The Girl Zone: Two. Mimou’s Jackets: Emotional Personification

The Black Bomber. The gorgeous winter bomber jacket had once been Nanouk’s, something big sister was given from a job she had for a while in Spain, and it had a small logo of the hotel embroidered on the left breast. It was mostly left behind in the hall closet; it was the turn of the decade and you just could not wear a bomber jacket in public without the obvious connotations. Mimou would, however, wear it at home when she took her sister’s black lab Jim out for a walk. The quilted lining was so thick she didn’t need a sweater at all, but could wear the jacket over a Fruit of the Loom or a Sisley tee, also sister’s old things, but Mimou never minded this. She adored Nanouk. She wanted to be like her, wear what she wore, smell like she did. Nanouk was her greatest hero, the most courageous person she knew, and the most beautiful. Mimou stroked the big dog’s floppy ears, totally in love with Bruce Willis from Moonlighting, and Michael Brandon from Dempsey and Makepeace, and Bill Murray, and Eddie Murphy, whose Axel Foley -laugh she had just gotten down and was doing all the time, driving the rest of the family crazy.

The Camel Suede. It, too, was a hand-me-down from Nanouk. Mimou wore it incessantly through her entire middle school years. It was already old and parts of it were covered in darker specks from where raindrops had hit it, but Mimou loved it to death. She wore it until she no longer could, when the lining gave and the cuffs were so ragged so that it really looked like Indiana Jones’ jacket, the coolness of it so immense that Mimou was beside herself when mother finally had to put her foot down. They were the years of Mimou and Peri secretly spraying Nanouk’s expensive Ysatis by Givenchy behind the ears and to the wrists when they were playing at her house, but to school she would always wear the Puma perfume from a box set she got from Santa that included a deo spray, it was kind of peach and lemon, not bad, but nowhere near the luxurious musky Dynasty scent that was out of bounds, and she and Peri would hover around Nanouk’s make-up case, squirting only ever so little, afraid Nanouk would notice the foul play. The girly, simple bottle of Puma for Girls wasn’t as cool, but it was the one that was legitimately Mimou’s, so she just wore it, making her nose used to the lemony palette. Perhaps that was the reason Mimou would, as an adult, always buy her fragrances in the citrus family. When she was old enough to have a say in these matters, she was one time, when she was fourteen, given her own bottle of Ysatis as a present, after she had pestered both her parents about it long enough. But it was like with anything else forbidden: once it was safe to use, she no longer cared for it the way she had.

The Rose Blazer. Anything but a hand-me-down, it was one of Nanouk’s treasured work blazers. Once she had it on when she came home for the holidays, and when the blazer was left by accident in the closet after big sister was gone again, Mimou immediately used the opportunity to take the beautiful dusty rose colored garment over to Peri’s, before Nanouk would have a chance to miss it, to be used as costume in their murder mystery play. The girls had a video camera on loan, and proceeded to create what to their minds was a terrific tale in the very best Agatha Christie –vein of murder and mayhem, the girls alternating as villains and victims. Years later, when Mimou, having forgotten all about the Rose Blazer, showed the video to Nanouk, she got a delayed earful from big sister, when Mimou’s character appeared in the picture, wearing the expensive garment. “What!? Who gave you permission to use that blazer? When were you even able to shoot this? Do not pause it. Let’s see what else you’ve got on that’s mine!”

Mother’s Black Vintage. The beginning of adult cool for Mimou. The wool overcoat was heavy and baggy, and the buttons went diagonal across the front, and it had no collar, and Mimou adored it. It was that time in her life when she saw Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia, Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, for the first time, and the early Sixties style of the coat felt like a lucky coincidence, and fabulously lovely, and to the point. She would buy copies of The Face magazine at the news stand, learn the lyrics to every song from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins, agonize the terrible agonies of her life-of-death late teens, take her coffee mug outside on the porch to drink in the morning, and drive her small green car with windows open and Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion blasting from the speakers.

Father’s Pinstripe. This would become her signature outerwear for years. Mimou wore the suit jacket through high school and well into her twenties. Whenever the weather allowed it, she changed into this jacket. It became such a natural extension of herself, that when she finally took it to the dry-cleaners and had to wear something else for a few days, she was overwrought by the crisis. The Pinstripe was always accompanied by an old supply bag from an army surplus store, where Mimou kept her cigarettes and her journal and her folded copy on the month’s special Buffy issue of the SFX magazine. The bag would be worn to shreds, too, like the suede jacket that had long before preceded it.

The Quilted Saab Jacket. At the time it was considered cool to wear ridiculous and unrelated name brands or faux name tags on your clothes. A friend of Mimou’s had a Union –tee, a promotional shirt of a long gone chain of gas and service stations. It was the Oasis versus Blur versus Verve versus Pulp –age, and Mimou’s midnight blue with white stripes waist-length jacket fit the bill beautifully. These kinds of clothes were relatively easy to find at flea-markets, and the more ludicrous the label, the better.

