“We call resort winter,” says Stuart Vevers, who is standing in the middle of the Coach showroom one sunny June morning the other day, “because that’s when it appears, around the holidays. Our belief is that our client is living in the real world: She’s not at a resort, she’s not on a cruise. She’s living in the moment.” Realness and being in the moment are two things that have stood Vevers well. He has constantly focused on them at Coach, and suffice to say his instincts have always been spot on. Standing over this season: grandpacore, and cottagecore, but to reduce what he has done to hashtags rather does this collection a disservice. The truth is he has a pretty canny knack of intuiting not only how we want things to look, but how we want them to feel, which is to say, loveworn, weathered, and lived in.
Vevers’s resort—sorry, winter!—collection is stuffed full of things that perform the sleight of hand marking out what many of us want from fashion now. The comfort of the past, quite literally, in this case; there’s plenty of nostalgia-tinged fuzzy-soft cozy cable knits and full tweedy skirts with huge taffeta bows, rocking a Victoriana-goes-1950s vibe. Yet also the thrill of newness: That might come from the way brushed flannel pajamas’ collars have been faced with satin, à la a tuxedo, or the way that oversized Argyle check knit polo shirts are designed to layer up at will, one of the many pieces in his winter denuded of gender specificity. Likewise the jewelry: Diamanté bows and chandelier earrings to pin here, there, and everywhere, and single earrings with a delightfully kitschy quality to them—pumpkins, candy canes, essentially the John Waters-approved inventory of holiday tree decorations.
For layering up with those sweaters Vevers suggests a delightfully ratty tee emblazoned with Popeye; it was inspired by a black and white image of Debbie Harry back in the day wearing a t-shirt with the pipe smoking, spinach loving cartoon character. Popeye also appears on comfy, roomy knits, including one sweater where the sailor man is toting a Coach purse. (He’s not the only pop cultural icon in play here, either. Vevers was also looking at images of Twin Peaks stars Madchen Amick and Lara Flynn Boyle between takes, in their homespun, 1950s-esque looks warped by the ever original eye of director David Lynch.)
And as for those purses, the powerhouse of the brand: A squashy, capacious frame purse from 1969 has gotten a reissue, rendered in a washed leather or yet more knit (it’s everywhere in this collection) and small purses hanging from chain straps have been patched together out of regenerated leather. Like so much else here, those purses possess that same loveworn feel, which feels intuitively right for now, when shellacked perfection feels out of place. In other words: Make it pristinely, just don’t make it look pristine. “That wasn’t my original training—luxury was meant to be perfect,” says Vevers. “It was always perfection—a constant strive for perfection. And when I joined Coach, I felt I wanted something perfect in a different way. So we’ve done a lot of deep research into garment washing, and washing [our leathers], dyeing things; it’s all those techniques that are starting to, I think, feel very Coach.”
