Great coats or base layers: which outerwear tribe are you?

Coats this season may come in many colours, but they come in only one guise: all-conquering cover-ups that leave nothing to chance climatically speaking, but everything to play for style-wise.

For starters, the parka is enjoying a revival, unconnected to its modernist heyday in the early-Sixties and late-Seventies. Consider, too, the return of the great coat: the swamping Chesterfield, and the seemingly bullet-proof leather trench. All three are throwback styles, quasi-military in outlook but fundamentally contemporary by design.

Needless to say, it’s time to forgive and forget the relative fripperies of our flimsy, top-coated youth and invest in a far more substantial cut, something that accepts we live in testier times. This is dressing for the way the world is, rather than the way we’d like it to be.

As the golden age of self-driving motor vehicles sputters to an end, generations of mid-length “car coats”, stripped of steering-wheel-snagging cuff decorations or seat-belt-trapping epaulettes, have finally been consigned to the boot-space of history.

For the first time in several generations, easy ingress/egress from one’s car is no longer the most salient consideration when it comes to buying a new coat. Enter the age of the awesome overcoat.

Salle Privee overcoat, ￡1,530, Mr Porter

As ever in terms of “style tribes”, our innermost concerns regarding outerwear continue to delineate along quite separate lines.

On one side: the advocates of the traditional overcoat, whether substantially sized-up in accordance with today’s fashion rules (see: Balenciaga), or simply, solidly built as the prevailing orthodoxy of the Twenties and Thirties dictated.

These acolytes of the age of the steamer-trunk et al recognise the status-conferring power of a bold herringbone double-breasted ankle-grazer, or a reconstituted Pea Jacket that might have once mitigated the freezing terrors of a North Atlantic Convoy.

And on the other side, stand (and they always stand, never sit – core strength and all that) what we might call the “Base Layer Players”.

Far from taking their instruction from the battlefield, these no less hardy individuals receive direction from the paragons of elite sports, who’ve long-since learned that extra warmth can be generated from within, and that several smart (ie carefully considered) layers will easily do the work of any amount of outwardly applied insulation.

Quilted gilet, ￡249, Hugo Boss

It’s not just the weekend runners in their compression tights and figure-hugging fleeces that have learned this ruse either: city types have decided that a roll-neck-beneath-gilet-beneath (preferably cashmere) “shacket” can beat all but the most ardently intense weather system. And let’s face it, how often do city-dwellers find themselves alone in the elements?

It’s a hard won rather than a time worn solution to the same problem: keeping the weather at bay. Whether you’re a Great Coat generalista or a Base Layer Player is a matter of personal choice, but however you wear it, accept you are currently joined in a battle that only climate change itself is likely to win. 

Bill Prince is the deputy editor of British GQ

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