Fall Trend Report: Barn Jackets and Chloé Bags
Fall Trend Report: Barn Jackets and Chloé Bags
I keep seeing them everywhere...
Barn Jackets
It’s officially fall, even though it’s still sweltering outside, which can only mean one thing: it’s ‘sage green clothes supremacy’ time of year. Sage green is undeniably the colour you wear to go visit a pumpkin patch, drink apple cider and overall participate in all the classic “Christian Girl Autumn” activities. We’re also going to be seeing it a heck of a lot more of it in the months to come because the verdict is in, folks, it’s going to be a Barn Jacket Fall. (Not to be confused with Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald Fall.) This is excellent news to me, as my fall coat of choice for the last six?seven? years has been a waxed canvas dark green Earnest Sewn (RIP) jacket I found at a consignment store. Here are some pics of the coat in various iterations.
I love this coat because it’s extremely practical, pairs with basically everything (except sage green pants, of which, sadly, I have many) and is the perfect weight for insulating myself from a crisp fall breeze. I never really considered how the coat typified my sense of style until my friend Mel sent me this TikTok.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
After watching, I realized that Queen Elizabeth II has subconsciously been my influencing my sense of style since day 1 — I do love a good kerchief —and that I would probably dress like a member of the British aristocracy on their way to a pheasant hunt every day of my life if that seemed like a normal thing to do. There’s something about a dowdy-length skirt, a pair of flat shoes and a practical coat that I find shiveringly (did I just make up a word?) irresistible.
Barn jackets are unique in the sense that they sit somewhere on the spectrum between quiet luxury/old money aesthetic and blue collar. They are designed to be practical and serve a purpose—namely to keep it’s wearer warm while they perform outdoor chores. Yet a barn jacket by Burberry or Barbour screams generational wealth while one by Carhartt suggests a living earned through physical labour.
Fashion magazines will round up a host of expensive, trendy options for you to buy —$900 for By Malene Birger!—but unlike a cashmere sweater, a barn jacket is not something you should necessarily buy a high-end version of. As a utility garment, the goal is to purchase one and wear it until it disintegrates into a pile of ash—like the shredded Carhartt barn coat my farmer aunt keeps in her actual barn and has worn for the last 20+ years. There is only one brand I would suggest buying a barn coat from new and that is L.L. Bean. Their Adirondack barn coat (or Field coat for men) is made from water resistant waxed cotton canvas, come in two colours (sage green and khaki tan) and has literally thousands of five-star reviews. Because the cotton is so heavy, barn jackets typically have to be broken in like a pair of shoes, but all the reviews suggest this one version off much softer than expected. I also just have a soft spot for L.L. Bean in general, and am ride or die for their made-in-USA boat and totes and Bean boots, so do with that information what you will.
I’m planning on styling my barn jacket with…everything this fall, just like I normally do. It will look great juxtaposed with a voluminous white midi skirt and a pair of delicate flats, or a bit more in situ with a pair of jeans and heavy-duty boots. Honestly, just don’t think about it too much.
Chloé Bags
As a ‘shoe person,’ a negligible part of my brain’s real estate is dedicated to thinking about handbags. But something I’ve noticed floating around in the universe far more than usual is a growing propensity for vintage Chloé bags. Recently, I’ve seen them popping up everywhere, starting with this moodboard tweet, then another tweet from musician/it girl Eliza McLamb.
I know it technically requires three examples to constitute a trend, but frankly, seeing two in such quick succession was enough to send me hurtling over to the RealReal to see what I could find. Turns out you can get a full-on high-end designer bag for less than $300—basically unheard of these days. I’ve always thought of Chloé as being a high-quality leather brand, like Mulberry or Hermes, so I was surprised and delighted to learn they only introduced leather into their offerings in 2001, when Phoebe Philo took over the brand. To me, Chloé bags inhabit a mysterious time vacuum in which the design reads as “timeless” but in a very 2000s way. You can almost see the cool minivan mom who owned this bag before consigning it to the RealReal. But that’s neither here nor there. Here’s a bunch of cute, quality, relatively inexpensive bags you can invest in before they get even more popular and the price goes up.
