Leather Bother

I have been delighted on my return to Tokyo to find that the sales are not over yet. Fearing that I would be picking over the remains of the clothes rejected by the rest of Tokyo's fashion-conscious inhabitants, I have in fact been able to score a number of hits.

One ongoing saga that my friends in Tokyo have been watching unfold was my relentless quest for a jacket.

What I wanted:
-A leather or sheepskin jacket that is warm but not necessarily as warm as my ski jacket, and not exorbitantly expensive.

What I found during my search:
-Nothing but exorbitantly expensive, paper-thin leather jackets.

Now there was no doubt that these leather jackets were works of art, and probably worth the amount that was being charged for them, but there's something disheartening about discovering that the average price of a leather jacket in Tokyo is around 400 pounds. The average price. Seriously, the leather is beautifully soft and all, but we're not talking about Armani or Prada here, so how can they charge that much?? Do the Japanese stroke their cows to death?

To cut a long story short, I worked my way through two jackets before getting to what I wanted.

While back in England, I went to Camden Market, where by the end of the day I must have seen about 500 new and second hand leather jackets. Out of all of those, I only tried on about three because all the others looked so fucking sorry that I didn't even want to take them off the rack. Finally, I found pretty much exactly what I wanted for 100 quid, new -- found at the very end of the day: the last jacket on the on the last rack of the last shop I went into, telling myself that I'll give up if I didn't find anything in there.

Back in Tokyo, I managed the seemingly impossible last weekend, when by chance I found a second hand sheepskin jacket that is exactly what I want for 50 quid! Couldn't believe it, since in Japan second hand shops are pretty few and far between to begin with, and when you do find them, they tend to be more along the lines of "expensive vintage", and given its good condition they could easily have charged 100 for it. Score!