The overcoat. The one garment people see in full

In January a client came to collect a navy peacoat. Caccioppoli cloth from Naples, double face: deep navy outside, dark brown on the reverse, wool with ten per cent cashmere. Two buttons under the collar to close the throat when the wind comes up off the river, or when you land in Milan in January. I held it before handing it over and caught myself thinking that we have cut far more suits than coats over the years, and yet it is the coats that stay in the memory.

The reason is simple. Your suit is seen by colleagues. A made to measure overcoat is seen by the whole city. It is the only garment in a man's wardrobe that a stranger sees in full, collar to hem, before you have said good morning. Everything else is covered, or half open. A coat works for you from a hundred metres away. That is why we give it more attention than anything else we make.

Lisbon is not a cold city. That is precisely why the coat counts

Visitors laugh when someone from Lisbon says it is cold in January. Twelve degrees is not cold anywhere in Europe. But twelve degrees with high humidity, an Atlantic wind and houses built for the summer produce a chill any Swede would recognise. The Portuguese winter is short, wet and more uncomfortable than the numbers suggest, and it has one practical consequence: nobody here needs five coats. They need one that is right.

Then there is the other half of our clients' year, which is spent elsewhere. London in November, Milan in January, Zurich in February, a week in the Douro when there is frost at breakfast. A wool and cashmere coat answers Lisbon and answers northern Europe. It has the widest geographical range of anything a man can own.

Why the overcoat came back

Over the past twenty years the male wardrobe lost the tie, then the compulsory jacket, and at some point the pressed trouser as well. The overcoat stayed. An old rule is at work here: the fewer formal pieces a man has on, the more weight falls on the one that remains. When everyone wore suits, the coat was simply the outer layer. When there is a sweater and a pair of jeans underneath, the coat becomes the only place where cut is still visible.

It has outlived the redingote, the cape, the mackintosh, the Dunkirk duffle coat, the leather trench of the nineties and, it seems, the dress code of video calls. Why is the Chesterfield, drawn up for an earl in the 1840s, still made almost unchanged. Why is the peacoat of Dutch sailors worn by people who have never stood on a deck. Why did the trench, cut for the trenches of the First World War, become the most peaceable garment there is. Because all three were useful first and beautiful second. A shape that comes out of a problem does not date.

Your suit is seen by colleagues. Your coat is seen by the city.ATELIER 23

Twenty goats for one coat

Here begins the part of this work I like most. The cashmere goat lives on high plateau where winter reaches forty below, and gives around a hundred and fifty grams of fine down a year when it is combed. One coat takes the down of roughly two dozen goats. The fibre is about fifteen microns across; a human hair is five times thicker. Hence the central paradox of cashmere: the finer it is, the warmer it gets.

We work with four houses. Loro Piana of Piedmont, founded in 1924, for pure cashmere and for cloths with Storm System, a thin membrane on the reverse that carries a coat through a wet afternoon. Dormeuil, Paris, 1842, for cashmere with a dense, smooth surface that holds its shape for years. Delfino of Biella, who weave the double-face cloths, two woollen faces made into one, so the coat needs no lining at all. And Caccioppoli, Naples, 1920, where I find colours nobody else has.

There is also alpaca. We cut few of them and enjoy every one: the fibre is hollow, so it warms like cashmere, weighs less and does not pill. The herringbone coat in pure alpaca we made in November 2024 is still among my favourites. And wool with ten per cent cashmere gives the most sensible coat of all: nearly the warmth of cashmere with twice the resistance to daily wear, which is what matters to a man in a coat five days a week.

Colour. Loro Piana sent deep navy, burgundy, emerald and sand this season, alongside grey, black and brown. To my mind a first coat should be navy. Black only looks right with black shoes, camel wants a tanned face, and navy goes with everything and everyone, from a dinner jacket to trainers. The second coat can be anything at all, emerald included. Precisely because it is the second: the first one has an obligation to be correct.

Which coat to choose

The double-breasted coat to the knee is the most requested, and I understand why. It broadens the shoulder, reads relaxed with the fronts open and formal with them closed, which is two coats for the price of one. The classic single-breasted Chesterfield with a covered fly front I recommend to men who wear a coat over a suit every day: it does not argue with the lapels underneath. The peacoat, short and double-breasted, is for those who drive and have tired of folding a long coat into a car seat.

A case of its own is our jacket-coat in heavy Scabal coating cashmere: a jacket by cut, a coat by function, buttoning to the throat. It was made for the days when it is too early for a coat and too late for a jacket alone, and in Lisbon those days are not four months of the year, they are most of the winter.

On down jackets. They are warm, they are light, and I own one myself for the mountains. But in a down jacket you are simply a man in a down jacket. In a coat you are someone who decided how he would be seen.

How a made to measure coat is made

It starts with a first conversation of about an hour. We look at cloth in the length, because cashmere has to be touched: women choose with their eyes and men with their hands, a line I have been repeating for ten years and nobody has disproved yet. We take measurements and talk about length, lapel width, pockets, and above all about how you will wear it: over a suit or over a sweater, on foot or at the wheel. Those answers change the whole cut.

The cloth then goes to our own workshop in the Serra da Estrela, the highest ground in Portugal, where wool has been a serious business since the eighteenth century and where, by happy accident, it is genuinely cold. The first fitting comes a few weeks later and settles the shoulder and the sleeve; the finished coat follows. From cloth to hanger is four to six weeks, and it is the one thing I am pedantic about: a winter coat is ordered in September and a mid-season one in February. Order in December and the coat arrives in February, and February in Portugal is very nearly spring.

A coat for twenty years

King Charles, when he was still Prince of Wales, wore the same coats for decades, having them repaired and relined. The British press called it Sloane Ranger culture; I would call it common sense. A cashmere or wool-cashmere coat lasts fifteen to twenty years if it is cleaned once a season and kept on a wide hanger. We guarantee everything we make, repair it, reline it, and shorten it if fashion changes, or if the owner does.

A good coat is cheaper than a bad one. It is simply paid for once.

This season's cloths have arrived. There are few lengths, each one enough for a handful of coats, and when they are gone the next ones come in spring. It is September. There is no reason to wait for December.

Questions before ordering

In the catalogue: Vero Vest · City Safari Jacket