NEW FRONTIER British designer Stuart Vevers is leading heritage house Coach into a bold future.
Inspired by youthful vigour, and with an unpretentious take on American luxury and cool, British designer Stuart Vevers is leading heritage house Coach into a bold future.
Ilove working on new products,” said Stuart Vevers, Coach’s creative director. “There’s something fundamental about product. When it feels right, you get that energy and excitement from people around you – that drives me … and to make the best kinds of products. When I see someone in the street and they are wearing something that I designed – a sweater, a jacket, carrying a bag – it’s really exciting.”
There’s a lot for Vevers to get excited about then. His oversized shearling jackets and coats from his initial collections have become model-off-duty staples and established his handwriting for Coach. ( Judging by her street style shots, Susie Bubble is certainly getting bang for her buck with her Coach spring/summer ’16 floral patchwork dress.)
Vevers’s focus on outerwear was a natural transition: he wanted to introduce ready-to-wear to the leathergoods house to redirect the brand. As he puts it: “Part of my proposition at Coach is to be part of the fashion conversation.”
We speak days after his spring/summer ’16 show held on the High Line, a raised walkway and garden above New York City. It’s a relatively new icon of New York, having only been completed two years ago, but is an appropriate choice for Coach in a way, itself a young American fashion icon, of sorts. While the label was established in 1941, making this year its 75th anniversary, it is older than many other renowned landmark brands, yet it is still in its infancy compared to labels like Loewe, where Vevers was previously creative director (that Spanish leathergoods label started in 1846) or Louis Vuitton, another house where Vevers worked as part of the design team.
“IT’S A REALLY UNIQUE THING THAT IN SIX OR SEVEN MINUTES YOU CAN SAY A LOT”
Post-show, many designers escape the city, to take a break before working on their next collection. Not Vevers, who is enthusiastically talking through the collection, very stress-free, very happy to chat to journalist after journalist asking him the same questions about his inspirations. He ends with the interview with a beam: “That was fun!” Which interviewer doesn’t love to hear that?
He returns time and time again not to lofty references but the pieces in the showroom in front of us, which will soon end up on the shop floor. He’s inspired by how a “real girl puts together her wardrobe”. Along with the Coach bag, she can also wear the Coach T-shirt, the Coach printed silk scarf, and perhaps layer with a Coach multicoloured tea dress topped off with a Coach zip-up suede jacket.
The collection looked to Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven for inspiration. Those were the sorts of films he watched in the cinema as a teenager in northern England – the romantic American Western charm has stayed with him since then, coupled with a sense of “unpreciousness”, like vintage Levi’s that he might have come across on a research trip in Japan. Luxury to him is no longer about a formality but an “ease and spontaneity” – all the dresses are loose in shape and unstructured, the sort of throw-on pieces for the daytime. Thinking about the customers, he’s less concerned about celebrity red-carpet dressing – at a push he might do a cocktail dress. For Vevers it’s about seeing Coach customers in daywear clothes. In the same collection there were different lengths, proportions and ideas, too. “It feels very old-fashioned to have this army of girls in the same silhouette and the same shoes,” ponders Vevers. “It’s really important that this element of individuality, personality and character comes through.”
The critical and commercial plaudits have surely spurred him on to explore new ground, as seen in his spring/summer ’16 collection. “It was important to me in the spring season that a lightness came through in spirit and in the actual pieces,” he says. “So anything that came in that looked a little heavy went onto the donkey rail very quickly!”
The nostalgia of Coach has beguiled Vevers, although he’s careful to not get too stuck in the past. “The combination or juxtaposition between heritage, craftsmanship and counter culture is very me, and I’m challenging and pushing the boundaries of what people’s preconception is about Coach.”
Choosing to launch the collection as a fashion show rather than a presentation – as he had done so previously – was to cut through the noise and to get his story across. “You know, at the end of the day we make clothes, bags and shoes and you’re presenting your new collection and it’s very immediate and you’ve got to tell your story. It’s a really unique thing that in six or seven minutes you can say a lot and people get to react to it.”
A music fanatic, he’s always said that if he wasn’t a designer he would have been a pop singer. “Fashion can be like the best three-minute pop song. A single moment in a show, look or bag can capture the spirit of the times.” The one-hit wonder, to him, is underrated. “A throwaway pop song can last for decades, like a throwaway fashion moment, because we remember how we felt, and those things stay with us and become part of us.” After the show Vevers headed to a Brooklyn dive bar with his design team to celebrate, and stayed up late dancing (we imagine) to a throwaway pop song of today that will outlast most of our lifetimes.