Not every jacket needs to fade into the background of an outfit. The Fringe Jacket is built to do the opposite: a boxy, relaxed faux suede shirt-jacket in Olive, with long fringe running across the front yoke, the back, and the sleeves, so there is movement built into the piece before you even add an outfit around it. The snap-front closure and patch pockets borrow their shape from a classic western shirt-jacket, but it is the fringe and the soft, matte suede finish doing most of the talking here, not any one era of styling. It reads as a finished look on its own, which is exactly what makes it an easy one to reach for on repeat this fall.
The simplest way to wear it is also the least fussy: thrown open over something plain underneath. The Mollie Top in Grey Plaid, the mixed media crewneck ELAN introduced earlier this season, is built for exactly that kind of supporting role: a soft 100% cotton knit body with a striped woven panel at the back and cuffs, enough texture to hold its own under a heavier outer layer without competing with the suede for attention. Grey against the jacket's olive-brown keeps the color story quiet, which is really the point. The Fringe Jacket is already doing the work of making the outfit feel considered.
Finish it with denim and the whole thing stops looking like an outfit anyone had to think too hard about. The Jolie Jean in Black is a wide-leg, high-rise cotton-blend denim with a raw hem and subtle fading, a style that has shown up across this blog all season for the same reason it works here: it does not ask for anything, which leaves the fringe free to be the one interesting detail in the mix. It is a combination built for the kind of week that includes a Friday night under the stars at a local observatory's fall star party as easily as a Saturday afternoon at an Oktoberfest-style beer garden, picnic tables and pretzels included, where a jacket you can shrug on and off over a few hours actually earns its keep.
None of these three pieces needs the others to work, which is really the point of building a fall outfit around construction instead of chasing a single trend. The fringe and suede give the jacket its own identity without needing a costume underneath it, the same instinct behind ELAN's full jacket range and the denim-and-suede pairing in the Jericho Jacket earlier this fall. Browse the rest of ELAN's tops and bottoms for more ways to build around it, or read about the brand's own Miami roots, stretching back to 1991, on the About ELAN page.
