When it comes to hemlines, my taste is for the extreme. In summer, I like my shorts slashed mid-thigh, super-short, but as soon as we shift towards autumn, I prefer things to dip dramatically south into super-long coat hems that hug your ankles. It’s basically fashion all or nothing.
This season, several designers went long. The third outfit in Anthony Vaccarello’s impossibly glamorous autumn/winter Saint Laurent men’s collection was a floor-sweeping, square-shouldered, single-breasted overcoat that worked the perfect elegant swish. Long leather coats evoked David Bowie in Berlin circa 1976.
Prada’s duffels and parkas dipped towards the floor, and Loewe offered both super-long classic overcoats alongside shorter (but still lengthy) tunic-coats inspired by Julien Nguyen’s 2021 painting “Woman in a Lab Coat”. Meanwhile, The Row’s longline belted cashmere overcoats drape languidly like glorious dressing gowns that can legitimately be worn outside.
French brand Lemaire, a longtime sweeping-coat ambassador, actually has a design in its collection called the “Bathrobe Coat”.
I have been partial to long coats since 2017, when I bought an almost floor-length black style by Lemaire that I have worn religiously since. I felt immediately more grown-up wearing it, infinitely more pulled together. Even though it’s softly tailored, it makes me stand taller — which, at 5ft 6in, I consider to be supremely useful. There is something about how it sways as you walk that feels pleasing, adding a slightly dramatic glide to proceedings. I also have an almost ankle-grazing beige check Marni trenchcoat for early autumn and late spring.
It’s not just coats that are going long. At Bottega Veneta’s autumn/winter show in Milan, creative director Matthieu Blazy offered floor-length sweaters for men, while at SS Daley in London, a longline knit appeared in navy — all of which would do the job of a wearable blanket.
On a recent fashion shoot I found myself styling some of these extra-long garments from the autumn/winter season, and yes, when you walk around Paris with two models in floor-length Bottega Veneta sweaters and ties or Rick Owens swooping tunics, you do get some attention, even in a fashion capital that has surely seen it all.
“People are so used to seeing, especially in menswear, a two-part outfit, a bottom and a top, but there is something very nice and easy, functional even, about choosing just one thing to wear,” says British designer Craig Green, who in the space of five minutes rattles off myriad examples of long silhouettes: aprons, medieval dress, warrior skirts, choir robes.
Green has been showing tall, elongated shapes ever since his 2012 Central Saint Martins MA graduation collection, which explored religious dress and workwear. He likes the protective effect of all-embracing longer silhouettes and appreciates their movement. “I often gravitate towards a long silhouette because it is like a blank canvas,” he adds.
Aside from my own personal love of a long coat, the elongated silhouette comeback makes sense. First, there is an overarching mood shift in fashion for clothes that are more dressed up, but with a certain no-nonsense luxuriousness about them too. I’d also argue that clothes with excessive amounts of fabric ironically scream “quiet luxury”.
Second, I agree with Green that a long coat has blank-canvas, palette-cleansing properties — wearing one reveals little else about your outfit. For example, when I tried on the runway version of the Prada duffel sized for a much taller model for the photos accompanying this piece, everything was duly engulfed in a glorious haze of khaki.
Christopher Breward, fashion historian and director of National Museums, Scotland, favours mid-calf coats himself, and says the renaissance of long silhouettes in menswear is connected to a revival of 1920s androgyny coupled with broader cultural complexities.
“This trend also picks up on some of the ambiguity and uncertainty we see in the world at large: between austerity and luxury, around changing concepts of masculinity, even the climate challenge, or conscription and military conflict,” he offers.
Breward says that in the 1780s and ’90s, a lighter, floor-length cotton coat called a banyan, influenced by Japanese kimonos and Indian dress, came to denote intellectual and even revolutionary intent. “In the 1810s, ’20s, ’30s, the long coat was a badge of urban dandyism, picking up its references from military uniform during a period of European wars and lampooned by satirists for its extreme proportions,” he says. “By the 1870s and ’80s, such coats had become part of the respectable bourgeois wardrobe.”
It was then subverted by artists and decadents between 1890 and the 1920s; a fine example of fantastic-looking long-coat dandyism was captured by John Singer Sargent in his portrait of W Graham Robertson, art collector, writer and stage designer, in 1894 (now owned by Tate Britain).
Dramatic coats have served actors and cinema particularly well. Al Pacino lived in them on the red carpet during the 1990s. Richard E Grant’s Withnail and I character is inseparable from his, while Richard Gere’s Armani belted camel coat in American Gigolo is routinely name-checked as a pivotal menswear moment. More recently, Robert Pattinson wore one with aplomb in The Batman.
Alexandre Mattiussi, founder and creative director of Ami, who himself wears long coats — and who showed numerous voluminous styles for men and women for this autumn in shades of baby blue, navy, beige and yellow — says the appeal lies in a certain cinematic moodiness. He points to Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo as two actors who long favoured this silhouette on screen.
It was in the second half of the 20th century, as people started driving cars, that the cumbersomeness of the long coat seemed out of sync with modern living. Even as a fan, I’d have to acknowledge that the heft of a big coat is not ideal for shoving in a gallery locker, hanging on the back of a restaurant chair or darting up and down the stairs of a bus. That said, these minor irritations don’t seem to have put me off when it comes to overlong outerwear. On the Ami runway I was unsurprisingly drawn to an outfit made up of a pair of short khaki shorts and a navy coat, styled with thick socks and a hefty shoe — an essential detail to ground the whole thing.
I asked Mattiussi about this look. “I love balancing the silhouettes, to play a game of less and more,” he says. “It could be super-cold outside, yet you can show some skin: you arrive at the party totally covered, and the moment you take off the coat, you are wearing a totally different look.” I confess that even I hadn’t thought about ticking off my two favourite demanding silhouettes in one outfit for the forthcoming party season, but I might do now.
Meanwhile, how to wear the super-elongated sweater in real life admittedly remains a work in progress. One friend was particularly horrified at the idea of anyone over 22 (the approximate age of most runway models) wearing a dress-like sweater. But I can see how it works perfectly well as a very expensive cocoon on a sofa or as a WFH cosy shell.
Wearing the Saint Laurent black-and-white version — sliding it on, you immediately feel as if you’re about to step into a fashion show — you move your body differently, you perhaps slink a bit, while the trousers poking out underneath its hem definitely flap about. Another friend asked me if I would wear it on the Tube. I wouldn’t. Not because I think people would stare, but because I think I’d roast to death in it.
As I modelled it by a canal in east London, a couple of male runners raised their eyebrows, while a female passer-by smiled and said, “Looking good”. I’m not rushing to buy one — just yet — but I definitely wouldn’t rule it out. And, in the meantime, I’m eyeing up that Lemaire “Bathrobe”.
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