The trucker jacket —road haulier and vehicular logistics personnel jacket to some — packs a great deal into its relatively diminutive form. Take its collar, for starters, which is shapely and full and cut in a slightly hooked shape, and which can be worn just as happily wide open as buttoned to the top.
The jacket has fairly large "warmer" pockets at the front, one on each side — though you perhaps wouldn't realise so at first glance, since they are tucked away entirely out of sight within the pleats that run down the front.
Pockets at the chest, too, built into the jacket's chest seam.
The jacket is, to coin a phrase overused, built to last. The cloth is thick, the seams are turned, and while it is a fairly complex little number, it is designed and engineered in the simplest and cleanest and strongest manner. It is also finished to counter wear-and-tear — e.g. bar-tacks abound, such as at the mouths of pockets.
The chest seam at the front of the jacket is mirrored at the back, where a yoke runs across the shoulder blades. From this yoke emanate two additional pleats — just like those at the front — which run down at approximate kidney coordinates all the way to the hem.
At the back, too, is a belt, which runs between those aforementioned rear pleats, fastening with two brass loops, and allowing the body to be tightened up a little. It's handy if you wish to wear your jacket open, but in a nice and neat fashion, keeping it from swinging around too much at the front.
The buttons on the jacket are solid horn — middling in colour and matte in finish — and each is a little different from one to the next. They are in that regard as if alpha-keratin snowflakes — such is the beauty of being a product of a high-grade natural material, rather than, say, a plastic replica.
The sleeves run down to a fairly tight cuff — a pleat at the front of the sleeve helping with this narrowing — and with the under-seam opening up a few inches from the end. It's effectively a shirt-style cuff, but with a large button, or like a denim jacket cuff, but with a button rather than a snap.
With things so eventful on the outside of the jacket, inside, things are kept as clean and as simple as can be, with a jetted chest pocket on the left and right sides.
The jacket is lined halfway down the back with a smooth and slinky satin, cut as a single panel. It helps with sliding the jacket on and off, being as the outer cloth has the potential for friction. The sleeves, too, are lined with the same cloth.
This is corduroy of some substance: heavy, thick, and wide of wale. Still, corduroy being corduroy, despite its stern exterior, deep down this is a very soft cotton — wonderfully smooth and warm against the skin, surprisingly breathable, and with a character enriched with time and wear.
