Death of a Leather Jacket

We have a mould problem in our flat. It's worst in winter, when all the windows are closed and there's no ventilation to clear condensation.

Mould spreads in the hidden places. We clean it up. It breaks out again. We clean.

The day before we went to Sydney last week, A. pulled my old leather jacket out from the cupboard. It looked like something from a zombie film. The lower half was green.

I didn't know how to clean it, and we didn't have time. We put it away to deal with when we got back.

We got back last night.

I googled how to clean mould off leather, hung the jacket up in the bathroom, and got to work.

Very quickly, I realised it was a lost cause.

The mould was not just on the leather, but inside the sleeves and the pockets, and all through the lining. It would take a professional to clean it up properly. And the jacket wasn't worth it. The zips were broken, the lining frayed, the stitching falling apart.

My cleaning stopped being an attempt to save the jacket, and became a ritual washing of the dead.

I bought the jacket from Mars Leathers back in the early 90s. It was the first reallly "goth" piece of clothing I owned. I was an awkward, suburban nerd at the time, but I was reading William Gibson and The Sandman, listening to NIN and The Pixies and Fugazi. So the jacket was an attempt, I suppose, to become someone different. Someone cooler, and more interesting.

I wore it constantly for over a decade. I wore it to goth clubs and roleplaying conventions and to gigs. I made love in that jacket. I made love to a girlfriend while she wore that jacket. She loved me wearing it down the street. She said it made me look intimidating, that no one hassled her while she was with me. When artist friends drew portraits of me, they drew me wearing that jacket.

Slowly, I grew out of it. Emotionally, and physically. I put on weight. The sleeves were too short. I felt slightly foolish wearing it as I got older, like I was playing dress-ups. Eventually I hung it up in the back of the wardrobe and left it there, not sure what to do with it.

I always had this sentimental idea that I would pass the jacket on to someone one day: a friend, a lover, maybe even a son. That never happened. And so time passed, and the mould spread, and the jacket slowly died of neglect.

It's just a piece of clothing. It's twenty years old, and falling apart, and it never fit properly anyway.

It's just a piece of clothing. But there are memories in the fabric, old hopes and adventures and dreams. I bought the jacket to be someone different from who I was. And for a while, with the jacket, I was.

But in the end, a jacket is just a jacket, and who you are has more to do with what you do than what you wear.

I washed off the last of the mould, took some photographs, folded it up carefully, and placed it in the bin.