Winter coats were killed off by global warming - and a hatred of cloakrooms
Heavy winter coats for social occasions were a staple in yesteryear – ie among Oldie-readers now between 80 and 100. It was colder outside before global warming, and coats were a matter less of etiquette than of survival.
For smart occasions, mink coats were favoured by grown-up women; dark, woollen knee-length overcoats by men.
For less smart occasions, women wore Loden coats – in traditional dark green with silver or horn buttons. Men would not have been seen dead in a Loden coat in London, but might have donned a fawn-coloured covert coat, with a brown velvet collar, from Cordings.
But, today, other than for weddings, funerals and memorial services, and on the racecourse, winter overcoats have become increasingly unnecessary.
Why? One reason is that we no longer have the same standards of courtesy. As the late Hardy Amies pointed out to me, ‘If you are badly dressed when I have a meeting with you, I am offended because you have obviously not considered me to be important.’
And we also no longer wear winter overcoats because it’s hot in the tube or taxi, and it’s only a short sprint to the building – which is invariably centrally heated. Once you get inside the building, coats are a nuisance. You have to check them in because they are too bulky to carry. You have to hang on to the cloakroom ticket and carry cash to tip the cloakroom person.
In 2008, Nicky Haslam gave a famous party at the neoclassical Palladian villa Parkstead House, in Roehampton.
Friends of mine who attended initially thought it was badly organised as there was no cloakroom. Later, when smoking outside and observing the smarties disgorging from a line of chauffeur-driven limos, they realised why.
You don’t need a coat in a preheated limo and you don’t need one for the short distance between car and party.
In Geordieland, despite gales howling in from the North Sea, all the young women going clubbing at weekends can be seen in little more than a thong even on the coldest wintry nights.
The young in Newcastle go from club to club in beer overcoats - that is, no overcoats. It's a palaver to keep checking coats in and out. Besides, they don't have the extra money to pay the charges.
Also, you develop a ‘hide’ if you never wear a coat. The Essex-born sculptor Guy Taplin, born 1939, has a workshop on a bleak sandbar between the mouths of the Blackwater and Colne rivers on the Essex coast – a place he describes as ‘about as wild a place as anywhere you can get in the world’.
Taplin is famous for his carved birds – avocets, plovers and egrets – made from driftwood. While beachcombing, he has never worn more than a thin denim jacket and shirt beneath it.
‘I don’t feel the cold now,’ he boasts.
Parties of yesteryear were ‘private’ – ie they were not ‘launches’ as they usually are today, with someone sponsoring them and paparazzi outside.
In private houses, heaps of coats were bunged indistinguishably on beds, in the absence of an organised hanging system or pop-up clothes rails. The typical man would enrage his wife by seizing any old dark coat when he left the party, rather than the precise expensive one that actually belonged to him.
Talking of clothes rails reminds me of an evening in the Beefsteak Club. A queue was going up the stairs and the arrivers were serially handing their coats to an attendant, who was courteously hanging them in the club wardrobe at the top of the stairs.
Craig Brown noted that the ‘club servant’ performing this function was none other than Sir Tom Stoppard, who had clearly been mistaken for a clothes-rail attendant. Seeing him helpfully hanging the coat of a fellow guest who had arrived with him, the next guest handed Sir Tom her coat – and then the others swarming up the stairs in her wake followed suit.
So unegotistical is Sir Tom that he was happy to continue to oblige. The coats being hung on this occasion were velvet evening coats, lined with soft silk from designers such as Edina Ronay and Sophie Dundas, cashmere cloaks from Johnstons of Elgin, and for the men everything from a long tweed to a puffer-type lightweight down jacket.
Anoraks, by the way, are never worn by those with any consideration for others. There is no such thing as a chic anorak.
Dry robes – a mac on the outside and a towelling robe on the inside that you zip up – are even more offensive, although just about acceptable at the seaside.
The Oldie January 2024
