Coach creative director Stuart Vevers has recently taken up residence on the Upper West Side, a move that may have also shifted his design perspective. Where he once craved the expansive landscapes of Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven, the British designer is now binge watching city-centric East Coast dramas such as Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. Released in 1990, the movie depicts a group of young, wealthy uptown New Yorkers during debutante season and was the jumping point for Resort. It’s perhaps why the central piece in Coach’s latest lineup is not a prairie dress but rather a tweedy cropped two-piece suit.
For all its preppy origins, the collection still delivered a certain downtown attitude. Vevers cited perennial New York cool girl Chloë Sevigny as an influence, and the new suits seem designed to be twisted and turned with kooky accessories the way she does best. With that in mind, the ankle-nipping retro running shoes took the current yen for clunky dad sneakers in a streamlined new direction.
Vevers has always had a rich archive of handbags and outerwear to play with thanks to Bonnie Cashin, Coach’s first designer, who helped make the leather goods brand a household name in the ’60s and ’70s. When it comes to clothes though, the history is considerably shorter. That got Vevers thinking about what a vintage piece of Coach might look like had ready-to-wear been produced way back when. To flesh out this revisionist picture, he used the classic horse and carriage motif. Replete with graphic racing stripes, the V-neck knit horse-and-carriage tanks and shrunken button-down shirts had an appealing thrift store quality that was in line with the personal, lived-in vibe of previous collections. More than anything though, that old-school pattern was especially fresh on Coach’s new oversize shoppers and saddle bags. As the craze for logos reaches its peak, this was a nice way to move the idea forward.
