The trench coat was
developed as an alternative to the heavy serge greatcoats worn by
British and French soldiers in the First World War. Invention of the
trench coat is claimed by both Burberry and Aquascutum, with
Aquascutum's claim dating back to the 1850s. Thomas Burberry, the
inventor of gabardine fabric, submitted a design for an Army
officer's raincoat to the United Kingdom War Office in 1901.
The trench coat
became an optional item of dress in the British Army, and was
obtained by private purchase by officers and Warrant Officers Class I
who were under no obligation to own them. No other ranks were
permitted to wear them. Another optional item was the British Warm, a
wool coat similar to the greatcoat that was shorter in length, also
worn by British officers and Warrant Officers Class I as an optional
piece.
During the First
World War, the design of the trench coat was modified to include
shoulder straps and D-rings. The shoulder straps were for the
attachment of epaulettes or other rank insignia; There is a popular
myth that the D-ring was for the attachment of hand grenades. The
ring was originally for map cases and swords or other equipment to
the belt. This latter pattern was dubbed "trench coat" by
the soldiers in the front line. Many trench coats had large pockets
for maps and cleverly placed flaps and vents to deal with the odour
associated with earlier rubber coats. A range of waterproof coats
were designed and sold during wartime that incorporated War Office
requirements with traditional aspects of leisurewear. What became
known as the ‘trench coat’ combined the features of a military
waterproof cape and the regulation greatcoat designed for British
officers. Many veterans returning to civilian life kept the coats
that became fashionable for both men and women.
During the Second
World War, officers of the United Kingdom continued to use the trench
coat on the battlefield in inclement weather. Other nations also
developed trench coat style jackets, notably the United States and
Soviet Union, and other armies of continental Europe such as Belgium,
France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland (and are often seen
in war zone photographs in the 1939-40 era, even worn by troops on
the attack), although as the war progressed, in the field shorter
"field jackets" became more popular, including garments
such as the Denison smock used by British commandos, paratroopers,
and snipers and the M1941/M1943 field jackets used by the US Army.
These garments were shorter and more practical than the trench coat,
and as such they allowed the wearer to be more mobile.
A typical trench
coat by this period was a ten-buttoned, double-breasted long coat
made with tan, khaki, beige, or black fabric. Trench coats often have
cuff straps on the raglan sleeves, shoulder straps and a belt. The
trench coat was typically worn as a windbreaker or as a rain jacket,
and not for protection from the cold in winter or snowy conditions
The
Classy Rise of the Trench Coat
World
War I brought with it a broad array of societal changes, including
men's fashion
By Linda Rodriguez
McRobbie
smithsonian.com
May 27, 2015 /
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/trench-coat-made-its-mark-world-war-i-180955397/
The trench coat
wasn’t exactly invented for use during the war that gave it its
name, a war spent mired in muddy, bloody trenches across Europe. But
it was during the First World War that this now iconic garment took
the shape that we recognize today, a form that remains startlingly
current despite being more than 100 years old.
The trench coat is,
in some ways, emblematic of the unique moment in history that World
War I occupies, when everything – from rigidly held social
structures to military organization to fashion – was in upheaval;
it is both a product of this time as well as a symbol of it. “It’s
the result of the scientific innovation, technology, mass production…
The story of the trench coat is a very modern story,” says Dr. Jane
Tynan, lecturer in design history at Central Saint Martins,
University of the Arts London and author of British Army Uniform and
the First World War: Men in Khaki.
Even so, the story
of the trench coat starts roughly 100 years before the outbreak of
World War I in 1914. As early as 1823, rubberized cotton was being
used in weatherproof outerwear for both civilian and military use.
These “macks”, named for their inventor Charles Macintosh, were
great at keeping rain out, but equally – and unfortunately –
great at keeping sweat in. They also had a distinctive and unpleasant
smell of their own, and a propensity to melt in the sun.
Nevertheless, Mackintosh’s outerwear, including rubberized riding
jackets, were used by British military officers and soldiers
throughout the 19th century.
Inspired by the
market the macks created – and the fabric’s initial shortcomings
– clothiers continued to develop better, more breathable
waterproofed textiles. In 1853, Mayfair gentlemen’s clothier John
Emary developed and patented a more appealing (read: less stinky)
water-repellant fabric, later renaming his company “Aquascutum” –
from the Latin, “aqua” meaning “water” and “scutum”
meaning “shield” – to reflect its focus on designing wet
weather gear for the gentry. His “Wrappers” were soon necessities
for the well-dressed man who wanted to remain well-dressed in
inclement weather.
