The Smashing Pumpkins’s “1979” formed the entire soundtrack for Coach’s fall show yesterday. The iconic 90s coming-of-age anthem conjured a mood of suburban teenage nostalgia, immediately bringing to mind its era-defining visuals — of kids in Dr. Martens messing around in fields and doing handbrake turns in their parents’ cars.
The dusty set echoed the video’s sun-dried roadsides. The catwalk was lined with scrub and tumbleweeds, setting the stage for Stuart Vevers’s ongoing road trip through American culture. The designer stuck to his key strategy of blending country and city style codes, but this time there was a hip-hop bass line, the show notes said. Specifically, the designer had been looking at the genre’s early New York days.
Giant puffer jackets covered in desert roses, elongated shearling baseball caps, and rubber-sole boots that looked like the lovechildren of a duck boot and a shell toe all blended American outdoorsiness with city staples.
Anchoring it all were the brand’s now-signature frilled floral and paisley patchwork dresses, which also came in a soft brown check this season (the print looked like the pixels of a blown-up image, more modern than homespun). And of course there were plenty of Vevers’s favorite outerwear options: varsity bombers (with wooly patches or patterned silk sleeves) and shearling jackets (the two-tone purple number was in it to win it). Draped from the backs of those jackets, long shearling fleeces looked more like pelts than collars, tempering the corn-fed cuteness with teen runaway wildness.
Credits
Text Alice Newell-Hanson
Photography courtesy Coach