NEWS STORY
The Trench Coat
A coat that evokes power, sex, mystery and insouciance
The plain beige trench, that classic icon of chic-dom, has made a
comeback with ittish girls. Chloë Sevigny, a long-time appreciator, has
recently been seen wearing her vintage Burberry indoors, open and unbelted.
So has her friend Tara Subkoff, half of the design team Imitation of Christ,
who was spied at a Gagosian Gallery reception, in L.A., in an unbelted
trench over a plain black cocktail dress.
"Tailored classics are looking good right now," explains Laird
Borrelli, a senior editor at style.com. But everyone's done khakis.
"You want to look classic without looking trite. The trench has power,
sexuality and transgression -- you always have the possibility of being
slightly dirty under a trench."
Perhaps no one signifies the renaissance of the trench more than
Charlotte Gainsbourg, the French actress, Balenciaga muse and daughter of
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. She wears her own signature trench,
accessorized with a hand-knit scarf and hat, in the upcoming comedy My Wife
Is an Actress. In the film, she saunters around London, skinny as an alley
cat, looking cooler than cool.
Of course, while French women seem born with the ability to imbue a plain
beige trench with insouciant sexiness, the trench coat is actually British.
In the late 1800s, Thomas Burberry developed gabardine, a tightly woven
waterproof fabric, which he then made into overcoats for field sports. The
fabric was adapted for use in the trenches in World War I, hence the coat's
name. The D-rings from the belt were used to hang grenades and canteens, and
the extra flap of fabric over the right shoulder, the "gun flap,"
kept water from dripping inside the coat.
At the end of the war, military overstock hit the stores, and trench
fashion became street fashion -- for men and women. Flappers wore the coats
belted low at the waist. Hollywood liked the trench's connotations of
reserve and mystery, and put it in the movies. The garment's popularity then
ebbed and flowed, until Yves Saint Laurent, who first showed one in 1968,
made the trench a wardrobe staple.
Illustration
by Virginia Johnston
"Fashion-wise, the definitive version is one of YSL's from the late
'60s or '70s," says Cameron Silver, curator and owner of Los Angeles
vintage boutique and gallery Decades, where YSLs can retail from US$450 to
US$800. "They have a narrower, more sensual cut than a classic
Burberry."
Of course, those deeply fashionable people who inevitably wear their
trenches with the most aplomb don't shop for them at all -- they just have
them. Although Chloë Sevigny's agent Amanda Lawrence told me Chloë would
not give a quote about her trench ("She doesn't give fashion quotes,
she doesn't talk like that"), Lawrence did say, "It was just
something lying around, she can't remember. She might have found it in her
mother's closet in Connecticut, years ago."
by Miranda Purves National
Post 11 May 2002
