Mom found a men’s trench coat at my thrift store Thursday before I did. Size 42, camel colored. She texted me a picture of it, asking if I wanted it “for the girlfriend you don’t have.” Neither of us had a girlfriend, but I have a sister named Casey who had been lamenting for months any time we’d go clothes shopping that every women’s trench she tried on fit her like a straightjacket through the shoulders. I bought it for four dollars because it was four dollars and I never say no to four dollars and handed it to her without thinking there was any story in it.
There was a story in it. Casey wore that coat for two winters. I saw enough people ask her where she got it to change how I answered a question I hadn’t even realized I believed in until then.
The coat doesn’t know who’s wearing it.
That’s what nobody tells you when they’re sitting on the fence about whether or not a woman should wear a men’s trench.
It’s wool or it’s poly blend, it has a belt or it doesn’t. Those are facts that don’t change no matter who’s wearing. What changes is proportion, and proportion is about fit, not gender. I’ve bought and sold coats out of thrift stores for coming up on six years now and tell you what, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the ones that sell, about coats people fight over on a Saturday morning while we’re unpacking trucks, they almost never split cleanly along department lines. That size 40 trench is getting tried on by everyone who walks through the store that day whether it’s in the men’s section or not.
What actually happens when you put one on
This particular coat was cut for a man roughly five foot ten. Casey’s five foot four, so the sleeves needed rolling up and the overall length hit her mid calf instead of stopping at her knee. She left it that way on purpose. Said it looked “intentional” even. Casey was, objectively speaking, the first person I’ve ever known to say that about oversized menswear on a woman. I’ve heard it used that way approximately four hundred times since buying that coat, almost all of them by people trying to sell me something, but she was telling the truth. Casey leaving that coat long instead of cuffing it like you or I might actually was intentional because the length did something the belt couldn’t. It grounded the coat.
The way I see it, a trench that hits a woman at the knee reads as just a coat. One that extends past that is making a statement and that’s not inherently bad. It just is what it is and you have to decide if that’s what you’re going for when you put it on before you buy.
The test was really in the shoulders. Men’s trenches have a very distinct shape through the shoulder seam that women’s coats have almost universally abandoned because women’s outerwear is cut to nip in at the waist instead of the shoulder. Casey’s shoulders weren’t even close to touching the ends of that coat’s sewing when she buttoned it up, fell about half an inch past her actual shoulder instead. Sounds small, looks like everything once it’s on you. Too much and it’s costume. Not quite enough and suddenly you look like you stole your husbands coat and it’s fight or flight at that point. Half an inch, rumor has it, is the magic number. Case in point: coworker of Casey’s came up to her once in the break room to ask where she’d found that thing, convinced it was some women’s designer doing the boyfriend look on purpose instead of what it really was, a lucky thrift store find she got for four dollars and just so happened to have in her size.
I did the math on this coat just like I do every thrift store score I come across. I cannot help myself.
Worn two winters by Casey, she said three times a week average across both summers puts you at around ninety wears. Four dollars split by ninety is really just nothing. Four cents a wear? Let me pull out my phone and actually do that division. Four divided by ninety? Four dollars bought her coat us out to be somewhere around four and a half cents a wear. Insane.
Where it stops working
I will never say that every woman can wear every men’s trench coat, because that’s just dumb. Blanket statements like that are how people end up burned, something I’ve seen plenty of times over while working these past few years. Mom had actually tried that same coat on years before she handed it down to Casey, just because she was surprised I didn’t have it already in stock and it happened to be there that Thursday. It swallowed her. Not worn animal tees and distressed jeans swallowed her, but actually swallowed her. Shoulders grazing her wrists, hem dragging on the floor. It looked like it belonged on her brother, not her.
Mom’s five foot two, and Casey’s thirty-three inches taller than that. The difference between “I’m wearing my brothers coat and love it” and “Good lord Claudia why did you take my coat?” turned out to be inches, literally inches on our height charts and maybe fifty pounds on our bathroom scales. A very real line to women’s clothes that doesn’t get talked about enough because it applies just as much to the Womens section as it does the Mens.
See, that’s the thing. It works on women who have the shoulders for it. Simple as that. Casey has broad shoulders. Most women do not. There’s nothing superior about Casey that some other woman can’t attain with a few hours and a waist trainer if she really wants to.
It just means that particular trench coat wasn’t going to work for every woman who wanted to wear it the way it worked for Casey. And that’s okay. Bodies are as diverse as the opinions people decide to project onto them.
I bought two more since then, both from that church thrift store, both smaller sizes, both get flagged in my mind as “text Casey and make sure” before I even consider pricing them for resale. Now we’re up to three with a good chance of four if that Thursday keeps hauling ass bringing me men’s trenches like she knows me watching her from across the street. That coat wasn’t any different than any of them except for the woman it ended up on. Still just wool and buttons and a belt that either ties or buckles depending on what year it thinks it’s from. Whether or not it works on you has literally always come down to if you’ve got those four inches between the shoulder seam and where your actual shoulder stops. Ain’t nobody debating who wears what gonna change that.
Liam is a sparky from Birmingham who got into charity shopping during one very skint year and never really stopped. He works out the cost per wear on everything he buys, sometimes out loud, sometimes wrongly the first time.
