As I progress through my senior year at Dartmouth, I go back and forth between feeling as though freshman year was a lifetime ago or just last week. This seems to be a universal experience among my friends, and we all reflect on how far we’ve come in different ways. Some remember the time they took ENGS 12 on a whim and instantly fell in love with the hands-on creativity of the human-centered design minor. Others reminisce about their first Hanover winter and how they have since learned to prepare for the toughest season on campus.
One thing we all remember, however, is our very first frackets that were stolen and who they belong to now.
For those who might not be familiar, a fracket is a frat jacket. It is the cheapest, ugliest, warmest jacket you wear solely to go out to frats. It is a jacket you enter the frat wearing, but have only a 50-50 chance of finding upon exiting. When you emerge from the basement and your fracket isn’t where you left it, you tend to grab the next best one you can find. Some may call this stealing, but I prefer to think of it as a communal system.
I fondly remember my first fracket. It was from Amazon, and it was Dartmouth green, which is where I went wrong. I shouldn’t have been surprised when it got stolen the first time I ever wore it. Who wouldn’t want a somewhat warm, rather pretty green jacket? I learned my lesson: A fracket should be as unattractive and distinguishable as possible so that no one will want to steal it, and even if they do, they won’t be able to get away with wearing it without the rightful owner recognizing it.
Left fracket-less, I had no choice but to steal someone else’s so that I didn’t freeze on the walk back to my dorm. It just so happened that the first, most nondescript jacket I saw on the floor behind the couch where I had left mine was a black Patagonia puffer jacket. The owner clearly did not understand or care about the 50-50 chance rule.
Did I feel a little guilty that I was about to steal this person’s expensive jacket? Yes. Did I steal it anyway? Also yes. I even found a pair of gloves in the pocket!
I was proud of myself for how long I managed to hold onto that fracket — a few months at least. Inevitably, though, someone stole the stolen fracket. So I stole again.
My next find was also pretty great. It was a teal and pink vintage ski jacket that I ended up setting aside for special occasions like Winter Carnival.
In between frackets, I made use of my resources and wore my Allen House sweatshirt out one night. It is beyond me why anyone would reach for that paper-thin, hideous sweatshirt, but I never saw it again. Perhaps I subconsciously wanted to lose it and didn’t try very hard to wear it out of the frat that night.
I’m now a senior, and I’ve already bought two frackets from Listen this year. I’ll probably go through their whole stock by June.
Aside from the Patagonia fracket, I haven’t had much luck hanging onto frackets for more than a few months. Some Dartmouth students, however, have gamed the communal fracket system much better than I. Rachel Pontes ’26 has even managed to use her friend’s mom’s old ski jacket as both her fracket and her ski jacket — if you need some insider advice on fracket strategy, she is your girl!
MC Hadley ’26 bought her bright red fracket on Amazon at the start of her freshman fall. She’s from Georgia, and single-digit temperatures were new to her. Unlike me, her color choice was intentional.
“I bought the bright red one on purpose because I wanted it to be super noticeable so that if somebody took it from me, I’d be able to track them down,” Hadley explained.
She even wrote her name and phone number on the inside of the jacket, but despite her efforts, the fracket was eventually stolen one night that fall.
“I wasn’t tied to the jacket, but I was a little annoyed,” Hadley said.
One day, a few months later, Hadley received an email from an upperclassman. He had taken her bright red fracket by mistake and had been compelled to return it when he saw her name and number written on the inside. They met in the library to execute the return, and to this day, Hadley still has that fracket. Whereas she used to employ the common strategy of tying the sleeves of her fracket together with her friends’ to make it more difficult for potential thieves to easily pluck a single fracket from a pile behind a couch, Hadley now stores her fracket upstairs in frats so that she can easily locate it at the end of the night.
Emeline Moss ’26 uses a similar tactic.
“I feel like the frats that I go to are the ones with my friends in them, so I’ll just put my jacket in their rooms,” she said. A perk of knowing a brother, I suppose.
“I prefer it when I can find my own, but I think the concept of them — that they’re so cheap and are bad jackets – [means] it’s fine to steal them,” Moss noted. “But then I see all the Fizz posts that are like, ‘I left my $50 lip gloss in the pocket. Hopefully it’s returned!’”
Theft seems to be the most common reason why people’s frackets go missing, but Nishka Malik ’28 had a bit of a different experience.
“My first [fracket] was an old winter jacket that I didn’t like anymore, but then I lost it at GDX when there was a fire and we were all told we had to leave,” Malik explained. “I never went back to get it, so then I stole one.”
Whether it’s a fracket-less frat-goer grabbing the first one they see or a fire alarm, the moral of the story is: Wear and steal frackets at your own risk. Don’t wear anything that you care about seeing again into a frat, and definitely don’t leave anything expensive or valuable in your pockets. I’ve seen far too many Fizz posts and “Lost & Found GroupMe” messages from people panicking about their missing EpiPens, Apple Watches, etc. Don’t bring your EpiPen to a frat — that’s coming from someone who carries her EpiPen pretty much everywhere.
