Come Meet My Jeans

The video is about the new Josie jacket – which I’ll get to – but first, I want to invite you to a shopping event I’ve organized in Los Angeles with my friend Jenna Cooper of +COOP. If you are in town, please come visit us. We’re selling things and raising money for various fire aid organizations. I’m giving to the Pasadena Educational Foundation’s Eaton Fire Fund and Mama2Mama, which provides postpartum doulas and pregnancy support to displaced families. It’s Clare, me, Jamie (as in, Haller)… If you don’t know Milk Teeth, they make the cutest kids clothing (see: these jeans), and Hortense has such cheerful everyday jewelry. It’s a party! I hope you’ll join us.

L.A. readers, I’d love to meet you.

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The new Josie jacket, which comes in Jet and Salt, was named after my husband’s great grandmother Ingrid Josephina Stocker, a force of a woman who, from 1914-1930, sustained 640 acres of farmland on a homestead in Winifred, MT. A single mother, she raised her son Walt in a log cabin on the property that still stands today. I visited this cabin and its enormous wheat fields with my family last summer (here’s the story). Like the landscape, the impression it’s made on me goes on and on.

Photographs saved by my mother-in-law Mazie of her grandmother Josie and Walt (Mazie’s father) with their neighbors the Udelhovens, the cousins Audrey and Eileen Nelson, and countless other unidentified ranchers show modest lives, rich with style. The look is one we now identify as archetypally American. So era-defining, their clothing almost seems theatrical. In fact, nothing is more real.

My husband’s great grandmother Josie Stocker in the front, with her cousin Jim Nelson and his daughters Audrey (left) and Eileen (center) in the back. The man in the driver’s seat is unknown. Josie is holding a Gladstone suitcase. Audrey and Eileen wear jeans.

In these photos, many of the men wear engineer coats reminiscent of today’s popular field jackets: Hearty and handsome with large pockets and little collars. I love these hybrid shirt-jacket overlayers and it didn’t take long for me to start imagining a way to make a jacket like them for women in denim – the fine Italian denim I use, specifically. Picture a work coat distilled to its simplest form and cut in the most luscious material. It had to be done.

The men in this photo with Josie are unknown and most likely local ranch hands. They wear simple engineer coats, the inspiration for my own Josie Jacket.

The Josie jacket is crazy-easy to wear and, like its predecessors, works hard under many conditions. I like it sandwiched between a t-shirt and a trench coat. I like it buttoned all the way up to the tippy top. The narrow shoulders are a proper fit; the collar behaves beautifully. It comes in black and white, just like the photographs. I hope one day after years and years of wear it tells as good a story.

The Josie Jacket in Salt with the Bob in Big Sky. The Josie fits TTS. Size down if you want a more shrunken fit.

The Josie in Jet.

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That’s all for today. I really hope you’ll come see me in L.A. next week. Few things make me happier than helping people find jeans they love. For real life. Thank you for reading. Denim Forever.

Jane

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More good links…

Here is a link to donate to Mama2Mama if you want to just be direct about it. Read about it here.

Odyssey Charter Schools still needs support.

Here is a video I made of me in the Sally.