• 16:51Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  You gotta be shaped like a Dorito chip to pull this off. It's like a very tight fitting elegant jacket.

• 16:58Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  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. It's not, compared to, compared to what was happening with all the jacket chaos, it is more practical. But when you know that the M43 jacket is like secretly being developed in a laboratory, the ETO jacket kind of looks like a joke.

• 17:32Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  You know?

• 17:33Roman Mars?

  Because, you know, he's a, he's a general. So like his version of a versatile jacket is 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.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  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 had changed in his time.

• 17:59Roman Mars?

  And so, but what is his thinking? Like, he must have some recognition that this is not the most practical jacket in the world. So what does Little John like about this?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  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 Little John, he sees the jacket as this soldier making tool. Like, you want to be a soldier? You gotta dress like a soldier in the same way. That's like, you gotta make your bed, you gotta stand up straight. You gotta wear this nice jacket, you gotta come correct, you gotta 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. Like looking good, looking classy.

• 18:51Roman Mars?

  So this ambition does not a villain make?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:54Roman Mars?

  What makes General Little John a villain?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  What makes a villain, a villain is vindictiveness.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  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 Little John did something really terrible.

• 19:28Roman Mars?

  So what did General Little John do?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Little John 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 like makes a vow then and there that he will stop the M43 jacket from ever reaching the wider military.

• 20:00Roman Mars?

  Wow. So how does he go about stopping this?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  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 D'Orio is like, here you go. Here's this jacket that I lovingly made and it's perfect. Little John's like, no, get those away from me over my dead body. Never. Our man of science, D'Orio, is begging Little John, like, please, please take these jackets. You know, like winter, 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 like packed up, ready to go to Europe. And he was like, nope, we got it. I made a jacket, I'm fine. Like, we're just going to wear my jacket over here. We don't need that.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  And he's making excuses, he's dragging his feet, he's putting it off for so long. And he's not really being transparent about like, I hate these jackets. He's just like, no, no, no, thanks. You know, we, we don't need these. So in the fall of 1944, it doesn't seem like the war is slowing down anytime soon. It's expanding throughout Europe and all the quartermasters throughout the European Theater of Operations under Little John are turning to Little John. And they're like, hey, we don't have those new jackets that we heard about. We're probably unprepared. You can actually, like, Kerner found this letter from someone to Little John and you can see how they have to tiptoe around him. He's like, just maybe, possibly it will be colder than you think.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  I know that you think you don't need these jackets, but maybe you do. It's like, and he, you can tell what a tyrant he is. Like, no one feels comfortable being like, please order the jackets.

• 21:41Roman Mars?

  Finally, in the fall of 1944, Little John gives in to the undeniable superiority of the M43 jacket.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, Little John acquiesces and is like, okay, fine, fine. Let the jackets in, I don't even care, whatever.

• 21:54Roman Mars?

  But all that gear is waiting back in the United States. So it takes months to reach the troops in Europe.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Most troops will not begin receiving M43 jackets and adequate sleeping bags and footwear and all the other stuff D'Orio designed until January 1945. They had to go through like, you know, September, October, November, December, freezing.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  So by the time winter hits, they're in ETO jackets. They're in like dress jackets. And it's, it's horrible. They were freezing. Many of them developed trench foot, which is duh disgusting. Like, I don't want to gross anybody out, but like, your skin falls off. It's nasty. And this is World War II. Communication technology has gotten really good. Like, 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,

• 23:01Speaker 01

  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. I, you know, Joshua Kerner brought me into the Quartermaster Archives. And we were looking at old newspapers that were covering this. Those on like page four of the Washington Post. This is not like style section stuff. It's just unignorable.

• 23:32Roman Mars?

  So does Little John ever get his comeuppance? Like, does he ever get blamed for this?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  No, like, no one pins this on General Little John at all. He completely gets away with it.

• 23:45Roman Mars?

  Huh. How does he manage that?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Because it's great to be friends with Dwight D. Eisenhower, who essentially like ran interference for his buddy from West Point. And 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. You know, we have to support the troops and we can't gang up on leadership. But like, we all know why. It was friend nepotism.

• 24:18Roman Mars?

  Friend nepotism, yeah. So the M43 field jacket finally makes its way to soldiers in Europe in 1945. No thanks to Little John. What happens next?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:58Roman Mars?

  Yeah, like even after the theater of Europe is sort of won.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. People thought we were going to invade Japan. Like, this was going to be like five more years, you know?

• 25:06Roman Mars?

  Just like outfitting soldiers to go into Japan and occupy that as best they possibly could. Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, the, 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 on and on 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 in way lesser, way lower on the, on the scale of problems,

• 25:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:07Roman Mars?

  And so what do they do?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  They got to get rid of it. They got to 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, Little John, 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 like 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. Like, the military surplus store, most of the stuff had never been worn.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  And they would like 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 like where you went to get your basics. Before there was Walmart, there was the military surplus store.

