16 Camel Coats You Could Wear This Winter (And The Next 10)
The word “classic” is applied so liberally to certain items of clothing that it’s started to lose all meaning. But if there’s one garment deserving of such praise, it’s a coat that put one maison on the map (Max Mara) and became the off-duty uniform of fashion royalty (Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy), not to mention actual royalty (Kate Middleton).
The camel coat has always had friends in high places – Marilyn Monroe participated in a 1953 photoshoot that is still known as the “Camel Coat Sitting” – but, crucially, has never erred from its essential DNA.
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When Max Mara made a women’s version of its camel coat in the late ’50s, it was considered revolutionary at that moment in time. Max Mara’s creative director, Ian Griffiths, has previously explained the significance of its origin story to Vogue. “At a time when women’s fashion was really quite ‘polite’, Max Mara made a really radical gesture. But it wasn’t just the gesture, it was the quality, too. Max Mara made the coat as well as any of the men’s manufacturers could. So what you had, and still have, is a true object of desire, perfect in terms of material, form, cut, proportion and detail, and with a history.”
More than half a century later, Max Mara’s camel coat is no longer deemed “radical”. It is, however, the textbook definition of a classic (today’s fans include Meghan Markle, Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Lawrence). And for good reason. It hasn’t aged since it first became the coat for women about town. The only difference nowadays is that, pleasingly, there’s a camel coat for everyone, whether your personal style leans towards ladylike or something more lo-fi.
If you’re not into belted wrap coats, which is perhaps the most well-trodden path into the genre, why not try another “classic” (the pea coat, rendered in camel instead of its customary navy, or a single-breasted tailored coat that’s straight-up-and-down sharp)? As you can see from the above street-stylers, meanwhile, camel outerwear is an “outfit coat”, meaning that you really don’t need to worry about what else you team it with. The result will be polished, effortlessly so and every time.
Here are the 16 camel coats that will be considered timeless now – and in the next half a century.
