We might be enjoying a bit of a false spring right now, but mark our words, and the calendar—genuinely warm days are on the horizon. Which means it’s time to start thinking about liberating your tennis racket from storage and upping the number of SPF in your moisturizer. In the GQ offices, though, it’s also the time to ask yourself one simple question: how’s your light jacket game looking?
Answer carefully, because there are real-world consequences at stake: we’ve all been caught shivering in an outdoor beer garden with nothing but a cardigan for warmth, or bundled up in a wool overcoat for a walk around the shops during a surprise sun trap. What you need, frankly, is a jacket that falls somewhere in between—something transitional, something like, say, the new Dickies Service Painter jacket.
Chances are, you know all about the brand’s goes-with-everything 874 work trousers, but if you need a layer that’s equally likely to survive an apocalypse up top, consider your need, uh, serviced. Rendered in a blouson silhouette from sturdy cotton, yarn-dyed in a subtle stripe—red on cream, or cream on black—and a little heavier than the overshirt you think will pass muster on that first park outing of the year.
Dickies isn’t reinventing the wheel here in its quest for the Goldilocks jacket—and boy, are we glad about it. Instead, the Service Painter borrows from the classics and relies on its fabric to do the rest, using an indestructible canvas to craft a subtly-tailored weapon of spring-loaded layering. Think of it as a denim jacket with a little more dressy appeal, or a leather jacket that you don’t have to baby in a drizzle.
Zip it up to the top, leave it open over a vintage tee, throw it down on the grass for an impromptu seat on which to consume your salad in the park. However you wear it, this Dickies jacket has your back, front, sides—and, in the case of said park outing—ass.
