>> Argh me maties!!  Shiver me timbers, but have I got a golden treasure chest for ye lassies...  the John Galliano Pirate jacket (left) from his Fall/Winter 2001 collection.  It's easy to get your hands on one (cheap too!), but don't worry, there's a catch.  You have to make it yourself. 

I came across a great site today, showstudio.com, which  provides the pattern for the Pirate Jacket itself.  Personally, I like the Union Jack version that SHOWstudio made (right) much better than the runway version (Eep!  Did I just say that?  Sacrilege!  Burn her!).  I don't think I've seen a pattern I'd more like to make in all my days of looking through Butterick, Simplicity, and even Vogue pattern books.  I'm so tempted, to start on this... if only I wasn't leaving the country in three weeks.  The corset detailing (I'm such a sucker for corsets), the decontructed look, the flap on the front -- it's all to die for.  And I know that it's possible -- a couple of regulars on craftster.org recently pieced it all together.  And for those of you who are up for the task, they left behind some priceless instructions -- SHOWstudio may be great with the patterns, but they're horrible with the directions.  It's all there for the taking -- so Godspeed, ye landlubbers and wenches.

For those of you who would rather walk the plank than don anything by the Dread Pirate Galliano himself, as you wish -- SHOWstudio's design_download section has graciously provided you with a few other options -- an absolutely gorgeous kimono-inspired jacket (left) from Alexander McQueen's Fall/Winter 2003 collection, a cape from Yohji Yamamoto, and sometime in the near future they will be adding a pattern from Junya Watanabe's forthcoming Fall/Winter 2005 collection.