Product Review: The VEILANCE Field IS

Veilance has really nailed that stripped back, functional aesthetic, which imo is just what you should be going for this pandemic: whichever round of “hard” lockdown you’re on, nothing suggests you’ve adapted to life like a utilitarian uniform. That’s why I’ve been wearing this field jacket every day. It’s versatile and futuristic, and also really really warm, especially to wear inside, but that’s ok, because crucial for the lockdown look is an air of hard-won inner peace and indifference to your environment, including temperature. Your perfect posture only confirms seven months of yoga and meditation, or jogging at near-freezing temperatures in shorts and no socks. You don’t clap back when people say things like, “why are you dressed for a polar expedition to go to Lidl?” or “aren’t you afraid you’ll get heatstroke wearing that indoors?” From the outside it just might look like you wear the same thing every day, but you’re expending your mental energy on loftier things, like bio-surveillance and the merits of anarcho-primitivism. With no more ‘fits to plan, you might actually end up thinking about something other than clothes entirely.
Isn’t this all a bit performative? Not if you want to reverse engineer your way to equanimity by giving off all the sartorial signs of already possessing it. And anyway, as Susan Sontag (sort of) pointed out, all style is performative. Who called it gorpcore, instead of just “camp”?