That’s probably arguing too hard for the trench coat’s appeal today, but it does speak to why this style is so cocooning. With a blanket wrapped around your lower legs, it could even double as an “emergency sleeping kit”. What’s really most useful is a breathable layering piece, one that, as a vintage Burberry ad had it, can “afford hygienic and efficient protection against wet or chill and prolonged resistance to hard wear”, adding that it was “suitable for every war zone”. Since so much of our time is now spent in heated homes, offices or cars (not to mention the rising temperatures of climate change) the need for a seriously heavy coat is greatly diminished. Some have so few of these, in fact, that they’re more like a mac/trench hybrid.īut there’s one reason why this classic style never quite goes away: it works, and arguably more so now than it did a century ago. There are multiple versions of the trench coat: short ones and long ones, lined and unlined, in wool or cotton gabardine or khaki drill, poplin or twill weaves – with more expensive options treated for added waterproofing – with more or fewer of those classic details. The trench coat was the technical jacket of its era. On its own it might not keep you all that warm, but it will keep you very, very dry – the trench coat was, after all, named after those First World War warrens in which men were exposed to the elements for weeks at a time – but also properly ventilated. The raglan cut makes it easier to get over layers, too. The double-breasted cut provides an extra layer of warmth for your torso and the belt, throat latch and cuff tighteners allow for all hatches to be battened down should the weather turn. But then the storm flap at the shoulder – designed in part to help soften rifle recoil – is also, like the back vent, an arrangement that allows rain water to run off away from the body, rather than into the coat. True, the epaulettes, for your insignia of rank, and the D-rings – metal rings attached at the belt from which to suspend your grenades and ammunition pouches – are largely redundant now. On the most classic of styles, many of the original details remain. Put simply, a trench coat is a three-quarter length coat designed to keep the grime and rain off your finer clothes rather than offer protection like a full-on winter coat would it was first created with a detachable sheepskin liner – back when the coat was known as the ‘trench warm’ – and still works well over a gilet to the same end. Yet, for all that Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart might have re-cast the trench coat as somehow quintessentially American – the trench coat is the noir detective’s coat of choice – it is a British invention, belonging jointly (despite their rivalry over it) to both Aquascutum and Burberry: the former invented the first waterproof wool, devised a field coat for soldiers of the Crimean War and would later corner the Hollywood trench-coat market, for many the definition of the classic form the later invented gabardine and won the contract to supply a trench-type coat for the Boer War and beyond. Indeed, when the trench coat was devised – ostensibly as a means of keeping the endless mud off one’s uniform in the trenches of the First World War – it was allowed to be worn only by officers. This perhaps stems from the fact that it is one of the oldest army garments still widely worn, dating from an early 20th century era when you still had to look smart even to go to war. Of all men’s clothing with a military heritage, the trench coat is the classiest.
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