Baggy jeans, workwear and plenty of grit: luxury reimagined at Coach

New York fashion week is proving a particularly perplexing time for brands as they continue to grapple with a global slowdown, leading many to question what luxury even means today.

For some consumers, it is always going to be about a gleaming five-figure handbag. For others, it is a limited-edition Labubu. While a certain cohort considers a plain cashmere jumper to be the peak of high status, logomania endures for others. Vintage shopping is now used to denote quality but equally buying nothing has become a powerful signifier.

However, ahead of the Coach show on Monday afternoon, the brand’s creative director, Stuart Vevers, said the word luxury was “overused”. The Yorkshire-born designer, who has worked with the US house since 2013, explained that he was no longer “interested in extreme polish or perfection that has long been associated with luxury”.

Instead, Vevers’ catwalk collection aimed to capture what is seen as desirable in the eyes of today’s youth. This translated into low-slung jeans so baggy they could be heard scraping along the catwalk with seams grubby and scuffed. Shrunken knits appeared to be moth-eaten. Some models wore workwear-inspired boots with lug soles and scratched leather. There were also actual workwear pieces including repurposed trousers with paint splatters still visible. Meanwhile, motorcycle jackets appeared worn-in because they were – fashioned from upcycled leather, part of a wider sustainability initiative the brand launched in 2023.

Low-slung jeans that scraped along the catwalk and upcycled leather were stars of the Coach catwalk. Photograph: Courtesy of PR/Shutterstock

Welcome to luxury 2.0. This is what gen Z wants to wear and is already wearing all over the city’s Lower East Side. Vevers loves to people-watch and his time spent doing so is proving fruitful. In a world of distraction, Coach has managed to capture the attention of gen Z.

On the most recent Lyst Index, a quarterly report that ranks brands based on sales, Coach now sits at number five, sandwiched between Prada and The Row. In August, its parent company, Tapestry, said Coach continued to lead sales at the group, rising 14% to $1.43bn since January. Coach’s success means its show has become one of the largest on the schedule. This time it took over a 70,000 sq ft event space overlooking the East River, filling it with guests including actor Elle Fanning and NBA star Jayson Tatum.

While previous collections riffed on American iconography, including ‘I Heart NY’ T-shirts, this time the cultural references were much more muted. Vevers said he had been thinking about grit: “By grit, I mean resilience, and the beauty of how the city comes back to life every morning.”

Vevers credited “a differentiated point of view and a differentiated aesthetic” as part of its appeal. “Our pieces have a certain down-to-earth quality. There is a certain ease to them. I think that sits well with the times we are in.”

Coach’s pricing strategy also works. Its Tabby bag, seen swinging on the arm of pop star Charli xcx, hovers around the £200 mark – something fans can afford to save up for rather than just add to a fantasy wishlist. Giant ‘Kisslock’ clutches that riff on a 1969 design of clasped purse and sit closer to the £600 mark have also seen a spike in interest thanks to Carrie Bradshaw gripping one in the final episode of And Just Like That.

Coach is also leaning into its 84-year-old history. Anne Hathaway has been pictured on the set of the Devil Wears Prada sequel carrying a bag from a 1986 collection. Meanwhile, after noticing youngsters were buying vintage pieces featuring Coach’s signature monogram, Vevers has put a fresh spin on the idea of logo dressing. This time around, it comes spliced with plaid and check patterns on pleated skirts and trousers.

Elsewhere, Luar closed out Sunday night with a show soundtracked to a reading of J Drew Lanham’s poem Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves. Founded by Raul Lopez in 2011, the queer designer of colour most recently created Venus Williams’s US Open looks and also counts Beyoncé and Madonna as fans.

Lopez has used previous catwalks to highlight issues including immigration and homophobia. This time around, he said he wanted to “pay tribute to the syncretic spirit of the Dominican Republic”. Lopez, who is a third-generation Dominican, played with texture using feathers and beading to add depth to bodysuits and tailoring. He described the collection as a confrontation of “the brutal legacy of slavery – how it fractured bodies, families and futures – yet simultaneously birthed radical forms of creativity, expression and resistance”.