The denim jacket has been around since the 1880s, when Levi Strauss first made it for California miners. But it took the era of 1969–1989 to turn it into something more than workwear — to make it the defining garment of a generation that believed, above all else, in being exactly who you were.

By the mid-70s, the jean jacket had migrated from the working class to the counterculture to the mainstream, and in doing so it had become something rare in fashion: a garment that belonged to everyone. You could wear it to a concert or a job interview, to a rodeo or a record store. It asked nothing of you except that you be yourself.

You could tell everything about a person by what they'd done to their jean jacket. Patches, pins, paint — it was a biography you wore.

The customization culture around the jean jacket was its own art form. Patches from bands you'd seen, pins from causes you believed in, embroidery from a girlfriend or a sister, paint from a night when you felt like making something. The jacket became a record of a life — a wearable autobiography that you updated as you went.

Springsteen wore his on the cover of Born in the U.S.A. in 1984, and suddenly every kid in America wanted one. But the jacket's appeal predated Springsteen and outlasted him. It was the garment of the working road, of the kid who didn't have money for fashion but had something better: a sense of self that didn't need a label to prove it.

The jean jacket's democracy was real. It crossed class lines, gender lines, regional lines. A rancher in Montana and a punk in New York and a surfer in California could all wear the same jacket and mean something different by it — and all of them would be right. That's a rare thing in fashion. That's why the jean jacket endures.