Thomas Burberry, a
21-year-old draper from Basingstoke, Hampshire, founded his eponymous
menswear business in 1856; in 1879, inspired by the lanolin-coated
waterproof smocks worn by Hampshire shepherds, he invented
“gabardine”, a breathable yet weatherproofed twill made by
coating individual strands of cotton or wool fiber rather than the
whole fabric. Burberry’s gabardine outerwear, like Aquascutum’s,
proved popular with upper class, sporty types, and with aviators,
explorers and adventurers: When Sir Ernest Shackleton went to
Antarctica in 1907, he and his crew wore Burberry’s gabardine coats
and sheltered in tents made from the same material.
“Lightweight
waterproof fabric is] a technological development, like the Gore-Tex
of that period, making a material that would be fit for purpose,”
explains Peter Doyle, military historian and author of The First
World War in 100 Objects (the trench coat is number 26). With the
fabric, the factories, and the primary players – Burberry,
Aquascutum, and, to some degree, Mackintosh – in place, it was only
a matter of time before the trench coat took shape. And what drove
the design was changes in how the British military outfit itself, and
to a large degree, how war was now being waged.
**********
Warfare through the
1860s was Napoleonic, typically conducted in large fields where two
armies faced off and fired or hacked at one another until one fell.
In these scenarios, brightly colored uniforms helped commanders
identify their infantry troops even through the smoke of battle. But
with the technological advancements in long-range arms in place even
by the Crimean War in the 1850s, this kind of warfare had become
deeply impractical, not to mention deadly; bright, garish uniforms
simply made soldiers easier targets.
Military tactics
needed to adapt to this new reality and so too did uniforms. The
color khaki, which came to dominate British military uniforms, was
the result of lessons learned in India; the word “khaki” means
“dust” in Hindi. The first experiments at dyeing uniforms to
blend in with the landscape began in 1840; during the Indian
Rebellion of 1857, several British regiments dyed their uniforms drab
colors.
By the 1890s, khaki
and camouflage had spread to the rest of the British military; in the
Boer War in 1899, the utility of khaki uniforms had proven itself by
allowing soldiers dealing with guerilla warfare to blend more easily
with their surroundings. The British military was in some ways slow
to change – bizarrely, mustaches for officers were compulsory until
1916 – but by World War I, there was an increasing recognition that
uniforms needed to disappear into the landscape, allow for fluid,
unencumbered movement, be adaptable to the fighting terrain, and be
easily produced in mass quantities.
The terrain that
British military outfitters were designing for even early in the war
was, essentially, a disgusting hole in the ground. Trenches were
networks of narrow, deep ditches, open to the elements; they smelled,
of both the unwashed living bodies crammed in there and the dead ones
buried close by. They were muddy and filthy, and often flooded with
either rain or, when the latrines overflowed, something worse. They
were infested with rats, many grown to enormous size, and lice that
fed off the close-quartered soldiers. Life in the trench, where
soldiers would typically spend several days at a stretch, was periods
of intense boredom without even sleep to assuage it, punctuated by
moments of extreme and frantic action that required the ability to
move quickly.
It was to deal with
these conditions that the trench coat was designed. “This was
really the modernizing of military dress. It was becoming
utilitarian, functional, camouflaged … it’s a very modern
approach to warfare,” says Tynan.
In past wars,
British officers and soldiers alike wore greatcoats, long overcoats
of serge, a thick woolen material, that were heavy even when dry;
they were warm, but unwieldy. But in the trenches, these were a
liability: Too long, they were often caked with mud, making them even
heavier, and, even without the soldiers’ standard equipment, were
difficult to maneuver in. Soldiers in the trenches needed something
that was shorter, lighter, more flexible, warm but ventilated, and
still weatherproof. The trench coat, as it soon came to be known as,
fit the bill perfectly.
But let’s be
clear: Regular rank and file soldiers, who were issued their (now
khaki) uniforms, did not wear trench coats. They had to make do with
the old greatcoats, sometimes cutting the bottoms off to allow
greater ease of movement. Soldiers’ clothing was a source of
discomfort for them – coarse material, ill-fitting cuts, poorly
made, and teeming with lice.
Uniforms for those
with higher ranks, however, were a very different story. While their
dress was dictated by War Office mandates, officers were tasked with
the actual outfitting themselves. Up until 1914, officers in the
regular army were even asked to buy the clothes themselves, often at
considerable cost, rather than simply being given the money to spend
as they saw fit: In 1894, one tailor estimated that a British
officer’s dress could cost anywhere from £40 to £200. From the
start of the war in 1914, British officers were provided a £50
allowance to outfit themselves, a nod to the fact that dressing like
a proper British military officer didn’t come cheaply.
