Every October, some menswear account will repost the same graphic. “Coats That Will Define The Season.” Dark green wool. A shearling collar. Something that passes for description, maybe, like a “car coat” that retails for eleven hundred dollars and looks, from every angle I’ve spent time staring at it, exactly like a coat. I’ve watched decade cycles of that same graphic pass for ten years now at this point, except the coats move so quickly that what somebody was telling you was a necessary purchase in 2019 is now clearly a mistake, and what they’re gonna tell you is mandatory next year will be that mistake by 2027. No one ever comes back to make those corrections.
The account just reposts a new graphic.
I say all of this as someone who has bought approximately half of a thrift store coat section defending buying only one coat at a time with a straight face. So believe me when I say I’m not coming at this from some ill-informed Every item in rotation! garden view. I currently own six coats, which is realistically three more coats than any adult human needs. One of them is a barn coat I wore twice before realizing it made me look like Stevie Ray Vaseline’s brother or something. Look, I’m skeptical about coats the way most people are about brands. I just don’t fall for the cycle. And those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Here’s the thing about coats as cycle fodder though, about why they’re different than buying a nice sweater. When a sweater sucks, you wear it around for a season then hang it quietly in the back of your thrift pile until it results in the wrong color shortsails two years later. It’s annoying but the cost of getting a sweater wrong is twenty dollars and maybe some ego damage. A coat can cost you fifteen 150 to 1,000 dollars, it’s the first thing people notice about you before they look at your shirt or your shoes, and it has to actually withstand weather. Actual weather. Outside weather. Bags sweat from being outside, coats get wrung out in the rain. Making coat decisions based on what the hell the trends are this season is how you end up with nothing that fits and a car coat you wore three times before the shearling started shedding everywhere.
Pattern actually repeating beneath all that noise
Luckily, if you sift through all the seasonal bullshit and just pay attention to what people are actually buying when they’re not buying costumes, there is a pattern. And it’s not new. It’s just been amplified louder than usual. The overcoat is back, fully back, the long wool kind that covers your ass, and nobody cares how old you are when you wear it. I found one two winters ago that was still got mine at an estate sale last year. Dark charcoal. Half canvassed. Union label stitched into the inside pocket. Older than my dad. Cost me forty bucks. The guy selling it had it piled on top of a stack of dress shirts like it was nothing. Still gets stopped on the street by strangers complimenting me on it when I go out. Nothing I pay retail for does that.
The second pattern worth caring about is the field coat, M65 silhouette, whatever you want to call it. The ubiquitous “utility jacket” brands liked calling it so they could charge triple. That hasn’t come back because someone put it on a graph and said it’s prepped for takeoff. It’s back because it’s useful. It actually has pockets that work. Sweaterslayer without looking like you’ve got a coat-over-coat situation going on. And it honestly doesn’t care if you get caught in the rain. All those other things. That’s what separates the coats that last past a fad cycle from the flannels they bundle with. Somebody was genuinely using them. They weren’t trendy coats. Just things that worked really well.
The things I would actually skip buying this year if we’re being real? Everything anyone tells you is an “elevated” version of something else. For some reason coats that are just cheap versions of actual workwear with some fancy stitching detail or obvious pocket added so companies can convince you they invented five-pocket jackets are elevated these days. Lots of x1000 stitched into the cuff. Trust me. I bought one of those. Regretted it two wears later. The sleeves didn’t survive Pittsburgh weather. Disclaimer: NOT a problem with all coats that don’t cost a grand. But I specifically say that because one of those elbows started shredding after four wears when jackets that cost me fifteen bucks laughed at Pittsburgh weather.
The reason decades-old coats keep outperforming now coats
I don’t think that vintage coats continue to outperform things because “throwing on the patina of nostalgia makes us feel good and betters justify our purchases” or whatever arguments people like to trot out when you suggest something was probably just better made thirty years ago. I think it’s because coats being worn in 1980 had to survive being the only coat someone owned. Not this coat and the lightweight winter coat, not this coat if it doesn’t rain but the parka if it does. Just one coat. Worn in winters that real people live in. If it’s falling apart now, on a folding table a hundred miles from the closest coastline, there’s a reason. The material held up. The seams didn’t give out. It was built to do this.
I almost decided against a whole table last fall because the top half was chock full of khaki-colored rain coats pressed together, shoulders already halfway collapsed. Then I hit a sleeve of barely-touched heavy melton wool beneath them. Completely wrong color palette for Fall 2022, beta cuff.
Perfect weight. Still tight at every stitching seam I checked. THAT’ S why we dig through crap tables. THAT’s what makes wiping dew off your glasses and sorting through years of clothes other people forgot worth it.
The lady that runs that table knows me well enough now that she doesn’t even say hi anymore on Sundays. Just nudges stuff in my direction before I know to look. Which, if you had to sum up good coat buying in the world, is closer to the truth than you’ll ever find in a graphics caption. It’s not trying to stay ahead of the curve until next year, when they reverse whatever the actualretail guy is telling you. It’s learning what lasts, checking garment labels when some sketchyass online retailer wants you to trust them on size, and knowing that the best coat you’ll buy all year might’ve been donated thirty years ago because somebody stopped wearing it.
Callum has spent ten years digging through car boot sales and charity shops in Glasgow. He writes about vintage menswear and old workwear, and he’s happiest when he’s found something good buried at the back of a rail.
