"Baby, It's Cold Outside"

Twenty-five hangers all in a row...

 
I hate winter, and if I never see snow again it won't be too soon. We've lived in south Texas for 18 years, but I still buy a new coat every year. Currently there are 12 winter coats, 8 "between-seasons" coats, and 5 raincoats in my closet, a rabbit fur chubby moldering in a box and a New York-winter-worthy down coat laying in wait under the bed. The raincoats actually get the most use, but that down coat sure came in handy when our power grid blew last February.

Back east I felt it important to have a winter coat I loved because that's how the world mostly saw me for half a year. My choices were not always a success. The mod-looking mohair cape I bought in the fall of 1969 did not work that winter despite elbow-length gloves. My suede and shearling Dr. Zhivago coat was almost too heavy to walk in. This was all before we discovered "layering" and before down came off the ski slopes and into our hearts.

Admittedly once I figured out how to keep warm in an east coast winter, the coat obsession became more fashion than thermal. There were maxi coats, surely dreamed up by coat industry executives on a retreat at a sheep farm in Maine. They proved totally impractical on New York's slushy streets and beat a fast retreat themselves. I can't bear to let that rabbit fur chubby go as I dragged it home from a stall in Portobello Road. It has never NOT been shedding. 

Generations past a mink coat was the sign of making it, or proof that your husband had made it. My mother almost married a man who promised her a mink coat if she said yes. It was not her finest hour. I didn't realize mink is incredibly warm along with being lightweight until the mink era was over. I once wore my fake leopard on the subway and stood accused of leopard genocide. I was not about to take chances.

In 1967 a winter coat got me a before-and-after in Glamour Magazine (which often used staff members as models). I truly loved my "before" coat and continued to wear it ever after. I didn't think it was too big. Do you? But I wish I had bought the "after" coat. I'd still wear it today.