COAT TALES: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

We're often asked where we get the inspiration from for our coat designs. As a team of historians as well as designers, the short answer is 'the past'.

In preparation for each season, our design team leafs through reams of archival material from Victorian and Edwardian Britain, whether fashion magazines or high society portraiture, photographs of the royal family or couturiers' advertisements to find coat styles that would appeal to modern audience across the world. 

The next step is adaptation and modernisation. The inspiration for one of our pieces usually comes from several historical outerwear styles, so our design team works hard to fuse together elements of the designs that they have retrieved from the archives.

Our aim, as our founder Rachael puts it, 'is never to simply re-make classical British coat styles, but rather to revitalise them so that they are relevant and desirable to parents and children today'. 

Take our Kensington coat, for example. The original inspiration for this AW18 piece came from a mixture of Victorian gallery coat designs and images of Edwardian seaside fashions captured from an imported 1912 edition of the Gazette de Bon Ton. 

In other words, what we do is to bring the past to the present for future generations, one coat at a time!