The engineer jacket is a style of workwear jacket which is short of body, abundant of pocket, lacking entirely of collar, and which goes about its business in a quietly unconventional way.
Rather than bother with a collar, the engineer jacket has, instead, no collar. It has an open, gently curved front — the sort of setup one sees sometimes on engineer and railroad-type jackets from yesteryear — and a placket panel that runs on both sides.
There are four pockets on the outside of the jacket, the first of which (starting from the top) are at the chest, and are tucked right up close to the seams of the placket. They are fairly sensible in width and capacity — wide for chest pockets, maybe, but not in the grand scheme of pocketing.
The second pockets, meanwhile, are grander than grand. They span the distance from the front placket panel to the rear body seam (which just so happens to be the armhole seam). They're whoppers, in short, and are unsurprisingly covered by suitably whoppering flaps.
The engineer jacket has what looks like a normal armhole in the standard inset style ...
... but round the back it can be seen that this armhole has ideas of its own — disregarding any idea that an armhole should tuck neatly around an arm, and instead charting a course down the entire length of the back of the jacket, in so doing becoming part of the overall build of the body.
The buttons on the jacket are medium of size, middling of colour, and are a keratinous microcosm of the entire universe: the random nature of reality fully at play, with streaks going this way, flecks going that way, spots all around, and the merry chaos coalescing into inimitable beauty.
The jacket has plain cuffs at the end of its sleeves. Entirely decorative, mostly, but they do serve as good and proper punctuation points at the end of one's arms.
With the outside being so eventful, the interior is clean and simple, with a jetted chest pocket on the left and right sides.
Two panels of cloth — very sweeping, moderately dramatic — run down inside the back of the jacket. They are lining, to be overly reductive about their status, present principally to hide the inner workings of the jacket. But they're also there to observe and contemplate each and every time the jacket is pulled on.
The sleeves on the jacket are lined with a slinky satin, making donning and undonning it an exercise in pure frictionlessness, and helping to reduce wear and tear with whatever happens to be worn underneath.
This isn't just any Bedford cord. This isinside-outBedford cord, with the trademark grooves on the inside and the previously unsung canvas-like pebbled texture of the cloth on the outside. It is high-grade cotton and is strong and durable and breathable, as well as having a warm and brushed handle.
