What brings these 3 jackets together, surprisingly the subculture of Skinheads. They also appropriated the Harrington Jacket, the Denim Jacket & the MA-1 Bomber, serious good taste from the Skinhead subculture 😊

As the title suggests I’ll just take you through the Crombie, the Sheepskin & the Donkey Jacket then come back to the other 3 in my next The Juice post in a couple of weeks.

The Crombie

This topcoat in its many forms was first produced in the 1860s at Cothal Mills in Aberdeen by J&J Crombie, it is still produced to this day although it is no longer a family firm & not now in Yorkshire. The Crombie can safely be called an Icon having been worn by Tsars, Kings, Film Stars, Prime Ministers & Presidents.

It is a three quarter length overcoat, jacket doesn’t really do it justice.. made of Melton wool which is a high quality merino wool known for its strength & warmth, the coat has a tailored fit, a fly front (meaning the buttons are concealed, seeing the buttons is too vulgar) with a velvet collar & a distinctive red lining making this a very attractive article of clothing complementing & acting as a contrast to the tight bleach splattered jeans with turn-ups, or cuff as its now known with 18 hole Oxford Doc Martens. In 1970s the coat with usually sported by a large shaven headed youth with a bottle of cider in one hand, giving you the V sign with the other hand, looking confusingly, razor sharp in this ‘uniform’

The Sheepskin or Shearling

The name of the coat is quite self explanatory..made from lamb or sheepskin pelts with the fur usually cropped short. History records no-one in particular to have ‘invented’ this jacket, only that the most populous areas for sheep the jacket was always available in its various forms, particularly where the climate was a little intemperate like the Steppes.. It has many great properties derived from the wool which I wrote about in the very first Juice article, safe to say its warm, & in the design favoured in the 1970s, handy for hanging around street corners with large pockets for the cider & as with the Crombie three quarter length going rather well with those tight jeans & 18 hole DMs.

The actual design is nothing like the famous shearlings that might come to mind such as the type worn by WWII pilots the A-2 Jacket. The coat in my memory is a tan colour, made up of different panels which would be accentuated by the fact that wool would frame each panel like piping, big wool & collar lapels, definitely a 1970s feature & as I mentioned before big deep pockets for the cider.

The Donkey Jacket

I’m not sure many (or any) of the international readers of The Juice would be aware of this jacket & very much unlike the previous jacket the name is not descriptive at all of the material or make up of the jacket!

This jacket was designed by George Key in 1888 based on the Sack Coat, with outdoor manual labour in mind, specifically for navvies working on the Manchester Ship Canal which would require a tough materialed jacket to be worn in all weather conditions that the Northern climate can throw at you, cold, wet & windy, I should know I’m from the North East… Anyway back to the name, as the canal was being dug one of the machines was called a Donkey engine which was a steam powered winch, so it became synonymous with the workers working this engine.

It did exactly what was required, keep you warm and dry while being tough, also made on Melton Wool, perhaps not as refined as the Crombie Melton Wool..generally black in colour. It was un-tailored or what you would call boxy now, straight down from the shoulders to about themid-thigh, in a shirt style with a large collar & no lapels, just buttons all the way up, tight at the neck keep the wind & rain out. An early design feature was reinforced shoulders at first with leather & as time went on PVC to stop the rain soaking though directly.

It was appropriated by all manual labour industries, I remember guys with NCB (National Coal Board) written on theirs in the 1970s, builders & council workers too. Further to this the design feature of large pockets seems to be present here again, I’m now having suspicions that the Skinheads were more practical than stylish, almost Bauhas.. function over form.. always having space for those cans or a bottle of cider..