What jacket would you wear during the apocalypse? The broad picture, of course, depends a lot on what kind of apocalypse you鈥檙e dealing with鈥Mad Max studded leather will sink you fast in a Waterworld. But the sartorial details will say a lot about who the apocalypse makes you become.
In Netflix鈥檚 much-hyped new movie听Bird Box, the end crash-lands as a monstrous force that kills by being seen, transforming听Malorie (Sandra Bullock) into a ferocious outdoorsmom as she desperately canoes five-year-olds Boy and Girl toward their last hope of safety. She does it while wearing a blindfold and, Netflix confirms, a perfect nontechnical in mauve (officially listed as 72 Purple), which sold out before we could buy it. Though Bird Box has gotten , the puffy really stuck with us.
Objectively, this hoodless snap-front ultralight puffy is absolutely wrong for the serious task of blindfolded apocalypse canoeing: its durable water-repellent coating is designed to withstand light rain at most, and its unspecified-fill down is guaranteed to get soggy and suck body heat. It doesn鈥檛 even have a hood. (In the movie, Malorie supplements it with what we swear is a beige cashmere hoodie, a nice touch.)听
Compare it with the worn by The Descent鈥s protagonist听Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), whose adventure-athlete and cave-orc-bashing chops set a high bar for outdoorsmoms in the horror genre.听Or听the 听worn by The River Wild鈥檚 Gail (Meryl Streep), a former-river-guide outdoorsmom who has to raft听her son down Class V rapids at gunpoint. And given that Bird Box bears a strong genre-family resemblance to The Road, it also feels fair to compare it with the that envelops Man (Viggo Mortensen) as he doggedly safeguards his son, also named Boy.
In this lineup, Malorie鈥檚 Uniqlo puffy looks a little flimsy for the task of survival. Yet she听wears it with such awe-inspiring fierceness, exuding confident precision as she navigates the water and the woods, that you find yourself thinking, Surely a Patagonia label will eventually slide into view. But that would have ruined the point of the outfit.
Malorie听didn鈥檛 go into this thing as a technical-puffy-wearing outdoorsperson; she went听into it as a reluctant mother-to-be, draped in vintage-inspired fur-collared teal wool. And after things go sideways, she doesn鈥檛 get to have niceties like a looting spree at REI, because the apocalypse takes everything, hope by hope, until all that鈥檚 left is Boy and Girl. And that hones her into a brutally determined guardian听who doesn鈥檛 hesitate to blindly hurl a rowboat down rapids because that鈥檚 the only choice left. Like all outdoorsmoms, Malorie works with what she鈥檚 got: in this case a mauve Uniqlo puffy, as aggressively basic as she is aggressively consumed by survival. And she owns the hell out of it.
If you really wanted to channel Malorie鈥檚 mauve sensibility but failed to snag the Uniqlo听puffy, we found you some听pretty close alternatives:
Lululemon Pack It Down Jacket in Mauve Stone ($139)
Patagonia Women鈥檚 Downtown Jacket in Kiln Pink ($279)
Eddie Bauer Women鈥檚 Astoria Hooded Down Parka in Vintage Rose ($139)
