Purple Prose for a Purple Jacket

It can strike at the most unexpected times.

Walking home from a late night movie, the stars twinkling in the sky, a cool breeze lifting your hair and leaves crunching underfoot. You see it - in a shop window. That purple velvet blazer-cut jacket you’ve been waiting your entire life for.

You edge closer to the shop window – it’s night-time, the shop is closed. You press your face to the glass to get a closer look at the object of lust. Your breath makes a cloud of condensation on the cold pane of glass.

Days pass. Life conspires to keep you apart – meetings with academic supervisors, classes to attend, work – and you fill the time pining after your love, torturing yourself with thoughts of how it’ll never work. The jacket is too impossibly perfect for the likes of you.

But what if – what if – it did work? You allow yourself – reluctantly at first, but the fantasy gathers its own momentum - to imagine the life that you and the blazer will share. The smart casual functions. The trips overseas. The late night rendezvous. The boots, the bags, the dresses.

You imagine your future together. It is fabulous.

You work up the courage to approach the shop and try on the object of your affections. Your soul is in agony – will it, won’t it, love me back? You take it off the hanger. The moment on consummation approaches. The velvet caresses your fingertips, the shade of purple enticing you. You slip it on.

And that’s when it all goes hopelessly pear shaped.

It slumps around your shoulders. Its buttons are wrong. The sleeves are too short. Its too hot. It makes you look like Austen Powers.

Your castle in the air has been blown apart by hurricane of hideousness. How can something so right, that works so intuitively with your innermost sartorial desires, be so…wrong? Is it me? Is it the jacket? Is it both of us? Is the timing wrong?

You take off the blazer. You put it back on its hanger. Your hand lingers on the velvet, a parting caress, but the magic has gone. You walk out of the shop without a backwards glance, and you banish those evil questions from your mind.

Because there are plenty more jackets in the world, which will repay the love that you expend in equal measure. It’s not this one. But there are plenty of jackets in the world that will love you back – and will worship you exactly as you are. And it’s worth holding out for exactly that.