The Himel A-1 Heron À Corps Perdu

 “Time and Nemesis will do that which I would not, were it in my power remote or immediate. You will smile at this piece of prophecy – do so, but recollect it: it is justified by all human experience. No one was ever even the involuntary cause of great evils to others, without a requital: I have paid and am paying for mine – so will you.”

---George Gordon Lord Byron

 

 

I wasn’t in the market for another leather jacket.  But I’m now sure I don’t know what that means.  Put another way: I really wasn’t shopping but when it comes to The Good Stuff I’m on perpetual reconnaissance.  

 

Little anymore makes my heart race.  Is that a bad thing?  Love’s truest consort is nascent heartache, for what better measure is there of such reverie than the potential for defenseless enchantment?  Tomorrow’s arrival can make today’s impulse look like yet another costly gaffe.

What’s life without a tincture of reckless daring?  “Despair and genius are too oft connected.”I am at a loss to describe why I needed another Himel. “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore.” Who wouldn’t want to be Byron? Wearing a leather jacket this cool.

 

I’m not seeking perfection though I confess at least since my first great leather jacket was stolen---first by me, then from me---I might be trying to work something out.   My brother had temporarily vanished leaving his classic Schott in a closet at home.  I regarded it abandoned though was later accused of larceny.  Said Perfecto was lifted in a bar while on a dance floor---a place I should never have been trying to win a girl’s affections without the jacket on.  This was 1975.

 

My leather jacket journey has been from the outset more like the pavé on the way to Roubaix.  As Henri Pélissier described his own 1919 victory, “This wasn't a race. It was a pilgrimage.”  That’s how I feel about 50 years of leather jackets.  I’ve lost more than I’ve won but that has nothing to do with the sweet taste of conquest.

 

Himel is victory, Pyrrhus notwithstanding, even if “one other such victory might utterly undo him.”  When we say everything of real value comes with a cost, we usually mean something is taken from us.  But what we must also mean is that some things are worth the disbursement: “a naked thinking heart that makes no show,” as Donne puts it.

 

A few months back I saw David Himel dying some uneven colored horsehide at home.  The tanned skins original beauty demanded another take and Himel’s plan was to turn them into a seductive, beckoning chocolate colour (warranting even an extra vowel in the process).  He made for all the world to see a process performed in his own living room, the transmogrification of imperfectly wonderful Japaense horsehide into even greater, more pleasing imperfection.  Perfection, we should note, is not only artifice and sophism it positively ruins a leather jacket.

 

“Give me that man/ That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him / In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, / As I do thee.”

 

My idea was (yet another) unlined Cossack style Himel, his too often imitated but unsurpassed Heron A-1.   Without a lining a jacket like this reveals its inner workings in ways that make its sewers---crafts-persons with a lifetime of experience and remarkable skills—restive, even overwrought with possibility that the client making such a request might not fathom fully the consequences of such a choice.  But I’d done this one before and what I like best is that you can get even closer to the elemental narrative.

 

Wearing another living being’s skin that has passed through a complex process, other hands, other provisos and terms will cause its own special fioritura.  Put more plainly, I just wanted to see what would happen.  

 

“Help me, Lysander, help me! Do thy best To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!”

 

Another choice was to go just bit upsized to accommodate a more layered utility with a sweater or heavy flannel underneath.  The jacket would still have to look right with just a tee.  Never sacrifice young Brando for old Brando, even if you look more less Johnny than the Don in your dotage.  That takes us to “bespoke” fits and what that means.

 

 “The heart is sorely charg'd.”

 

Bespoke is about a conversation, not compromise so much as a process of discernment and achievability.  It’s not like you are exiting through the gift shop, ya’ know?  You may be seeking the unattainable but you will step right straight into callow vanity should perfection be your aim.  Try to spare yourself empty imaginations and you will find the greater pleasure in the parley between those who really know and what you think you know.

The key is neither to sacrifice yourself on an altar abdicating personal preferences, in this case to the couturier, nor to mistake oneself for an unfeigned phantom of threads.  There’s also no need to establish even a crumb of creative tension in this conversation any more than surrender.  You gotta know your job as client if you want an experience less vainglorious, more sating, perhaps empyreal.

 

Bespoke can be at once exhausting and appealing.  You will participate: in all the numbers, addressing anxieties you may not have known you possess of potential faux pas, and be subjugated to maintain the midline in anticipation.  It is an exercise in constancy that must yield control but should not succumb to passivity nor indulge too much dreamscape.

 

You find out about yourself when you enter into a commitment that costs more than money and embraces such an irrational expectancy.  You have to feel trust and think purposefully so that the result brings matters to earth, bursts undo bubbles, and exceeds predictions.  You’re going to need to come of age unhurriedly in the cask of your dreams, like a fine single malt or a bolt of raw state denim made on an obsolete loom.  Have we had enough philosophizing about a jacket yet?  Never.  Too much of everything is just enough.

 

A bespoke jacket of this quality provides a window into private spaces of the heart, into the recesses of desire’s unrequited nights on the dance floor, into the place where your own mortality is worn like a horse’s front quarters.

 

The thing of course is that it is just a jacket but it’s never just jacket.  If it were only another cool car or even your grail boots, that would be that.  Cars may last longer well-cared for but then it’s about vigilance, maintenance, caution; you have to pamper and that violates Bryon’s rule that impressing others is a risible adventure into pretension.  Much of our contemporary life is governed by planned obsolescence.  Try to buy less of that, more things like a Himel.   

 

“I had not so much scope for risibility the other day as I could have wished, for I was seated near a woman, to whom, when a boy, I was as much attached as boys generally are, and more than a man should be.”

