The Shacket, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love Bradley Cooper

Somewhere around the beginning of this year, I started getting targeted ads for a particular shacket. (A shacket, if you're unfamiliar, is a portmanteau of shirt and jacket. Some people might refer to this sort of thing as an overshirt. It's a light coat, with buttons and a collar that looks like a shirt collar.)

Now, as my 9-year-old put it recently, I'm never not thinking about shackets. I already had two or three. But this one was a particularly nice shacket. It had eye-catching colours and a nice pattern to it. It was heavier than the lightest shacket I already owned, and lighter than the heaviest. And most importantly, even though it was in an Instagram targeted ad, it was actually from a high quality brand I'd heard of before. I'd bought myself a coat there a few years earlier, in fact, that had held up and still looked nice.

In short, I felt justified in buying this shacket. So I did.

For a while, life was great. The shacket looked nice. It fit well. People complimented me on it. New shacket? they'd say. It looks good on you. I was still getting the same targeted ads for it — sometimes while sitting on the train wearing the shacket, which was a little embarrassing — but other than that, I was happy with my purchase.

After a few weeks though, the targeted ads changed. Now the lead image was of a shirt, and that shirt was being worn by actor and celebrity football club owner Ryan Reynolds. The brand was touting themselves as a brand of the rich, famous, and desirable.

This made me somewhat uncomfortable. I actually texted a friend a picture of the ad at the time, just to emphasise that I had bought the shacket before I knew it was the kind of shacket that Ryan Reynolds might wear. Not because I have anything against coincidentally wearing the same clothes Ryan Reynolds might wear, but to make clear that I hadn't bought the shacket because I wanted to wear the same clothes Ryan Reynolds might wear.

Anyway. Not long afterwards, I wore the shacket to Cambridge to visit my brother and his husband, and they complimented me on it too. They were so complimentary, in fact, that I shared the brand's website with them in case they wanted to buy a new shacket for themselves. (Not the same one, ha-ha-ha!) I'd already practically forgotten about Ryan Reynolds. I was enough of a brand ambassador on my own.

Still, those targeted ads kept following me around. Soon I started to feel self-conscious wearing the shacket. At this point it wasn't about Ryan Reynolds, either; he wasn't in the ads anymore. No, the problem was, I'd been seeing these targeted ads for months now — and the thing about targeted ads is, I knew if I'd been seeing them for months, then probably a lot of the other people I crossed paths with day-to-day had also been seeing them for months. I'm not the only white millennial man living in southeast London and working in the creative industries. The ad was surely targeting my shacket-wearing peers too.

Soon, it began to feel like it was only a matter of time before I walked into a pub and found someone else there wearing the same shacket. Or maybe worse, someone else who had resisted the weeks of increasingly desperate targeted ads and not bought the shacket, and who thought I was pathetic for having given in. Can you believe that guy actually bought that shacket? they'd think. What a sheep. What a conformist.

You're being silly, Andrew, I told myself. Nobody cares that much about your shacket.

Then I wore the shacket to a work meeting with a client, and at the end of the meeting that client said, oh, that's a nice shacket. Where's it from?

I named the brand.

Of course, she said. I should have known. The shacket of choice for the millennial southeast London man.

Reader, I steeled myself against this assault on my individuality. You're being silly, Andrew, I repeated to myself. You like the shacket. You've liked it since you first saw it. It looks nice. It fits well. People compliment you on it all the time. You shouldn't change your mind about it just because other people might think you bought it to be more like Ryan Reynolds, or because other people might judge you for giving into the targeted ads, or because other people might also own the same shacket, or even because someone literally implied you were a sheep or a conformist for wearing the same shacket brand as everyone else like you. We're living in a consumer capitalist society. Nobody is unique. Nobody has an original thought. Just wear the clothes you think are nice.

Still, I did start to wear it less after that. Only because the weather was getting nicer, I told myself. The spring in southeast London was unseasonably warm. It was time to switch over to my lighter shacket anyway. It was nothing to do with what other people might think of me. In fact, when I went on holiday to Nevada in April, where the weather was due to be colder again, I took the shacket with me. I even wore it on the plane. That's not the behaviour of someone who's been influenced by worries about what other people might think of him.

Walking happily around Nevada wearing my shacket though, I did begin to wonder. Was it really the colder weather? Nevada was even more unseasonably warm for the time of year than London had been. If I was being honest, maybe it was that, on the other side of the world, far from the relatively small London brand that made my shacket, I no longer had to worry about other people owning the same thing or seeing the same ads.

