In Paris, Anthony Vaccarello sent solid-gold trench coats down the Saint Laurent runway. It was an extravagant take on one of fashion's most familiar silhouettes, and a reminder of just how hard the trench is to escape.
Saint Laurent Turns to Gold and to Goodbye
Every season, someone tries to reinvent it. Make it oversized. Crop it. Deconstruct it. Cover it in sequins. Turn it leather. And every autumn, we come back to the same version: beige, belted, double-breasted, quietly practical.
More often than not, it is Burberry.
The timing feels right. Burberry turns 170 this year, and London's Victoria and Albert Museum is celebrating the house's most famous creation with The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon, a free exhibition running until 3 January 2027. A museum exhibition dedicated to a raincoat might sound like a lot. It isn't.
Made for the Mud
The trench did not begin as a fashion statement. It began with a fabric. Thomas Burberry opened his drapery in Basingstoke in 1856 and invented gabardine in 1879, patenting it in 1888, according to Burberry's archives. The tightly woven fabric was weatherproof but breathable, inspired in part by the lanolin-coated smocks worn by Hampshire shepherds.
In the 1880s, Burberry was already making capes for motoring, cycling and rambling, as well as an early car coat that predates the trench. In 1908, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton even used Burberry gabardine to cover his car’s engine in Antarctica.
Then came the war.
In 1912, Burberry patented the Tielocken, a belted gabardine coat the house describes as the direct ancestor of the trench. A few years later, the First World War created the perfect conditions for the coat to become what we know today: lighter and more practical than the heavy wool greatcoat. It took its name from the trenches where it was worn. More than 500,000 Burberry coats were worn by members of the armed forces, according to the house’s official history.
Burberry wasn't the only company making the case. London rival Aquascutum also claims the invention, and, as Smithsonian Magazine puts it, "no one really knows" who got there first. Burberry's 1912 patent, however, gives the house a strong claim.
What we do know is that the original trench was not designed for everyone. Officers paid for their own uniforms, and a good trench cost between £3 and £4 at a time when a private earned one shilling a day, Smithsonian notes. From the beginning, it was a practical garment with status built in.
And almost every detail had a purpose. The epaulettes carried rank insignia. The D-rings on the belt held binoculars, map cases, a sword or a pistol. The storm shield and gun flap kept out the rain. The throat latch protected the wearer from the weather and, more grimly, from poison gas.
Today, most of those details are decorative. That's part of the magic. The trench still looks like it has somewhere important to be.
From the Battlefield to Hollywood
When the war ended, officers kept wearing their trenches. Royal approval followed: in 1919, King George V granted Burberry its first Royal Warrant. Civilians wanted them too. Then Hollywood got involved. Humphrey Bogart wore one in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942) and The Big Sleep (1946), turning the coat into the uniform of the hard-boiled hero. Audrey Hepburn later gave it a completely different appeal: romantic, elegant, effortlessly Parisian.
No, Audrey Hepburn Didn’t Buy Her Ballet Flats in Lucerne
The trench had crossed a crucial line. It was no longer just functional. It had become an image. And that is where fashion tends to get interested.
How Burberry Made the Trench Coat Iconic
Plenty of houses made trench coats. Burberry made the trench coat Burberry. Its fabric, its patent and its war record all tied the coat to the house from the start. Then came the check: introduced in the 1920s as a lining for Burberry rainwear, according to the house's history of the check, the camel, black, white and red pattern became one of the most recognisable motifs in fashion.
By 1965, one in five coats exported from Britain was a Burberry. Since 1972, every Heritage trench has been made at the house’s factory in Castleford, Yorkshire.
In 1999, under CEO Rose Marie Bravo, Burberrys became Burberry and moved back upmarket, taking tighter control of its licences. But the check had a life of its own. By the early 2000s, it was everywhere: copied, counterfeited and attached to the British “chav” stereotype. Burberry had to distance itself from the very pattern that had made it famous. The solution was sitting in plain sight.
The Coat Becomes the Brand
Christopher Bailey arrived in 2001 as Design Director and stayed 17 years, eventually running the whole house. He understood something fundamental: the trench did not need to be reinvented. It needed to be made desirable again.
In 2009, he launched Art of the Trench, a website inviting people to share photographs of themselves in their Burberry trenches. It reportedly attracted more than 600,000 users, at a time when most luxury houses were still figuring out what the internet was for. The idea was simple. Don't tell people what the trench means. Show them how they wear it.
That distinction matters. The trench survived not by belonging to one decade, subculture or trend, but by adapting to whoever puts it on.
Still in the Trenches
More than a century after it left the battlefield, the trench is still everywhere. It hangs in a London museum and walks the Paris runways in solid gold. And every year, as soon as summer ends, it comes back to the top of our wish lists. The details have lost their purpose. The coat hasn’t. It still does exactly what it was made to do: keep the rain out, and make whoever wears it look like they know where they’re going.