Having officers
outfit themselves also helped reinforce the social hierarchy of the
military. Soldiers tended to be drawn from the British working
classes, while the officers were almost exclusively plucked from
upper, gentlemanly class, the “Downton Abbey” swanks. Dress was
(and still is, of course) an important marker of social distinction,
so allowing officers to buy their own active service kit from their
preferred tailors and outfitters set them apart, fortifying their
social supremacy. It also meant that though there were parameters for
what an officer had to wear, they could, as Doyle says, “cut a
dash”: “The latitude for creating their own style was enormous.
The officers called
on firms like Burberry, Aquascutum and a handful of others who
marketed themselves as military outfitters; notably, these also
tended to be the firms that made active, sporting wear for the very
same aristocratic gentleman (Aquascutum, for example, enjoyed no less
a patron than the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII; he wore
their overcoats and issued them their first royal warrant in 1897).
This marriage of sporting wear and military gear was longstanding.
Burberry, for example, designed the field uniform for the standing
British army in 1902 and noted in promotional materials that it was
based on one of their sportswear suits; Aquascutum was selling
overcoats and hunting gear to aristocratic gentlemen and outfitting
British officers with weatherproofed wool coats as far back as the
Crimean War in 1853. Burberry and Aquascutum both created designs
informed by their own lines of well-made, nicely tailored clothing
for wealthy people who liked to fish, shoot, ride, and golf. This
also tailored nicely with the image the British military wanted to
convey: War was hell, but it was also a sporty, masculine, outdoorsy
pursuit, a pleasure and a duty.
**********
Both Burberry and
Aquascutum take credit for the trench coat, and it’s unclear who
really was the first; both companies had strong ties to the British
military establishment and both already had weatherproof outerwear
similar to the trench coat. Burberry may have a stronger claim:
Khaki-colored Burberry “weatherproofs”, Mackintosh-style
raincoats in Burberry gabardine, were part of officers’ kit during
the Boer War and in 1912, Burberry patented a knee-length,
weatherproofed coat very like the trench coat called a “Tielocken”,
which featured a belt at the waist and broad lapels. But in truth, no
one really knows.
“Burberry and
Aquascutum were very clever in adapting to military requirements,”
says Tynan, especially as “what you’re talking about is a sport
coat being adapted for military use.” The adaptation appears to
have largely taken place within the first two years of war:
Regardless of who really was the first, British officers had
certainly adopted them by 1916, as this drawing of soldiers loading a
cannon while being supervised by a trench coat-wearing officer
attests. The first instance of the term “trench coat” in print
also came in 1916, in a tailoring trade journal accompanied by three
patterns for making the increasingly popular weatherproof coats. By
this time, the coats’ form had coalesced into essentially the same
thing sold by luxury “heritage” brands and cheap and cheerful
retailers today. So what made a coat a “trench coat”?
Firstly, it was a
coat worn by officers in trenches. A blindingly obvious statement,
sure, but it deserves some unpacking – because each part of the
trench coat had a function specific to where and how it was used and
who used it. Trench coats were double-breasted and tailored to the
waist, in keeping with the style of officers’ uniform. At the
belted waist, it flared into a kind of knee-length skirt; this was
short enough that it wouldn’t trail in the mud and wide enough to
allow ease of movement, but still covered a significant portion of
the body. The belt, reminiscent of the Sam Browne belt, would have
come with D-rings to hook on accessories, such as binoculars, map
cases, a sword, or a pistol.
At the back, a small
cape crosses the shoulders – an innovation taken from existing
military-issue waterproof capes – encouraging water to slough off;
at the front, there is a gun or storm flap at the shoulder, allowing
for ventilation. The pockets are large and deep, useful for maps and
other necessities. The straps at the cuffs of the raglan sleeves
tighten, offering greater protection from the weather. The collar
buttons at the neck, and this was for both protection from bad
weather and poison gas, which was first used on a large scale in
April 1915; gas masks could be tucked into the collar to make them
more airtight. Many of the coats also came with a warm, removable
liner, some of which could be used as emergency bedding if the need
arose. At the shoulders, straps bore epaulettes that indicated the
rank of the wearer.
In short, as Tynan
notes, “The trench coat was a very, very useful garment.”
