Bright pinks, caution oranges, and electric blues; it was a bold scene at the Coach showroom on Hudson Yards. “This season we’re really highlighting what we’re calling acids,” said Stuart Vevers. “I don’t think they’re quite fluoro.” In the room in front of us stood a mannequin in a fuchsia leather motorcycle jacket; a hue that most would call novelty but for the right individual is the exact color for their forever favorite jacket.
That individual could be someone like Lil Nas X, the Coach Ambassador and “curator” of a capsule within the pre-collection, which they are calling The Lil Nas X Drop (actually the full name is The Lil Nas X Drop: Designed by Coach, Curated by Lil Nas X). “We took inspiration from Lil Nas,” Vevers explained. “We then asked him to curate his favorite pieces from the collection. So we took inspiration from him, we created the collection, and then we asked him his favorite pieces.”
His name may appear in several graphic t-shirts and the label affixed on the inside of clothes, but the vibe here harks back to underground ’90s scenes and rave flyers, with a mix of techno and groovy typefaces, and high Xerox-contrast images of kittens and that sun with a face (you know the one). Special attention was given to a run of black tees and hoodies; the team figured out the exact color palette that years of washing and drying would fade to, and used it for the print. It was an uncanny combination of real and not real—it’s not that it was meant to look old, necessarily; rather, it was about finding the details that make an old favorite t-shirt, well, a favorite. (Elsewhere, the team sourced vintage hoodies and printed on them, to get that real distressed effect.)
The graphics were also used on leather goods, creating genuinely covetable, off-kilter accessories, especially on a small, square leather bag seemingly screen printed in cyan with the aforementioned sun and the Coach logo rendered in block-y letters. Vevers also brought back a monogram print of a horse and cart and then mixed it with colorful leather and leopard print to create collaged bags that had the appeal of candy.
The designer is clearly delighting in mixing classic “heritage” pieces in unexpected pieces that are geared towards engaging a Gen Z audience (witness the lookbook of self-shot iPhone photos), but the Coach collection remains fun for the whole family. In these pictures, that aforementioned moto jacket is worn with a midi-length column leather skirt with classic gold Coach hardware details at the hip, which would make perennial workhorses in anyone’s closet; ditto a classic long trench, or a peacoat with a shearling collar. Even the leopard print had cross-generational appeal, and not just because it was a Bonnie Cashin animal print from the 1960s. Vevers added, “We want people to see there’s a playfulness here.”