• 27:09Roman 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.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  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. Whatever 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.

• 28:00Roman Mars?

  Yeah, because wars don't stop.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  They just keep coming.

• 28:18Roman Mars?

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• 29:03Roman Mars?

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• 29:17Roman Mars?

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• 29:59Roman Mars?

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• 30:43Roman Mars?

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• 31:27Roman 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.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  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-

• 32:13Roman Mars?

  What the current soldier, yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  -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.

• 32:26Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And it is, what is particularly, like, 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 same clothes, the exact same clothes, when our collective feeling about those wars is really complicated.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Really, really complicated. And the thing that's so fascinating is as civilians and soldiers kind of start to-

• 32:54Roman Mars?

  Dress alike.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  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. You know, like, 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 protest. And then they start defacing their jackets with peace signs and patches. And this is, this is really new, because, again, after World War II, these had just been like standard jackets.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  You know, the stuff in the military surplus stores, like, good clothes, like, 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.

• 34:06Roman Mars?

  Yeah. You know, this adoption becomes, like, 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.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  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 and Taxi Driver. Like, it replaces the denim or the leather jacket. It's like, what tough guys wear. It becomes radical. It's like this shocking punk thing.

• 34:56Roman Mars?

  And so what does this mean for the field jacket? Like, this is, as described, like, the most perfect military piece of fashion that's ever been created. And now, it is associated with totally different things.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it essentially becomes fashion, which, I mean, that's the stereotypical way that fashion works, right? Like, outsiders and rebels and punks wear it. And then, as people start seeing it in, like, Serpico and Taxi Driver, it, like, starts to edge into the mainstream. And, you know, in the 70s, you really start, really start seeing, like, the yuppification of the field jacket. Like, you can see Woody Allen wearing it and Annie Hall as he's, like, waiting to go see an independent movie at Film Forum. And, like, 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.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And they start billing themselves as more of a fashion outpost.

• 35:57Roman 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. Boutique start popping up with the specific purpose of putting their own spin on military surplus.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  And when he came back, he was wearing this British Burma jacket.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  A military surplus jacket from Australia.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  I noticed it right away, not because it looked military, it looked really safari rugged.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  It was kind of, like, 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.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  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 100.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  So, she went home and she took two of these shirts apart and she sewed them together and she turned them into a dress.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Some other ones, I took off the epaulettes 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 got to find a place to open a store."

• 37:35Speaker 01

  So 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.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 37:58Roman Mars?

  That's amazing. So Banana Republic started as sort of an international army surplus store.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  And slowly, other countries were, like, joining the fold of liberal capitalist democracies and ending their drafts. And, you know, like, 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." Like, this, this stuff is getting harder to find. This is like a huge, huge problem.

• 39:06Roman Mars?

  Yeah, especially if your business is built on international army surplus, this is a huge problem.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  They were like, "I think we have to start making these clothes. I think 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.

• 39:34Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:37Roman 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-

• 39:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:47Roman Mars?

  Where does that leave us in terms of the field jacket? Like, where would you find a field jacket today?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Literally everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Like, Prada makes a version of it, Old Navy makes a version of it. You can look, 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, "Oh, a four-pocket jacket with some sort of cinching in the middle." It's like, that's just a 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.

• 40:33Roman 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.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, 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, like, 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. Like, they have a cold room, a rain room. They even had a mannequin covered with sensors. It's like their own version of Chauncey.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  And so, the interesting thing is, like, beyond the practicality, this is a look. This, like, crunchy, technical style was invented by the field jacket. This, like, 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 George D'Orio and General Littlejohn, even though General Littlejohn was not blamed and really took no fall, he was fighting for a world that was dying.

• 42:25Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  You know? No one was going to dress in suits anymore, not soldiers, not any of us. We live in D'Orio's world of scientific testing.

• 42:35Roman 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."

• 42:48Roman Mars?

  Could you expand on that?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  It is, it is. So I do like that this was a moment when the US 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 bought, you know, tents and backpacks and other things and they went hiking. You know, this is before outdoor stores were prominent.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  You know, 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, that the people who were rebelling against the war, you know, the jacket was a very strong anti-war statement, but it wasn't anti-soldier. You know, they were sort of all wearing it together.

• 43:55Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  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, it's a great design. So I, 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, it's like, that's a sign of great design.

• 44:20Roman Mars?

  It is.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  I had never thought about it before.

• 44:23Roman Mars?

  Well, this has been a really fun tour through the field jacket. Thank you so much, Avery Trufman. I really appreciate it.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Thanks, Roman.

• 44:35Roman 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 is 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.

• 44:55Roman Mars?

  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 Angel. Our series producers are Priscilla Alabie, Brenna Daldorf, and Ellie Lightfoot. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Iver Manley. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Cathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright.

• 45:39Roman Mars?

  Artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. And 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].

• 46:14Roman Mars?

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