The Trench Coat – A Century’s Witness
Few garments have stayed in use as long, or changed as little, as the trench coat. It began as equipment and became a classic without ever quite giving up the equipment.
Its story starts in the First World War. Officers needed a coat that kept out the weather and still let them move, long enough to cover the legs but short enough to stay clear of the mud. The details came from the same needs: a gun flap at the shoulder to pad the recoil, D-rings at the belt for carrying kit.
Two British houses are bound up with its making. Thomas Burberry, who founded his company in 1856, supplied the coat to officers in gabardine, his weatherproof cloth. Aquascutum, which dates to the 1850s, also claims to have made the first. Winston Churchill was often seen in one during the war.
After the war the coat came home. Veterans kept wearing theirs, and the public soon followed, for a coat that kept off the rain without stifling. It became a city garment, worn far from any battlefield.
The cinema fixed its image. Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, collar up and hat tilted, gave it its mystery; Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s gave it lightness, a coat for someone both guarded and open.
The fashion houses have returned to it again and again. Chanel and Dior have each made their own versions, and Karl Lagerfeld cut it in leather and in unexpected shapes. New fabrics keep it current.
The military features remain, now as matters of style: the double-breasted front, the broad lapels, the belt that once carried equipment and now gives the coat its line at the waist.
It is an easy coat to wear well and a hard one to wear badly. It sits naturally over a suit or over weekend clothes; it suits a floral dress as well as chinos and a pressed shirt. The one thing to avoid is too much volume underneath, which takes away its shape.
Increasingly it is cut for anyone, without a men’s or women’s version, which suits a coat that was always more about use than about the wearer. It will go on changing in detail. The essentials are unlikely to move.
We like trench coats from Burberry, Helmut Lang, Proenza Schouler and Ralph Lauren. We are not affiliated with any of these brands and receive nothing from sales.
PHOTOS A. SAKAE
