Coats & Outerwear

In the colder months your overcoat is the garment most people see most often. It is the first thing on when you arrive and the last thing off, it is what you are wearing on the street and in the lobby, and it is frequently the only thing anyone sees at all. It is also usually the least considered thing in the wardrobe.

The two tests almost every coat fails

The first is length. A coat has to be cut long enough to cover the jacket beneath it — a coat that ends above the jacket hem looks wrong in a way that is hard to unsee, and no amount of quality in the cloth rescues it.

The second is room. A coat has to go over tailoring without compressing it, which means real width through the chest and shoulder. Almost every off-the-rail coat fails this test, because it was cut to look good on a rail over a shirt. You can see it immediately: the lapels of the jacket underneath bow outward, and the shoulder line breaks.

What we can do about it

A coat can be shortened, taken in through the body, and have its sleeves corrected — the same work as a jacket, on heavier cloth. What cannot be undone is a coat cut too narrow across the back to go over a jacket at all. That one is decided by the maker, and by how much inlay they left in the seams.

Cloth matters more here than almost anywhere. Cashmere blends are worth the fragility on a coat because a coat takes far less abrasion than a jacket does, and the softness is what you notice every time you put it on.