You never forget your first jean jacket. Brand-new, rigid, navy, preferably Levi’s. Every single self-respecting American male teenager owned one of these from the 1970′s to the mid-1980′s. Buying your first denim jacket was a rite of passage. It was okay if your mom bought it for you, but it was not okay to buy a “vintage” jacket from a thrift store. You had to do the work yourself, and buying a pre-worn jacket was just cheating.

In a world where everyone was wearing nearly identical jean jackets, you had to find a way to express your individuality. This is where buttons came in. Adam Ant, David Bowie, English Beat, Talking Heads, or for the rebellious, perhaps the Sex Pistols, Misfits or Siouxsie and the Banshees. You could arrange the buttons in any creative way that you could think of– one side, both sides, different formations. But there was always a fine line between an acceptable abundance of buttons and crossing the line to “button guy”– you did not want to go there. Better yet, you could stand apart by wearing a Boast polo underneath with a drop tail showing in back.

In New York, your jean jacket marked you as an intrepid traveler along 8th St. in the West Village, where you would join your fellow denim wearers on a quest for “imports”, i.e., imported British records from overseas, the more obscure the better, with the illegally pirated copies the most prized. Postermat, Bleecker Bob’s, and Second Coming Records were mandatory stops along the route, as was It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll, where you could check out the rack of Dead bootleg cassettes before adjourning to the back of the store to play the Journey video game amidst the smoke emanating from the men’s room.

- Gray H., Team Boast