If a Jean Jacket Doesn’t Make You Pine for Fall, Call Your Doctor Immediately
More Jean Jackets We Love
What to Look for in a Great Denim Jacket
Material and construction: With denim jackets and jean jackets, the most important factor will be the denim itself. Make sure that the denim feels substantial and weighty. Good quality denim shouldn’t be too thin or loosely woven. Though I personally prefer denim without any sort of elastane, you may want to consider opting for a jacket with some stretch built into it for ease of movement. Even then, I’d advise you to limit the percentage of stretch to no more than 2%. Selvedge denim and Japanese denim are often a good sign of a high-quality fabric, but non-selvedge and non-Japanese denim can be well-made too, so don’t put all your trust in provenance.
Fit: Fit is subjective, but most trucker jackets follow a tried-and-true formula with a hem that hits right at the hips. They may have a leaner silhouette or a boxier cut, but a hallmark of trucker jackets is truly the cropped length which helps emphasize your natural proportions and lengthens your legs (without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars and months of agony). Denim jackets with hand pockets are often a little longer than those without, so if you may want to factor that into your decision.
Silhouette: Sizing is key, as well. Most denim jackets are cut on the more tailored end and around hip length. Make sure that the shoulder seams line up with your shoulder bones if not a little past. Keep in mind that you may want to layer underneath, since that will affect how snug the jacket will feel. With time, the sleeves of a trucker jacket will tend to get shorter as the elbow creases set in so if the sleeves are a tad long, you’re probably in a good place.
How We Test and Review Products
Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.
Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.
How We Make These Picks
We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.
To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.
We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.
Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.
Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you. (Read more about GQ’s testing process here.)
