The 1960s Mustard-Yellow Corduroy Jacket
THE
The young Australian woman was in London for the first time when she visited Portobello Road Market. She’d heard there were interesting clothes there – far more interesting than in her home city of Adelaide.
Maybe that’s why the young woman’s eyes went to all the fitted things on the colourful stalls at the market. She wanted to try something new – wasn’t that part of the reason she was all the way over here on the other side of the world?
That’s how she ended up taking home a mustard-yellow corduroy jacket, which was, the designer told her as he perched on a stool smoking a Gauloises, in the Nehru style, named for the former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who liked his jackets buttoned up to a high neck.
Mr Nehru had died in 1964, leaving a daughter, Indira Gandhi, who by 1966 was herself prime minister. The young woman admired Mrs Gandhi and wondered why India could have a female prime minister and Australia could not.
Thus, the designer mentioning that the jacket was in the Nehru style meant something to the young woman, who tried it on, bought it and wore it almost every day she was travelling throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, thrilled at its unusual colour – she’d never owned anything mustard-coloured before, and nor had anyone she knew – and the way it flattered her figure.
Then she packed it into her suitcase and took it home to Adelaide, where her stylish yet conservative mother expressed distaste at the colour, cut and style, which meant the jacket was relegated to the far reaches of the young woman’s vast wardrobe.
The young woman married in the early 1970s and became a mother shortly afterward. She kept the jacket, hoping that one day she’d have an opportunity to wear it. But styles moved on and the Nehru jacket was no longer in fashion.
Mrs Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, when the no-longer-young woman’s own eldest daughter was turning ten. It seemed impossible that things could change so profoundly when hardly any time seemed to have passed since she was on Portobello Road looking for a unique piece to take home to Australia.
In the late 1980s, the woman, her husband and children moved to Sydney when her husband took a big job in a large company. They settled in the harbourside suburb of Cremorne, and she loved it there, although she missed Adelaide and the routines and places she was used to.
The jacket came to Sydney with the family, and spent a bit of time being used for her daughters’ dress-ups, but eventually the woman had to admit to herself that she was never going to wear it again, and she didn’t want to see it ruined by her daughters.
Someone else would surely love it the way she had, even if the colour had faded a little.
So she took it to a local charity shop where she liked to look for unusual pieces, free from her mother’s judgemental eye.
The somewhat elderly woman behind the counter greeted her, as she always did, and pronounced the garment ‘beaut’, saying she was sure someone would love it.
The original owner left the shop without a pang of regret, believing she had done the right thing by a piece of clothing that had always done the right thing by her.