There was, for a while, a white jacket in downtown Minneapolis that the man who ordered it never came to collect. I know because I used to shop where it hung. The store was called Hubert White, and one afternoon someone there took the jacket out and showed it to me the way you might show a person a small and quiet miracle. It had been made for Prince. He had designed it himself, ordered it in five colors, and taken four of them home. The white one was still waiting when he died in the spring of 2016. A finished thing, pressed and perfect, that never got to do the single job it was made for.
I have thought about that jacket more than I expected to. It sits at the meeting point of three stories that happen to be very good ones on their own, and almost unbearably good together: a Minneapolis shop, a Chicago workroom, and the most particular dresser his hometown ever produced. Let me tell it properly, because the details deserve it.
The shop
Hubert White was a Minneapolis institution. It stood in the Twin Cities from 1916, opened by a traveling notions salesman named Hubert White who had noticed that nobody was selling proper menswear the way he thought it should be sold. It was the oldest menswear retailer in Minnesota, family-run across the generations, and for its last quarter century it lived inside the IDS Center on Nicollet Mall, about as close to the heart of downtown as a building can get. F. Scott Fitzgerald bought his clothes there. Esquire once named it one of the best men's stores in America. It was the kind of shop that kept the great houses on its floor, did a good share of its business in made-to-measure, and remembered your name and your shoulders the second time you walked in. It has since closed its doors, which only makes a story like this one feel more worth setting down.
So when they brought out the Prince jacket, it was not a stunt or a piece of memorabilia behind glass. It was simply a garment that had been ordered and made and not yet claimed, hanging among the other things waiting for their owners, except that this owner was never going to come.
The maker
The jacket was an Oxxford. If that name means nothing to you, understand that it is, by fairly wide agreement, the finest tailoring made in America. Oxxford Clothes was founded in Chicago in 1916, the very same year as Hubert White, by Jacob and Louise Weinberg, who misspelled the word Oxford on purpose so that no one could ever mistake them for anyone else. Forbes once called an Oxxford the best American-made suit, and Robb Report named the house the quintessential American suit maker, and neither was exaggerating for effect.
What earns that reputation is the hand of it. A single Oxxford garment carries something on the order of fourteen thousand hand-sewn stitches. It passes through roughly a hundred and twenty pairs of hands over about eight weeks. Every buttonhole is cut and sewn by hand, which takes a person some twenty minutes each, against the second and a half a machine would spend. There are around nine hundred stitches in the roll of the lapel alone, put there so that the lapel will fall exactly the way it should for as long as the coat exists. The people who do this work will tell you they can recognize one another's stitching on sight, the way you might know a friend's handwriting. It is, in the most literal sense, a garment full of individual human decisions.
He was a man who authored every surface. Of course he designed his own jacket, and of course he wanted it five ways.
This is the house Prince went to when he wanted a jacket to be exactly, and only, his own. It is a perfect match, when you think about it. The most meticulous performer of his generation, the man who controlled every note and every color and every letter of his own name, sending his ideas to the one American workroom stubborn enough to build them entirely by hand.
The commission
Here is the part I keep returning to. Prince did not walk in and buy a jacket off the rail. He designed one, and then he ordered it in five colors, a private run of a single idea rendered five different ways, which is a very Prince thing to do. A lesser man picks a favorite. Prince wanted the whole chord. He came for four of them and wore them out into whatever nights he wore them into, and the fifth, the white one, sat finished and waiting for him to come in and take it too.
Then, on the twenty-first of April in 2016, he was gone, and the white jacket was still there. It had been cut and canvassed and stitched by a hundred and twenty hands in Chicago, shipped to a hundred-year-old shop in the city that made him, and hung up in anticipation of a man who would not be arriving. Everything about it was complete except the only thing that finishes a piece of clothing, which is a person putting it on and walking out the door.
What a jacket is for
We do not usually think of clothes as things that can be left unfinished, but a garment really is a kind of collaboration that only closes when it is worn. The cloth is chosen, the pattern is cut, the hundred and twenty hands do their work, the shop presses it and hangs it, and then the last and most important contributor is supposed to arrive and complete the sentence by living in it. The white jacket had every part of that except the last one. It is a held note with no resolution, a beautifully made question that never got its answer.
And there is something almost too fitting in the shape of it. Two houses, Oxxford and Hubert White, both born in the same year, 1916, both spending a century quietly perfecting the same unfashionable belief that a thing made slowly and by hand is worth more than a thing made fast. A hundred years later the two of them come together to make one last object for the most extraordinary man their part of the world ever grew, and the object outlives him by a matter of weeks. If you wanted to write a small parable about care, about doing things properly, about the strange permanence of a well-made thing against the fragility of the person it was made for, you could not do much better than a perfect white jacket, hanging in Minneapolis, waiting.
I do not know where the jacket is now. I hope it is somewhere it is loved. But I am glad I got to stand in front of it for a few minutes, and to understand that the man we all think of as pure flamboyance cared enough to design his own coat and order it five times over. That is not vanity. That is authorship, right down to a jacket the world would never see him wear.
Dress for yourself, not the room. Prince did, right down to the one the room never got to see.
Whatever Suits You · Style. Sound. Substance.