But there was a
tragic unintended consequence of officers’ distinctive dress,
including the trench coat: It made them easier targets for snipers,
especially as they lead the charge over the top of the trench. By
Christmas 1914, officers were dying at a higher rate than soldiers
(by the end of the war, 17 percent of the officer class were killed,
as compared to 12 percent of the ranks) and this precipitated a major
shift in the make-up of the British Army. The mass pre-war
recruitment drives had already relaxed requirements for officers; the
new citizen army was headed by civilian gentleman. But now, necessity
demanded that the army relax traditions further and take officers
from the soldiering ranks and the middle class. For the rest of the
war, more than half of the officers would come from non-traditional
sources. These newly created officers were often referred to by the
uncomfortable epithet “temporary gentleman”, a term that
reinforced both the fact that officers were supposed to be gentlemen
and that these new officers were not.
To bridge that gap,
the newly made officers hoped that clothes would indeed make the man.
“Quite a lot of men who had no money, no standing, no basis for
working and living in that social arena were suddenly walking down
the street with insignia on their shoulder,” says Doyle. “If they
could cut a dash with all these affectations with their uniforms, the
very thing that would have gotten them picked off the front line by
snipers, that was very aspirational.” Doyle explains that one of
the other elements that pushed the trench coat to the fore was the
commercial competition built up to outfit this new and growing
civilian army. “Up and down London, Oxford Street, Bond Street,
there would be military outfitters who would be offering the solution
to all the problems of the British military soldier – ‘Right, we
can outfit you in a week.’ … Officers would say, ‘I’ve got
some money, I don’t know what to do, I’ll buy all that’. There
came this incredible competition to supply the best possible kit.”
Interestingly,
adverts from the time show that even as the actual make-up of the
officer class was changing, its ideal member was still an active,
vaguely aristocratic gentleman. This gentleman officer, comfortable
on the battlefield in his tailored outfit, remained the dominant
image for much of the war – newspaper illustrations even imagined
scenes of officers at leisure at the front, relaxing with pipes and
gramophones and tea – although this leisure class lifestyle was as
far removed from the bloody reality of the trenches as the grand
English country house was from the Western Front.
For the temporary
gentleman, this ideal image would have been entrancing. And very much
a part of this image was, by the middle of the war at least, the
trench coat. It embodied the panache and style of the ideal officer,
while at the same being actually useful, rendering it a perfectly
aspirational garment for the middle class. New officers happily and
frequently shelled out the £3 or £4 for a good quality trench coat
(for example, this Burberry model); a sizeable sum when you consider
that the average rank-and-file soldier made just one shilling a day,
and there were 20 shillings to a pound. (Doyle pointed out that given
the very real possibility of dying, maybe even while wearing the
trench coat, newly made officers didn’t often balk at spending a
lot of money on things.) And, of course, if one couldn’t afford a
good quality trench coat there were dozens of retailers who were
willing to outfit a new officer more or less on the cheap, lending to
the increasing ubiquity of the trench coat. (This isn’t to say,
however, that the cheaper coats carried the same social currency and
in that way, it’s no different than now: As Valerie Steele,
director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New
York, puts it, “I wouldn’t underestimate people’s ability to
read the differences between a Burberry trench and an H&M
trench.”)
Ubiquity is one
measure of success and by that measure alone, the trench coat was a
winner. By August 1917, the New York Times was reporting that even in
America, the British import was “in demand” among
“recently-commissioned officers”, and that a version of the coat
was expected to be a part of soldiers’ regular kit at the front.
But it wasn’t only
Allied officers who were adopting the coat in droves – even in the
midst of the war, civilians of both sexes also bought the coats. On
one level, civilians wearing a military coat was an act of
patriotism, or perhaps more accurately, a way of showing solidarity
with the war effort. As World War I ground on, savvy marketers began
plastering the word “trench” on virtually anything, from cook
stoves to jewelry. Doyle said that people at the time were desperate
to connect with their loved ones at the front, sometimes by sending
them well-meaning but often impractical gifts, but also by adopting
and using these “trench” items themselves. “If it’s labeled
‘trench’ you get the sense that they’re being bought
patriotically. There’s a slight hint of exploitation by the
[manufacturers], but then they’re supplying what the market wanted
and I think the trench coat fit into all that,” he says. “Certainly
people were realizing that to make it worthwhile, you needed to have
this magical word on it, ‘trench’.” For women in particular,
there was a sense that too-flashy dress was somehow unpatriotic. “How
are you going to create a new look? By falling into line with your
soldier boys,” says Doyle.