Maybe it was that, safely in Nevada, my shacket was no longer something that might make people think I wanted to dress like Ryan Reynolds, or just bought whatever ads told me to buy. It was no longer, in other words, a statement about the sort of person I was. It was just a shacket again.

I mean obviously, this was a silly thought too. All clothing is a statement of what sort of person you are. That's at least half the point of clothing. If anything, what changed in Nevada was that it was a different statement: I'm a man in a nice shacket; not, I'm a man in that nice shacket. But it's not like being a man wearing a nice shacket made me some kind of unique jewel either. So why did this stupid shacket suddenly bother me so much?

I'd never really had a problem with targeted ads before. Why wouldn't you want to get ads about products that some algorithm thinks you'll like based on your past behaviour? Isn't that better than buying products that are in the the same generic catalogue the whole world gets? In fact, if the algorithm is accurate, targeted ads are a great way to discover new things you might never find otherwise. Right? Isn't that why we follow critics, too, really? Read magazines? Ask friends for recommendations? We've always wanted help discovering things we like. Targeted ads are just the latest way to do it.

But now I see the other edge of the sword. Before targeted ads, the middle-aged men of southeast London probably all had equally similar taste in clothing. But if they did follow critics or read magazines, there was some variation in whose opinion they valued the most. And because they had to go out to actual stores and look for items they liked, and because they all went to different stores with different stock levels of different things at different times, those tastes were expressed more at random. There was a lot more noise in the equation.

But when the algorithm can just serve everyone that one shacket it knows we'll all love, and everyone can buy it immediately with a few taps on a phone screen, that noise is gone. We all just have the same shacket. We all have that shacket.

When I got back to London, I told myself none of this mattered. It's fine, I thought. It's definitely not shacket season anymore. I'll just put it in the cupboard until the autumn, and by then everyone will have forgotten about the targeted ads anyway, including me. It won't be that shacket anymore; it will have gone back to being just a nice shacket.

Reader, that is not what happened.

For one thing, I didn't put it away. I wore it to the movies the other weekend. A victory for not worrying about what other people think.

But then the targeted ads started again, and this time it was even worse. Now there was a picture of my shacket — that shacket — with the caption, "As seen on Bradley Cooper." I was literally wearing Bradley Cooper's shacket. Or maybe he was wearing my shacket. Either way, we were wearing the same shacket, and the brand was selling it as Bradley Cooper's shacket. Worse, the movie I had just worn it to was the new Marvel movie. I had gone to a Marvel movie wearing a shacket owned by a Marvel movie star.

To my increasing horror, when I googled "Bradley Cooper shacket" to try and verify this surely impossible fact, my shacket popped up straight away, from an article in GQ. In the photograph, Bradley Cooper also had a beard, and long hair sticking out of the back of his baseball cap, just like I had at the Marvel movie that week. I had somehow, inadvertently, modelled my personal style exactly on Bradley Cooper.

The indignities continued to pile up. When I texted that same friend this new development, she texted me back a picture of her own. She'd been leaving a meeting that afternoon and had seen someone else wearing the same shacket. When, stricken, I subsequently started this blog post, I googled "overshirt" while writing the first paragraph, to check whether it should have a space or not — just "overshirt", not "Bradley Cooper overshirt" — and my shacket popped up on the first page of results. I wasn't just wearing a nice shacket anymore. I was wearing the uber-shacket. Like the old saying (kind of) goes, when you looked up shacket in the dictionary, there was a picture of mine.

In defiance, I wore the shacket again that same afternoon. As I walked past the gym by my house, a dozen runners on treadmills watching me go past, I was plagued by those same questions. Had they seen my shacket in a targeted ad? Had they seen it on Bradley Cooper in GQ? Were they thinking, I can't believe that guy bought that shacket?

Or were they just thinking, hey, that's a nice shacket?

Neither, I told myself. They probably weren't noticing my shacket at all. They were probably all running in place worrying about their own outfit, or general appearance, or pace, or sweatiness. And even if they were noticing my shacket, and even if they'd been seeing the same targeted ads as me for months, they were probably thinking... Well shit, I can't buy that shacket now. Or else: hey, that guy bought the Bradley Cooper shacket. Maybe I should too.

In other words, they were probably about the same level of self-involved as me, or indeed anyone else living in 2025, and only cared about my shacket — if at all — to the extent that it informed their own sense of identity. They were thinking, ultimately, either "I'm like that guy" or "I'm not like that guy." And they'll be thinking that no matter what I'm wearing. So I might as well wear the shacket. As long as I don't end up in the same pub as Bradley Cooper, it'll probably turn out okay.

Stay the fuck out of southeast London, Bradley.