The Semi-Goth. A short-lived fancy, it was an impulse purchase from H&M’s discount rack, a black, thigh-length coat, embroidered in dark purple floral pattern throughout, and it sported a faux fur collar, of the horrible extravagant variety that were in vogue at the turn of the century. Mimou wore lots of thick sweaters underneath The Semi-Goth, because it wasn’t nearly thick enough alone to weather the climate of the North. With this coat, she would put on her faux fur midnight blue top hat, which equaled the coat in awfulness, and wear her snow white platform boots that were surprisingly comfy, considering how they looked. Out of all of her life’s jackets, she considered this one the most embarrassing later on, and with the accessories, as an ensemble, a true cringe. She looked like the Mad Hatter version of the already psychedelic Jay Kay from Jamiroquai.

The Corduroy Superfly. The cognac-colored knee-length overcoat had a bright orange inner lining, and the lining was the straw that broke Mimou’s resistance when considering whether to buy, and Mimou felt like Curtis Mayfield or Shaft when she wore it. She loved corduroy, and she loved the idea of the coat looking like your average winter coat on the outside, yet sporting a shocker surprise on the inside. This tendency to pay extra attention to lining would be her undoing when it came to coats and jackets. She strutted in that coat the few blocks from her apartment to have dinner at her favorite Indian restaurant, leaving the very distinct cooking smell in the garment for days. An era in her life marked by loneliness, depression, disillusion and dispirit, and losing her grandmother, she would later have difficulty putting on that coat again, even though she, for some reason, kept holding on to it.

The Woody. Mimou has actually two overcoats she calls by that name, because they are both similar to what Barbara Hershey’s character wears in the fall and winter scenes in Hannah and her Sisters. Every time she wears one of them she is instantly reminded of this film, and particularly the scene where the love-sick Elliot, played beautifully by Michael Caine, runs headlessly across many blocks to accidentally on purpose bump into Hershey’s Lee at a random corner, and together they go book browsing at a near-by book store. Out of all her coats and jackets, The Woodys are the most responsible and adult, and she never feels like she is failing through life, or insecure, or clueless, when she is out in one of them.

The Polka-Dot Audrey. Bought at a ridiculous price, even with large discount, the summer jacket is Mimou’s most expensive piece of clothing. It is white with large black polka dots, and on the lining there are black birds in silhouette, flying in a huge flock. She wears it only for a special occasion, even though she knows she really should get more use out of it. But she can’t help it. It is too beautiful to wear every day. She even envisioned at one point that should she ever get married in a civil ceremony, she would wear that jacket. Wearing it always makes her feel petite and graceful, and the look, for Mimou, is reminiscent of that of Hepburn’s in Two for the Road.

The Brando Jacket. It was a bargain from a thrift shop, costing four euros, and Mimou began calling it that because it sort of looks like what his character wore in On the Waterfront, the checkered lumberjack. Rapidly becoming her favorite jacket, its only drawback is that she can only wear teeny tiny sweaters underneath it. Mimou always feels thin and alert and adventurous and anachronistic wearing it, but in the most mesmerizing way, like she ought to be at the docks with the rest of the workers, hand-rolled cigarette dangling from the lips, waiting for a job, or buying a newspaper at a street corner, or picking up Eva Marie Saint’s glove from the ground and pulling it on.

The New Yorker. Bought at another vintage shop, The New Yorker is a pastel yellow tweed coat, a very special cut, and it goes all the way down to Mimou’s ankles. It actually is originally from New York, tailor-made, in the Seventies. When she was trying it on at the shop, the proprietor mused how well it suited her, and said it made her think of Audrey Hepburn. “Really? I’m getting more an Annie Hall –vibe myself”, Mimou responded, not telling that she already had a jacket with Audrey’s name. About a year later, when the owner of the shop happened on Mimou’s work place, Mimou couldn’t help herself, and asked if she remembered selling her the yellow tweed coat, telling her that it was one of her favorites and in use a lot, and she had lots and lots of coats to choose from, one for each day of the week and then some. “Yes, I remember very well”, the woman replied. “Every time I walk past here I am reminded of our discussion, and how you thought it looked like an Annie Hall, something I wouldn’t have thought before at all; how we come at a garment from totally different places. I think about how lucky I am, to be in this business, and how great it is that we are all different.”

The Camel Suede. While the style of the jacket is completely different from Nanouk’s old suede jacket with the water specks, the one Mimou wore to school, the biggest attraction of the gorgeous leather biker jacket still lays in the fact that the color is exactly the same, and it feels kind of similar to wear and naturally also to touch, all soft and kind of manly, and innocent and having to do with simplicity and happiness, at the same time. The water specks are yet to be materialized.

In the spirit of The Divine Sisterhood of the Jackets, this is for A.