On another level,
however, the war also had a kind of glamour that often eclipsed its
stark, stinking reality. As the advertisements for trench coats at
the time reinforced, the officer was the face of this glamour: “If
you look at adverts, it’s very dashing … it’s very much giving
a sense that if you’re wearing one of these, you’re at the height
of fashion,” explains Doyle, adding that during the war, the most
fashionable person in the U.K. was the trench coat-clad “gad about
town” officer. And on a pragmatic level, Tynan pointed out, what
made the coats so popular with officers – its practical
functionality married to a flattering cut – was also what resonated
with civilians.
**********
After the war,
battle wounds scabbed over and hardened into scars – but the
popularity of the trench coat remained. In part, it was buoyed by
former officers’ tendency to keep the coats: “The officers
realized they were no longer men of status and had to go back to
being clerks or whatever, their temporary gentleman status was
revoked… probably the echo into the 1920s was a remembrance of this
kind of status by wearing this coat,” theorized Doyle.
At the same time,
the glamour attached to the coat during the war was transmuted into a
different kind of romantic image, in which the dashing officer is
replaced by the equally alluring world-weary returning officer. “The
war-worn look was most attractive, not the fresh faced recruit with
his spanking new uniform, but the guy who comes back. He’s got his
hat at a jaunty angle... the idea was that he had been transformed,
he looked like the picture of experience,” Tynan says. “I think
that would certainly have given [the trench coat] a caché, an
officer returning with that sort of war-worn look and the trench coat
is certainly part of that image.”
The trench coat
remained part of the public consciousness in the period between the
wars, until the Second World War again put trench coats into military
action (Aquascutum was the big outfitter of Allied military personnel
this time). At the same time, the trench coat got another boost –
this time from the golden age of Hollywood. “A key element to its
continued success has to do with its appearance as costume in various
films,” says Valerie Steele. And specifically, who was wearing them
in those films: Hard-bitten detectives, gangsters, men of the world,
and femme fatales. For example, in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon,
Humphrey Bogart wore an Aquascutum Kingsway trench as Sam Spade
tangling with the duplicitous Brigid O’Shaugnessy; when he said
goodbye to Ingrid Bergman on that foggy tarmac in Casablanca in 1942,
he wore the trench; and again in 1946 as private eye Philip Marlowe
in The Big Sleep.
“It’s not a
question of power coming from an authority like the state. They’re
private detectives or spies, they rely on themselves and their wits,”
said Steele, noting that the trench coat reinforced that image. “[The
trench coat] does have a sense of kind of world-weariness, like it’s
seen all kinds of things. If you were asked ‘trench coat: naïve or
knowing?’ You’d go ‘knowing’ of course.” (Which makes Peter
Sellers wearing the trench coat as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in
The Pink Panther series all the funnier.)
Even as it became
the preferred outerwear of lone wolves, it continued to be an
essential part of the wardrobe of the social elite – a fascinating
dynamic that meant that the trench coat was equally appropriate on
the shoulders of Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the British
throne, as on Rick Deckard, hard-bitten bounty hunter of Ridley
Scott’s 1982 future noir Blade Runner. “It’s nostalgic… it’s
a fashion classic. It’s like blue jeans, it’s just one of the
items that has become part of our vocabulary of clothing because it’s
a very functional item that is also stylish,” says Tynan. “It
just works.”
It’s also
endlessly updatable. “Because it’s so iconic, it means that avant
garde designers can play with elements of it,” says Steele. Even
Burberry, which consciously recentered its brand around its trench
coat history in the middle of the last decade, understands this –
the company now offers dozens of variations on the trench, in bright
colors and prints, with python skin sleeves, in lace, suede, and
satin.
But as the trench
coat has become a fashion staple, on every fashion blogger’s
must-have list, its World War I origins are almost forgotten. Case in
point: Doyle said that in the 1990s, he passed the Burberry flagship
windows on London’s major fashion thoroughfare, Regent Street.
There, in huge lettering, were the words “Trench Fever”. In the
modern context, “trench fever” was about selling luxury trench
coats. But in the original context, the context out of which the
coats were born, “trench fever” was a disease transmitted by lice
in the close, fetid quarters of the trenches.
“I thought it
astounding,” said Doyle. “The millions of people who walked down
the street, would they have made that connection with the trenches? I
doubt that.”
Linda Rodriguez
McRobbie is an American freelance writer living in London, England.
She covers the weird stuff for Smithsonian.com, Boing Boing, Slate,
mental_floss, and others, and she's the author of Princesses Behaving
Badly.
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