The One Good Coat, and the Argument For It

The instinct is to spread the budget. Four adequate coats for four situations, none of which is very good, all of which are worn a quarter of the time and none of which you ever quite reach for.

The alternative is one, three times the price, worn every day from October to March, at which point the per-wearing arithmetic stops being an argument you have to make and starts being obvious.

The part nobody says is that this only works if the coat is the outermost layer of a wardrobe that is otherwise ordinary. A very good coat over ordinary clothes reads as a person with one good coat, which is a completely legible and rather likeable thing to be. Four medium coats read as a wardrobe.

And it has to be ruined eventually. A coat kept for good is not a coat, it is furniture, and I have three friends with a beautiful thing in a wardrobe that has been outside eleven times in six years.

I wrote about this colour in the spring with, I would now say, more enthusiasm than analysis, and it has since done the full circuit in about five months, which is fast even by the standards of a single colour.

The phases are extremely reliable and I can now recite them. It appears. It is described as unexpected. It becomes expected. It appears in a form so cheap that the colour itself is degraded — this is the phase that actually kills a colour, and it is nothing to do with taste, it is dye quality. Then the people who were early announce they are over it, loudly, in a way that is really about being early rather than about the colour.

I own three burgundy things and I am keeping all of them, and I would like to be very clear that this is not a defiant position. It is that two of them are good and one is a scarf.

The colour will be back in about four years in a slightly browner register and everybody involved will describe it as unexpected.

Four years old, shell in perfect condition, lining gone at both underarms and starting at the back vent, which is the classic pattern and means it was worn rather than stored.

The quote was substantial enough that I did the disloyal thing and looked at what the same money would buy new. It would buy something adequate, in a synthetic, in a shape that will look dated in three years.

What made the decision was not thrift and I am not going to dress it up as thrift. It was that I know how this jacket fits across the shoulders, and that took four years and one alteration to arrive at, and no amount of money buys that on a Thursday.

The tailor said something I have thought about since: that he relines perhaps six things a year now, and that twenty years ago it was six a week, and that the change is not that people got poorer. It is that clothes stopped being worth the shoulders.

Small, badly lit, run by a woman who does not greet you and does not follow you and who has never once asked whether I am looking for anything in particular.

I go about every three weeks. I look at perhaps forty things and touch perhaps six and buy, on the evidence, roughly one item every three years.

It is not window shopping and it is not aspiration. It is the only place I know where I can put my hands on cloth without a transaction being implied, and the effect of doing that for six years is that I can now tell a great deal about a garment before I have looked at the label — which is a skill that has saved me a considerable amount of money in every other shop I go into.

She knows exactly what I am doing. I am fairly sure it is why the shop is like that. She sells to people who have spent six years learning what things feel like, and you cannot manufacture those customers at speed.