 

Boots wear out with good use and the best should be rebuilt.  But a jacket wears in, it not only gets better with use, it can absorb the sum of experience, consume failure, and digest repletion.  The best jacket is harder to patina than the best boots and when its fit is proper, to a level of bespoke or comparable, then it calibrates rather than conforms.  Live long enough and with it and the jacket becomes another you.  Stay mindful that the jacket can become a former you if you aren’t careful with the beers.  Strangely enough, when it outlives you, it can do all of that again.  

Another guy might someday own my boots but the one who gets my Himel will also think it is his.  

“She is said to be an heiress, but of that I really know nothing certainly, and shall not enquire.  But I do know, that she has talents and excellent qualities; and you will not deny her judgment, after having refused six suitors and taken me.”

 

 

So the jacket.  (“Finally, the jacket,” you’re thinking.)  The jacket leather is from Shinki, the renown Japanese tannery, front quarter horsehide, and as we’ve already made mention,  personally dyed by David Himel.  (You can find that YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpOVu6xiRX0 )

 

Now if Jesus was a sheriff and I were a priest

If my lady was an heiress and my mama was a thief

If papa rode shotgun on the Fargo line

There's still too many bad boys

Tryin' to work the same line

My personal choice was simple, the most classic of the Heron A-1 designs: button front, leather facing so that the shawl collar reveals no lining, and, perhaps most distinctively, no lining at all and so no interior pockets.  With the front patch pockets there’s enough room unbuttoned for phone and a pair of glasses but they look better closed.  The cut fits at the waist so that you can sit on your bike (or the couch) and the bottom of the jacket offers block-width coverage.  The side adjusters let you pull in stylishly without affectation.  Unbutton the closer to the bottom two buttons and the jacket handsomely splays enough so you won’t look like a muffin.  The sleeves come to a button closure, an older look than the elasticized wool on, say, a traditional A-2 but you can loosen or tighten the width because the button holes are perfect and there are, of course, two buttons.  That Reese button machine is a marvel of a previous age.  Everything on this jacket is where it is supposed to be.

 

“I must, of course, reform thoroughly; and, seriously, if I can contribute to her happiness, I shall secure my own.  She is so good a person, that – that – in short, I wish I was a better.”

 

Without a lining there’s really no option for an internal pocket so when you reach unconsciously to put your something in the pocket that doesn’t exist you are reminded you made that choice happen.  I have yet to be frustrated by this, only reminded that I too am “… like the Jolly Miller, caring for nobody, and not cared for. All countries are much the same in my eyes. I smoke, and stare at mountains, and twirl my mustachios very independently. I miss no comforts…because I live more temperately.”

 

There are plenty of jacket designs with more pockets and should you ask for one of the many excellent linings---ask for a tweed that isn’t on the website--- there will be further options for internal pockets.  My next will opt for just such a reach. I might take up smoking again if I had the right pocket though that would only make cigarettes a bit less misguided.

 

Of course the unlined jacket shows you all of the stitching, seams, and joints.  I don’t know if unlining causes the cutter and sewer to make further choices but I do know from previous experience with lesser quality jackets that lining is often used to conceal a multitude of sins.  Not so in this case and I’d wager that anyone who pulled the lining from their Himel would find workmanship as superb as if there were none.

 

This jacket is a success in all that was conceived.  Because I have been through the bespoke process with Himel before I had little with which to concern myself even though I asked for a modest size adjustment, looking for room to layer a gansy or the like.  A word here further about that sizing process.  Unless you can visit the workshop in Toronto you’re going to have to take the time and make the effort to provide proper measurements.

 

The good news is that this is part of the fun and in our modern age of communication it’s not like you’ll have to travel three times to Saville Row to get this done right.  Is it “proper bespoke” without a hands-on fitting?  Certainly I think so.  These are not cut out patterns but paper drawn designs that meet your individual specification.  This is your jacket, not a made to measure or mere modification.  To compare this with off-the-rack is to think that all button holes are equal or that your “internet research” is research.

There is a size tag on the collar tag of all of my Himels but that appears as kind of fingerpost for the future.  The next owner (or seller) will be able to say something like “this is a 40” when in fact it’s bepoke and the wearer will adjust to measurements, as one would with an off the rack.  This ain’t no off the rack, not by a long shot.

 

“Besides, I mean to write my best work in Italian, and it will take me nine years more thoroughly to master the language; and then if my fancy exists, and I exist too, I will try what I can do really. As to the estimation of the English which you talk of, let them calculate what it is worth, before they insult me with their insolent condescension.”

 

I’m getting on and this jacket will not be mine 30 years from now, maybe not a lot sooner than that?  What does tomorrow promise?  Whatever the gods decide, a leather jacket of this quality is more stewardship than ownership.  You’re not protecting the future by owning title to undeveloped land so don’t pretend that you’re doing this for someone else.  There’s no virtue to signal only a great jacket to be worn.

When you do make this choice, go through this process, you will pay a handsome but not an obscene price.  There are off-the-rack options that cost as much (or nearly) and there are far lesser, quite famous designer brands (shall we name names?) that cannot remotely compare in any measure of quality.  Nothing of real value comes cheap and we should use “nothing” like “ever” and “always,” that is, with real infrequency and respected boundaries.

 

Expect not life from pain nor danger free,
Nor deem the doom of man reversed for thee.

 

Greatness is not to be confused with success and what you really want is both.  The success of a fit and style that you will enjoy for years and years---one that will invite you to stay, umm, fit.  And with the greatness that is neither success nor failure you will find instead its worth.  This Himel Heron A-1, this is worth more than its cost and that is a feeling rare, even inestimable.  Worthy of Byron, I say.