At 62, every coat with a hood on it made me look like I was going fishing
At 62, every coat with a hood on it made me look like I was going fishing
Six things the Amara jacket gets right, from a woman who had given up on being warm and recognisable at the same time.
Caroline Richards · Customer · Nottinghamshire · 5 min read
For about nine years I had two coats and a system. There was the nice one, which lived in the hall cupboard and came out for anything that mattered, and there was the one by the back door, which was green, enormous, had a hood like a bucket and belonged to my husband in about 2011. The second one is the one I actually wore. Bins, bird feeder, car boot, a quick dash to the shop. Most of my life, if I am honest about where my life happens.
So for nine years the version of me that most people actually saw was a woman in a man's fishing coat.
And I did know. I would catch myself in the glass of the back door and think, well, nobody is looking. Which is a thing you can tell yourself right up until somebody is.
How it happens
Here is the trap, and I do not think it is your fault if you are in it. Anything made to be practical is made to look practical. Go and look. Everything with a hood on it is nylon, or it is the colour of a wet pavement, or it has those little cords and toggles all down the front, or it is cut for a man who is going to be standing in a field for four hours.
And everything pretty has no hood at all. Lovely coats, nice buttons, no hood, so you are back to standing on the step deciding whether it is worth it.
So you end up owning both and wearing the ugly one, because the ugly one is the one that works. And then that becomes what you look like.
What I had wrong
I thought I had to pick. Warm and practical, or nice and useless. I had genuinely stopped looking for anything in between, because nine years of looking had taught me it did not exist.
I was not choosing comfort over looking nice. I was choosing it over being recognisable.
What I had not noticed is that the hood is the only reason the practical coat has to be ugly. There is nothing about a hood that requires nylon. You can put one on something lovely. Somebody just has to bother.
The Amara turned up at Nottingham Boutique, a little shop that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. It is a hooded jacket with a painted-looking botanical print on the outside, all pinks and teals and soft greens on a cream ground, and the whole inside of it, hood included, is thick curly fleece. It was thirty nine pounds ninety five, which I will come back to.
The day it came. The fleece inside was the first surprise.
THE HOOD IS NOT AN APOLOGY
It is a proper generous hood, lined all the way round with the same thick fleece as the body, and it sits on a coat covered in flowers. That is the whole trick and I am still a bit cross that it took somebody this long. You can put it up when the wind gets going and you still look like a woman in a nice coat, rather than a woman who has given up and gone to find something nylon. I have had it up walking back from the postbox and caught myself in a car window and not winced, which is new.
Hood up, walking back up the lane. This is the bit I did not think I could have.
Every hooded thing I have ever owned was navy, or nylon, or both. This is the first one I have not minded being seen in.
Glenys A., CotgraveTHE WARM IS INSIDE AND THE PRETTY IS OUTSIDE
This sounds obvious written down and it is not how most things are made. The outside is the print. The inside, the whole body and the hood, is a deep curly fleece in a soft greyish beige, the sort you want to put your hand against. So all the work the coat is doing is hidden, and all the part people see is the nice part. Nothing about it announces that it is a warm coat. It just is one.
The two halves of it, either side of the zip. Print on one side, fleece on the other.
The lining is far thicker than I expected from the photographs. Properly plush, not the thin stuff.
Rita J., BramcoteIT ZIPS RIGHT UP, OR IT STAYS OPEN
Full zip, all the way to the throat. Zipped up it is a coat and it is doing a coat's job. Left open over a jumper it is a long floral layer and you can see the fleece running down both front edges, which I think is the better of the two looks and is how I wear it round the house and out to the car. One garment, two moods, no thinking required at half past eight in the morning.
Zipped to the top, hands away. This is the walking version.
Wear it open indoors and zipped for the dog. Does not look like the same coat twice.
Maureen F., AttenboroughSOMEWHERE WARM TO PUT MY HANDS
Two side pockets at the hip, which I know is not a revelation, but my hands have been cold since about 1987 and I have spent years with them shoved up opposite sleeves like a woman in a Dickens adaptation. My keys go in one and my hands go in both, and at my age being able to walk along with your hands away and your shoulders down is worth more than it sounds.
Deep enough for a phone and a set of keys without feeling like they will fall out when you sit down.
Pat L., BlidworthTHE PRINT LOOKS PAINTED, NOT STAMPED
It is a mix of things rather than one flower repeated, and the edges are soft, so it reads like something painted onto the cloth rather than printed on top of it. Pinks and a sort of teal blue and several greens, on a cream ground that has been given a faded, slightly worn look. It is the difference between a pattern that looks like wallpaper in a nice old house and a pattern that looks like a tablecloth. Up close you can see the colours bleeding into one another.
On the wardrobe, where it has lived since it arrived.
I was worried it would look cheap and busy. It does not. It looks like an old botanical print.
Sheila D., FarnsfieldIT GOES UP TO A UK 22/24
Eight sizes, UK 8/10 right through to UK 22/24. I am saying it plainly because I know what it is to find the thing you have been looking for and then scroll down and watch it stop at a 16, as though past that you are not expected to want a nice coat, only a practical one. It does not stop here. And it is cut loose anyway, with room for a jumper underneath, which with a coat is rather the point.
A 20/22 that fits over a chunky jumper. I have waited a long time for that sentence to be true.
Brenda K., ScrevetonThe Amara, against the green thing by the back door
The green coat has gone to the charity shop, nine years late. Here is the comparison, which I think makes the case better than I can.
My husband's, from about 2011
Warm, and I looked like I was going fishing
Lived by the back door, out of sight
Worn for everything that did not matter
Taken off before anybody came round
Thirty nine pounds ninety five, and mine
Warm, with the warm part on the inside
Hangs on the wardrobe where I can see it
Worn for everything, including the things that matter
Left on, because somebody usually says something
About the price
It is £39.95. It was £80.00.
Forty pounds for a lined coat made me suspicious, because the lining is where the money goes and it is the easy place to skimp. You get a whisper of thin fleece across the back panel and bare fabric in the sleeves and the hood, and you do not find out until you are cold.
This one is lined through the body and all the way into the hood, and the pile is deep enough to push your fingers into. I am not going to tell you it is a winter coat for standing on a touchline in February. I am telling you it is a proper autumn coat that is honest about what it is, and that for the money I could not find the corner they had cut.
I went and read the reviews afterwards, which is the wrong order, I know. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some sites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, "I have worn it every day for a month and my husband has asked me twice where it came from, and he has never asked me that about anything." That would have decided it for me, had I read it first.
Put out the night before, which I have not done since I was working.
What I would tell you if we were friends
If you were sat here with a cup of tea I would ask you what is hanging by your back door, and whether you would be happy to be photographed in it.
Because the coat you wear for the bins and the car and the quick dash to the shop is not your second coat. It is your actual coat. It is the one the neighbours know you in. And if it is somebody else's, or it is nine years old, or it is the one you take off before you answer the door, then the you that most people see is not really you at all. It is just the version that was warm.
The coat you keep by the back door is the one you are actually wearing. Mine was my husband's.
You do not need to do anything dramatic. Make the one by the back door a nice one. That is the whole of it.
Caroline
AMARA | Floral Fleece Jacket
- Soft fleece lining through the body and right into the hood
- A generous fleece-lined hood you can put up when the wind picks up
- Vintage-style painterly floral print, in three prints to choose from
- Full zip front, so it wears zipped up or open over a jumper
- Two side pockets, somewhere warm for your hands and keys
- Relaxed fit, hip to mid-thigh length, UK 8/10 (S) to UK 22/24 (5XL)
- Free UK delivery and 30 day returns
The autumn sale is on now, half price.