Any jacket that’s too light is now a Bob Dylan jacket

Swap your winter coat for a light jacket to tremble like leaves in the wind. This is masochism, you might think, but it seems to be the new fearless obsession of Gen Z. Inspiration? All Bob Dylan style.

In fact, videos and views (currently 12 million) under the hashtag have been going crazy on TikTok for some time now. Bob Dylan Core, in which young children walk down the street huddled in jackets that are not warm enough for winter temperatures. Complete with a frowning look, lost in the void to the notes of the ballad Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, and lit cigarette if necessary. But there are those who even show off the harmonica.

Clearly this is yet another nostalgic retro-mania, inaugurated by Andrew Clark, Programmatic Advertising Manager for OMD USA, which, given the extreme simplicity of replication, has spread like wildfire. If on the one hand the risk of catching bronchopneumonia is just around the corner, on the other it is undeniable that the quixotic scene has a charm that is as funny as it is evocative.

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Specifically, the cosplay of the immense Bob Dylan refers to the famous symbolic cover of the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) taken by Don Hunstein, in which we find the very young singer in a promenade polar in the West Village arm in arm with his sweetheart at the time Suze Rotolo, all cold. Cause, an outfit, in fact, not at all suitable for the New York cold: a pair of jeans, combined with a greyish blouse and the (now highly sought after) thin brown suede jacket. But the momentum towards outerwear has also extended to denim, leather, nylon, cotton, because “any jacket that is too light” is a Bob Dylan jacket, users agree. So much so that it was made into a themed event on the campus of Emerson College in Boston last month.

After all, among the must have of the Duluth minstrel, the classic between-seasons-overcoats-that-no-longer-exist are undoubtedly the most popular ones. Flavorful blazer indie sleaze, suede blousons, leather jackets. Played on layering existentialists alternating sober turtlenecks, striped t-shirts, patterned shirts (polka dots and animal prints uber-glam) and combined with stonewashed jeans, pinstriped or velvet trousers.

Spontaneous, at times ramshackle, let’s say the putative father of a certain aesthetic beat often lexicalized on the catwalk by designers such as the current creative director of Celine, Hedi Slimane. That just a year ago she even managed to hire him for the series of shots Portrait of a Musician, in total look Celine Homme. Not a little stuff for a well-known lone wolf, who not even a Nobel Prize moves, but perhaps only “because it’s cold in Sweden” as Alda Merini would agree without mincing words.

It should also be noted that the legendary Mr. Tambourine is no stranger to lending his image to fashionable causes: the mystic is memorable TV commercial for Victoria’s Secret Angel in Venice together with the model Adriana Lima in 2004. Proof that anything can happen.

According to Anthony Scaduto, one of his most famous biographers, by distributing advance copies of Freewheelin’ in the spring of ’63 Bob Dylan was telling everyone that the cover was the most important part of the album. He had seen it for a long time, one might say, considering that sixty years later the younger generations are rediscovering him precisely through that faded image. At the same time, if we look at the meta-narrative layers that this incorporates under the skin, summarized by the manifesto Blowin’ in the Windis as ironic as the baggage, unconscious, inherent in the Bob Dylan Core also has to do with our distressing present. More than prosperous of masters of war.

But it doesn’t end there. Counting that our super star Timothée Chalamet will be next to delight us with the most “cold walk” cool of 2024 taking on the role of Dylan in the biopic A Complete Unknown by James Mangold then bringing thehype for “jackets that are too light” skyrocketing. Glorified by RayBan and disheveled hair. Already iconic.