Bomber jacket callingIts evolution and enduring style
Right in time for autumn and winter, we examine the history behind one of fashion’s most reliable staples of outerwear and why it’s the perfect signature to accompany all of life’s ups and downs.
30 October 2023 · 2 min read
Within the timeline of our lives sits our most memorable moments and eras: from sharing a first kiss or entering into adulthood to the more niche, like finally getting into Berghain. But within all of those crucial times are the styles we wore that encapsulate them, and if there’s one garment built to withstand all which life throws at us, it’s the bomber jacket.
Birthed out of wartime and necessity — the jacket’s appeal has endured from WWI to today’s modern fashion, making it a staple garment resistant to time and temporaneous trends. Not only has it served as a uniform for the military throughout the last century, but also for a range of opposing subcultures, from skinheads to the LGBTQIA+ community. After being embraced by such diverse communities, it’s become a canvas for making a statement and marking one’s identity.
Take actor Ryan Gosling and his versatile roles, for example. In the 2011 film Drive, the actor played a stone-cold loner and badass getaway driver, instantly recognisable by the silver bomber he donned (which we’re still praising to this day). Yet in 2023’s Barbie, he transformed into Ken — the fragile and naive lover boy of Barbie’s bubble-gum pop universe — crossing from the toy world into the human world in a pink bomber, and even in real life during the film’s press tour. Both characters are lightyears apart, but their bombers remain essential to capturing their identities.
The bomber’s own timeline begins with the introduction of the A-1 flight jacket in 1927, issued for the US military’s fighter pilots. The style would rapidly evolve alongside innovations in aviation over the next 30 years where numerous variations would emerge, like the G-1 (Tom Cruise’s jacket in the original Top Gun); the B-3, which was the first model designed for actual bomber planes; and in 1949 with it’s greatest transformation: the MA-1. It would feature its popular nylon shell and knitted collar — plus the neon orange interior lining for pilots to turn outwards when needing rescue. Until then, the jacket was reserved only for military production, but thanks to a contractor in 1963 (now the brand Alpha Industries), it would fall into commercial hands.
To wear a bomber jacket is to feel indestructible. Especially, when you decide to radically change your hairstyle or quit that job you’re sick of and take on the world. Once the public got ahold of the jacket, its bolstering qualities would spread and commence a rollercoaster of adoption by numerous subcultures. Where it began in the ’60s — after being claimed in a burgundy colourway by British ‘hard’ mods of working-class backgrounds as a shifting rejection of ‘soft’ mod glamour — would not be where it’d remain. Its innate armour would serve as a flag for punks and later hyper-masculine skinheads in the ’70s — before London’s LGBTQIA+ community would begin subverting and dampening that aggressive symbolism in the ’80s.
By the late ’90s and early ’00s, fashion designers like Raf Simons and Helmut Lang were staging legendary shows with the jacket in centre stage and freaking it to new extremes. Now, they’re a functional layer that has a place in anyone’s closet, whether slipping into a ubiquitous olive green option like Robert Dinero in Taxi Driver or wearing your heart on your back in a flamboyant-red. While the jacket has gone on to be relieved of the sketchy connotations it was once associated with (thankfully), its bold charm will undoubtedly linger forever.
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