Vintage Wool Coats to Drive Away the Winter Blues

The tale of one pricey COS coat and my quest to find an affordable alternative.

Several weeks ago, I found myself with some extra time to kill inside the suburban dystopia that is the Yorkdale Mall. (For the non-Toronto-dwellers amongst you, it’s a Dubai-style insane luxury mall with a sanitized, moneyed vibe and a full-on Tesla showroom inside.) I was there to attend a preview for Ecco shoes (where I subsequently fell in love with these white boots) but decided to duck into COS for the sole reason it happens to be conveniently close to the very posh bathrooms.

I’ve had wool coats on the brain something awful for the last month or so, and when I saw the store had a decent selection I went into full try-on mode. Unexpectedly, I ended up falling in love with this oversized wool coat—so much that not only have I already posted about it, like RFK and his brain worms, I literally have not been able to get it out of my head.

It’s kind of amazing how unspecial it looks in photographs, but when I tried it on I swear I could hear a chorus of angelic voices and trumpet sounds serenading me. (This was right before Christmas, so totally plausible, right?) The issue? it’s $500. The maximum I’m willing to spend on the category “nice wool coat” is $250—anything more than that feels like I’m getting fleeced.

My plan was to wait until post-holiday sales rolled around and snag the coat at a discount. But when I checked in this week, I learned that much to my chagrin, the coat had most definitely not gone on sale. Still, this pesky coat remains firmly lodged in my consciousness, so in order to excise it, I have started to wade into the infinite sea of vintage wool coats available online.