A good wool coat has weight to it before it does anything else. You pick it up off the hanger and your arm drops a little, that proper, settled heaviness that tells you it's not going to blow about on the walk to the car park or need constant tugging back into place. The outside should feel slightly rough under your palm, not fluffy, and the inside lining should slide rather than catch on your sleeve. If it feels light as a blanket, it's probably acrylic wearing a wool label, and it'll bobble by November.
Fit is where most of these go wrong, and it's almost never about the body, it's about the sleeve and the shoulder. Try it on over what you'd actually wear underneath, a jumper, not a vest, because wool coats are cut to be the outer layer and they'll feel tight across the back if you size for a t shirt. Sleeves should reach your wrist bone with room for a cardigan cuff underneath, not stop at the forearm looking jaunty, and the shoulder seam should sit on your shoulder, not halfway down your arm like it's borrowed. Sit down in it before you decide anything. If the hem rides up to your knee and stays there, that's the coat, not you, and no belt fixes a coat that fights your lap. Arms up test matters here too, reach for something on a shelf and see if the whole coat rides with you or if the hem stays put and the sleeve creeps.
If you've only got one wool coat, go longer than feels natural, somewhere past the hip, ideally closer to mid calf, because that's the version that covers a dress, a long tunic, trousers, all of it, without you doing maths every morning about what's showing underneath. Buttons over a zip, and a collar that stands up properly in a Leicester wind rather than folding flat the second you step outside.
It pairs with almost everything already hanging up, which sounds like a cop out line but isn't, it's just that a coat this plain does the pairing work for you. Jeans and boots on a school run, a maxi skirt and flat shoes for something slower, even over a work uniform if the cut's generous enough through the shoulder. I've worn the same one over three completely different outfits in one week and nobody clocked it was repeating, because the coat wasn't the outfit, it was just holding everything else in.
What to check first, before anything else, is the sleeve length with your actual layers on underneath.
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