Our Favorite Gold Trench Coats Right Now

I have a coat from 1997 that was called “champagne” on the tag, which was the polite way of saying gold before gold got confident about itself, and I nearly wore it to a dinner last month just to prove a point about how long good things last. The point I was trying to make was to myself, mostly, because I’d been going back and forth for a week about whether the new gold trench I’d bought was actually gold or actually just a very committed beige having a moment in certain light. Then it rained the entire week, the kind of Denver rain that shows up once a year and ruins every outdoor plan you had, and the dinner moved inside, and the question of which coat photographed better on a restaurant patio sorted itself out by simply not needing to happen. Nobody won that argument. The weather won it.

That’s sort of the whole story with this color, though.

It’s spectacular on a hook by the door after a party, catching the porch light like it’s got somewhere else to be, and it’s a completely different animal under office fluorescents, where it goes a bit flat and, if I’m honest, a bit institutional, like a folder you’d get handed at a benefits meeting. Flash photography loves it. A camera flash finds every bit of shine in that finish and gives it back to you tenfold, which is either the best thing about the coat or the reason three separate photos of me at the same event look like I’m wearing a different jacket each time.

I’ll say plainly which of my two is the real thing and which is the crush.

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The lightweight one, the one that folds down small enough to live in a bag, is the crush. I love wearing it, I love how little it weighs, and I fully expect to be over it within a year, the way I was over a gold blazer in roughly 2011 that I now can’t locate and don’t especially miss. The heavier belted one is the real thing, the one going in the closet next to the 1997 coat for an eventual side by side, and I mean that, we’ll see who’s still standing in another twenty years.

I won’t pretend this is for everyone. On the wrong person, in the wrong light, gold reads costume rather than coat, and I’ve seen it happen to a perfectly nice woman at a wedding who looked like she’d wandered off a parade float. It works on people who already dress a little bit loud. If that’s not you, this isn’t the color teaching you to be loud. It’s just going to sit there being gold at you until you take it back.