I have avoided zip-up jackets for most of my adult life.
For years I only wore pullover hoodies. The zip-up version — a metal slider, a rigid line running straight down the chest, closing tight around the throat — never felt built for me. My size ran large, which narrowed things further. And I never wanted more fabric, or more friction at my neck, than necessary.
Track jackets sat in the same category. The whole mechanism of closing something around your own throat was never natural to me.
Which is probably why, every July, I can’t look away from the women who do it anyway. Who close a track jacket all the way to the jaw under a Tokyo sun that gives them no reason to.
I’ve spent eight years photographing that decision. I still don’t fully understand it from the inside. So a few years into tracktop girl, I stopped trying to understand it and tried to build it instead.
I bought a mannequin torso online first. I told myself it would help — building out compositions, testing how a jacket sat on a fixed form before a person entered the frame.
It helped, a little. But something was missing. No resistance. No motion. No face. Total freedom, and no friction at all — and it turned out friction was the thing I actually needed. Nothing looked back. The whole thing felt slightly wrong in a way I couldn’t photograph my way out of.
Then, in April 2026, a different torso — studio equipment, already sitting in the corner — got used properly for the first time.
It was still cold enough that layering felt natural. But a second jacket, unworn, photographed alone, never looked right. Nobody’s found a clean way to make an empty track jacket read as more than a hanger with fabric on it.
The torso solved that. I handed it to her. No complicated direction — just asked her to hold it, both of them zipped to the same line, her eyes somewhere past the lens.
Two collars, closed to the same millimeter. One around a throat that was breathing. One around nothing.
Something changed. Not because I explained anything. The torso’s stillness next to her own stillness made a kind of sense neither made alone. The jacket needed her to mean anything. She, next to something that couldn’t stand up by itself, found a stillness I hadn’t photographed before.
I got ambitious after that.
I bought a torso of my own, then a mannequin head that was never designed to fit it. I cut through the neck with a handsaw, badly. Drilled through the base, badly. Forced the two pieces together with more force than the plastic was built to take.
The torso stayed stable through all of it. The head never did — slightly crooked no matter how many times I adjusted it.
I think I was trying to build a permanent specimen. Something that would hold the collar closed forever without complaint, without sweat, without needing to breathe.
What I got instead was a face that couldn’t hold an expression, tilted on a neck that couldn’t hold a joint, in a room where nothing looked back at me. The saw had made a statue. But track jackets aren’t built for statues. They need a body that’s still fighting the enclosure a little.
Here is the closest I’ve come to an answer.
She doesn’t wear the jacket the way you’d wear a coat, and the jacket doesn’t wear her the way a costume wears a body. Something happens between the two — closer to a negotiation than either taking possession of the other. The zipper going up isn’t her disappearing into the garment, and it isn’t the garment disappearing into her. It’s the moment where neither one is fully separate anymore.
That’s not an answer, exactly. But it’s the only honest shape I’ve found for one.
Every jacket I’ve photographed for tracktop girl eventually goes back into circulation. Worn again. Passed to someone else. Sold. Given away.
The torso doesn’t. It’s in a box now, in a different apartment than the one where I cut a mannequin’s neck open with a saw. It’s the one piece of this archive that never gets a second shoot.
I don’t think I fully answered the question I started with. I’m not sure I was trying to.
There’s a shorter version of this thought on Medium, if you want the compressed form. This is the long one — the one with the saw in it.
All specimens of tracktop girl are collected at tracktop.net
