so watching supernatural pre-dean getting his leather jacket stolen and tbh, he looks better without it. it’s a great jacket but it’s also very like, “I’m wearing my dad’s clothes.”
ok but like. john’s jacket. look. you have dean, this character that is an amalgamation of every tough cool guy hero tropes—the han solo to sam’s luke skywalker—who pops his collar and drives a big loud car and has lots of sex with women and shoots cool guns and no chick flick moments etc. but then you have the character make this choice in the pilot episode to grab his absentee father’s jacket and even though jensen ackles and jeffrey dean morgan are the exact same height and roughly the same build, the jacket makes dean look SMALL. it makes him look younger (even though 26 is young he’s technically a full grown adult) which is NOT the visual you go for if you’re trying to build up your tough cool guy action hero, especially when compared to his 6′5″ costar. like a surface level interpretation is that obviously this character is taking comfort in wrapping himself in the metaphorical and literal armor his dad wears in an attempt to emulate john, but the point is that it doesn’t fit him. IT DOESN’T WORK ON HIM IT’S AWKWARD AND DISSONANT. and that’s completely unintentional I’m sure, the costuming department just went “oh cool leather jacket” and that was that, but that isn’t going to stop me from being completely insane about it.
also them losing it in between season 5 and season 6 is also an unintentional interesting meta narrative because you can view it as dean trying to take on john’s role after he disappears/dies for sam, and it never works quite right, and then he fails and sam dies and john is dead too, so he gets rid of the jacket and tries to be a different kind of father than john was but it’s not as easy to escape the trappings of how he was raised because changing your behavior isn’t as simple as getting rid of your old wardrobe. and he ends up just getting a different, better fitting leather jacket after he goes back to hunting like somehow he’s accepted that he’ll never escape the life so it fits him better now. but it’s literally only because they brought the original leather jacket down to LA for a promotional photoshoot and someone stole it during the transport. supernatural is a SHOW
