There was a time, not too long ago, when an outfit was considered incomplete without one goes-with-everything staple. Say it with me, millennials: the green jacket!
Maybe you called yours an “army jacket” or a “combat coat” or some other military-adjacent but factually incorrect term for what is canonically an olive green coat with a boxy shape and roomy pockets at the chest and hips. It was oversized, hitting somewhere between mid-thigh and just above the knees, and looked best when paired with black skinny jeans, a band tee, and “combat” boots. Authentic!
The green jacket—technically called the field jacket, if we’re being proper—was as versatile as it was universal among the teens and tweens across America in the early 2010s, from the emos to the It girls to the preps. Now, almost 15 years after it was once the end all, be all of millennial style, it appears the ubiquitous green jacket is having a resurgence. From high-end fashion houses like Prada and Victoria Beckham to more utilitarian brands like L.L. Bean and Levi’s, the field jacket is so back.
The field jackets of the fall-winter 2025 season appear largely unchanged from the field jacket I purchased from Forever21 in 2012, which itself was a reference to the vintage-inspired jackets my alt-girl heroes wore in the ’90s. They, of course, were inspired by the anti-war protestors of the ’70s, who wore the field jacket—often purchased from Army surplus stores, and therefore the real deal—as a symbol of rebellion against the establishment, an ironic uniform for the counterculture amid the anti-war demonstrations of the era. Which takes us all the way back to the field jacket’s humble beginnings: the midcentury American military.
Yep, surprise, surprise, the field jacket is, in fact, a military garment. When it was invented in the 1940s, as the US prepared to enter World War II, it was considered revolutionary: a scientifically tested garment that was finally as functional as it was swaggy.
The field jacket as we know it today is the result of a collaboration between the US military and the then fledgling outdoor clothing industry (think: Eddie Bauer, Leon Leonwood Bean, etc.), according to Avery Trufelman, host of the award-winning fashion podcast Articles of Interest. When it was released to the troops, the field jacket wasn’t just the green jacket of millennial lore. That olive green cotton sateen jacket was actually “the base of a high-tech modular all-weather dressing system,” as Trufelman explained in her latest series for Articles of Interest, called gear.
“This field jacket wasn’t just a coat, it wasn’t just a blazer, it wasn’t just a windbreaker; it was a whole system,” Trufelman said on the podcast. “You could add a liner for warmth, a parka for cold, a rain cover for rain, you could tighten and cinch the drawstring depending on the layers and the weather.” At the time that the system was introduced, layering—literally the act of putting on a liner, then the olive green jacket—was such a novel concept that the Army sewed instructions for how to layer on the inside of the coat.
Trufelman dedicates an entire episode of her new season to the origins of the field jacket. The series, a follow-up to her six-parter about the origins of preppy clothing, is a deep dive into the connection between the US military and American fashion—two seemingly opposed industries which, you may be surprised to learn, have an immense overlap.
And while the base layer of the field jacket system is gearing up for its grand return to the trend cycle, we’d be remiss not to mention that another element—the jacket’s liner—is having its own moment in the fashion spotlight too. “You know the quilted jacket that everybody wears; it’s got that onion shape?” Trufelman tells Glamour. “That was the liner for the field jacket in Vietnam.”
The Vietnam surplus, she adds, informed a lot of how young people dressed during and after the war. “When the draft ended, that’s kind of when surplus ended because you only get surplus when there are big armies, and therefore, extra stuff,” she continues. “When you have a finite army, you don’t get clothiers being like, Oh, no, I made an extra.…” Enter the fashion industry, more than happy to fill the void once more.
Shop some of our favorite field jackets and liners below, and listen to Articles of Interest wherever you get your podcasts.
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