The Story of the Raglan Shirt
Me and her, Joan and Debbie. And...Bryan Adams?
I am circling back to the previous Story, because of a photo of Debbie Harry. You can read that Story here:
She has since then been lurking in the back of my mind, and on the front of my Pinterest feed.
In the ongoing discourse on taste, I know in my heart that Debbie Harry is my taste. Or, I feel it. I feel it in my heart.
And this is a story from the heart, featuring a somewhat odd piece of clothing. Stay with me.
It starts in Berlin, in 2007. Me and my best friend had been working housekeeping at a hotel all summer to earn money to stay in Berlin for a month that fall.
At this point in time, we do everything together.
We live together, we laugh together and love together. Study hard, party harder.
We are a unit, united in a friendship from early teenage years, honed in common interests for harder music and darker books than the rest of our friends, and now exploring early adulthood, hungry for the world, for sex, drugs and rock´n´roll. That Berlin stay had it all.
I think we liked to think of ourselves as this:
Joan (me, the dark-haired slightly androgynous one) and Debbie (her, the blonde sigarette-smoking bombshell one).
Except we were, at best, the wide-eyed-smalltown-millenial-MySpace-version of them.
Either way, here we are, u-bahning through Berlin from bar to bar, and from flohmarkt to vintage kilo store.
Here, I found a print raglan shirt that was me, in every way, except from the motif of actual print. Of…Bryan Adams?
The shirt itself is perfect. The cotton-blend is so soft, the fit is so right.
And I love a raglan sleeve.
I had several raglan shirts as a kid. I remember a white one, with bright green sleeves. And a t-shirt version, black, with a print of an eagle, covered in cheap rhinestones.
A dropped sleeve in general makes me feel very at ease. A raglan sleeve provides chill.
And it reminds me of my earliest fashion icons: The women (and men) in punk and rock. Just take a look:
A raglan shirt is cool (so is a ringer tee).
What makes this raglan a bit peculiar, for me, more that straight-up cool, is the print.
Bryan Adams? Not to diminish his achievements in the music industry, but the man is…not really cool, is he.
I remember thinking “this shirt is so good, that it defies the un-coolness of Bryan Adams”. I turned it around, and saw that it was from a world tour in 1985, which is the year I was born. Which made it feel right. Some kind of connection.
The Bryan Adams-element added a kind of humor to the shirt, and I do enjoy some humor, also in fashion.
The shirt is still great. And I still love my friend.
But just as I don´t wear the shirt all that often anymore, I don´t see her as often anymore.
I guess we were at our peak in our friendship back then. A few years and many empty bottles and some broken hearts later, as we started paying off our student loans, closer now to 30 than 20, some grudges caught hold, just enough to slowly un-unit the unit. And I was now a part of another unit, with my (still current) boyfriend/partner.
We are still friends and live in the same city, sharing the same friendgroup. We still buy each other Christmas gifts. She was one of the few who came along to my dad´s funeral. There is still love.
And I still love my raglan shirt. It reminds me of her, it reminds me of that month in Berlin, and it reminds me of my true taste.
Of Joan and Debbie.
Featuring Bryan Adams. This might be his coolest song: