Driftworks
Westwood/McLaren final collections and the fine art of falling apart (part 3)
Following on from the posts about the alien tailoring and arrival of the armour jacket, this final post looks at the classic Clint Eastwood jacket. This is the more famous jacket design that gave its name to the A/W 1984 collection, the first collection proper that Westwood designs and shows entirely independent from McLaren following an acrimonious and complex break up and realignment of debts, rights to names, patterns, etc under the Worlds End banner.
Understandably, it receives little critical analysis in Paul Gorman’s McLaren biography aside from suggesting that some elements were McLaren inspirations reworked by Westwood. Instead, Gorman gives a tantalising insight into a proposed collection ‘FAN MM’ that McLaren develops with Simon Withers and Andrea Linz. None of this makes it past sample stage and it is wound up in summer 1984 with no financial backing found, but the concept, resource materials, and manufacturing techniques sound incredible.
Regardless of tedious hair-splitting, the Eastwood jacket is a stroke of visionary genius and a tailoring masterpiece that stands apart from her deconstruction/reconstruction of period costume. The collection is inspired by wide-open spaces and drifting in a world apart, indicative of Westwood’s own circumstances following the turmoil of the disintegrating and ultimately rancorous relationship. She is quoted as saying that: “Sometimes you need to transport your idea to a world that doesn’t exist and then populate it with fantastic looking people”. As her son Ben Westwood recounts on the Worlds End history page, the collection is also influenced by the towering technologies of neon advertising in Tokyo. The clothing is gridded with logotypes and commercial straplines, adumbrating the iconic collection ‘Consumed’ by Raf Simons that I will cover in detail in a later post.
The signature jacket is loosely based upon an item of clothing from one of Eastwood’s Western films, with a close resemblance to the jacket that he wears in the 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales for which he plays the principal character that gives the film its title. This is a jacket that defies an obvious historical or cultural reference point, possibly adopted from a Confederate uniform that Wales sports when joining a renegade Confederate group as he avenges the killing of his family by Union soldiers. Further betrayals see Wales take on a more standard gunfighter guise as he maintains his trademark stony-faced expression and ruthlessly dispatches all the bounty hunters that are on his trail. Do you feel lucky, punk? However, Eastwood’s jacket in the film is not a Confederate uniform nor a standard cowboy get-up; it has the strange squared-off shape with sleeves cut off just below the elbow as well as the square pockets that sit on top of the shoulders. It doesn’t have the obvious, isomorphic cowboy look (such as briefly adopted by Mick Jones in the first incarnation of Big Audio Dynamite) and you can understand Westwood’s fascination with this jacket. It is clearly tailored, but also stepping outside of common frames of reference. I’m also guessing that the alliteration or assonance of pairing Eastwood with Westwood has some appeal.
The jacket produced by Westwood is remarkably distinctive, a design that has not been copied across to other fashion houses. It is structured without curved seams and undertakes a radical challenge in pattern cutting, like the self-imposed writing constrictions set by Georges Perec. The thinking and detailing is immense, with diamond and triangular gussets inserted to create the shapes normally afforded by curved seams. As a precursor to the armour jacket, it introduces the amplified silhouette, exaggerated further with pockets over pockets mounted on the shoulders. The jacket then pulls close to the body this with elongated close-fit knitted ribbing at the collar, cuffs and 40cm waist band. I have two Eastwood jackets stowed away – a brown and beige micro-dogtooth one, and a limited-edition wool one in grey and orange with a graffiti pattern. I’ve had others but regrettably sold them on thinking you can have too many. In truth, you can’t.
An addiction to collecting clothing, to valorising named designers, to raising a garment such as the Eastwood jacket to a cult status of a ‘grail’, is something that circles the world of fashion interest. It continues to manifest and broadcast exponentially. Several high-profile pop stars and celebrities have collected or hoarded Westwood clothing, with some of this now making its way into museum collections. Of course, Westwood set the path of sorts for high-profile rappers and celebrities to now plunder the archives of designers like Raf Simons and so create the astronomical prices we see for certain ‘pieces’. Westwood’s son Ben has written on his mother’s legacy from within the Worlds End shop, digging out historical items and passionately telling their story. The Eastwood jacket was given its own feature, and you can detect Ben’s absolute joy in getting into the history of this piece. The garment was first revisited in 1992 as a more-or-less faithful copy reproduction, and appears every five or so years in adventurous fabrics and sheens It is always very much sought after.
In 1994 the cross-media post-conceptualist artist Adam Chodzko commenced an art-based project called Product Recall, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the Eastwood jacket. His project used the vehicle of consumer environment product recall (through posters and advertisements in i-D magazine) to summon owners of the rare jacket to get in touch as “it has been discovered that this design was based on an earlier scheme for a memory jacket”. This plunged the work into a different orbit, playing on the double meaning of the word recall – the power of clothing to evoke or even encapsulate memory or memories (such as in my work here). In a more honest and less erudite reasoning, the artist also admits that one motivation for the project was to procure a jacket for himself, acknowledging that only 400 were made in the original production cycle and it was something he had always wanted.