What Is a Car Coat? The Coat Is Older Than Its Name

The usual story goes like this: open cars in the 1930s, cold drivers, a coat made for the job. Flip through a few old catalogs and it turns out to be the other way around.

Here's the short version. The coat most of us picture when someone says "1930s car coat", horsehide, about thirty inches, ending somewhere mid-thigh, was already selling by the thousands in the 1920s. And nobody called it a car coat. The catalogs just said leather coat, or horsehide coat, or now and then a blazer. The name came along about thirty years later, and by then it was stuck on a different coat entirely.

We spent a good while with old Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs while reworking our own two car coats. Here's what we found in them, and why it still matters if you're thinking about buying one.

One coat for the whole day

First, who was it for? Montgomery Ward answered that in 1925, right under its best-selling leather jacket:

"For farmers, teamsters, chauffeurs, sportsmen, motorists, mail carriers, ranchmen and lumbermen: in fact, any man whose work takes him out doors regardless of weather."
Montgomery Ward, Fall and Winter 1925-26, page 303

Motorists made the list, sure. Right between sportsmen and mail carriers. This was a coat for anyone who spent the day outside. By 1929 Wards didn't even bother explaining and just headed the page "Work · Sports." Sears put it even more simply: "For work or sport, you need this leather coat."

But here's the part we like. Look at what the illustrators drew underneath it. A collar and a tie. And not just once. Page after page.

So the same coat went to work and went to town, and nobody had to choose. It was what you grabbed when the day was going to be long and you weren't sure where all of it would end up. Honestly, it's still the easiest leather to throw over whatever you already have on. A shirt, a knit, trousers with a crease in them.

The movies never let go of that picture, either. Lino Ventura in the French crime films of the sixties and seventies, Robert Redford as a CIA reader on the run in Three Days of the Condor, Brad Pitt and Al Pacino as detectives in Se7en and Insomnia. Different decades, same idea: leather over a shirt and tie, on a guy with somewhere to be.

The car got warmer, the coat got shorter

So where do cars fit in? This is where the usual story is half right.

The open cars were real, and so were the long fur coats and linen dusters people wore in them. Then the cars got roofs. Around 1919 maybe one new car in ten had one. By 1926 it was nearly three in four, and heaters followed by the late 1930s.

So really, there were three coats, not one:

The car	The coat's job	What it looked like	What people called it
No roof (to the mid-1920s)	Keep the weather off	Knee length or longer. Fur, linen dusters	Motor coat, automobile coat
A roof, but still cold (mid-1920s to 1940s)	Keep you warm, but let you sit, drive, hop out and work	30 to 34 inches. Horsehide	Leather coat, horsehide coat
A roof and a heater (1950s on)	Stay out of the way	Short and light. Mostly cloth	Car coat

The one we care about is that middle one. Once there's a roof, you don't need a blanket with sleeves anymore. But the car's still freezing, so you need something warm. And anything that hangs to your knees is a pain behind the wheel. Sears said pretty much exactly that about its 1929 coat:

"This coat is thirty inches long and cut full so that it does not bind at any point. Allows perfect freedom of action."
Sears, Fall and Winter 1929-30, page 470

That's why length is the thing to get right, more than any detail on the front. Too long and you're fighting it every time you sit down. Too short and it's not really a coat anymore. Mid-thigh isn't a style that just happened to stick around. It's what a cold car taught people to want.

Two kinds, right from the start

If you've looked at car coats for a while, you've probably noticed they don't agree with each other. Some are long and almost bare. Others are shorter and covered in pockets and straps. It's easy to assume one's the real thing and the other came later.

Nope. Both were there from the beginning, usually on the same page. Sears in 1928 put a plain 30-inch coat with two pockets right next to a 32-inch one with "four pockets in all" and "an all around horsehide leather belt."

Turn the page and the belt moves around to the back: "Two strong roomy pockets. Half belt in back." Wards had its own version of the same choice in 1929. A neat single-breasted coat at 30 inches, or a big double-breasted one at 34.

So there are two honest ways to make this coat. Take things away until the shape does all the talking. Or add what a working day actually needs, pockets for your hands and a belt to pull it in, and keep it a bit shorter. Neither one is a copy of the other. Our two car coats sit one on each side, and as we reworked them we kept it that way.

Why horsehide

The catalogs didn't mess around when it came to the leather. They sold it on one thing: it was tough.

"The strongest, toughest coat leather known."
Sears, Fall and Winter 1929-30

"An all leather garment of this kind will 'wear like iron.'"
Montgomery Ward, Fall and Winter 1925-26

It wasn't a cheap leftover, either. Horses were vanishing from farms, and by 1928 Sears was already apologising for the price. By 1941 horsehide was the fancy option. By 1959 the Wards Christmas catalog mentions it exactly twice. Both times on a baseball.

Which leaves us with a funny little fact. By the time anyone called this a car coat, the leather it was made of had already left the building.

And then it got a name

"Car coat" barely exists before the mid-fifties, and then suddenly it's everywhere. Wards' 1959 Christmas catalog sells one on a page called "For the Man and His Car." Washable Dacron, short and light, made for the drive.

That's the heated-car coat, and it's a different coat from the 1928 horsehide one. Most of what's sold as a car coat today comes from this side.

The leather one didn't vanish, though. It just moved from the catalog to the movies. Sixties and seventies European cinema wore it exactly the way Sears drew it in 1928. Over a tie or a turtleneck, a little long, nothing extra.

That older one is where we started. The coat from before it had a name.

If you're picking one now

It still works the way it always did. Over a dark shirt, over a sweater with a briefcase in hand. It doesn't ask the rest of your outfit to change.

If you take one thing from all this, make it these three:

• Sit down in it. Length is the whole point. It should cover you standing up and stay out of your way sitting down, without riding up or bunching at the hips.
• Ask what the leather is. A lot of what's sold as a leather car coat today is cowhide, lamb, or not leather at all. Horsehide was the original for a reason, and these days it's the exception.
• Pick your kind. Long and pared down, or shorter with the pockets and the belt. Both are the real thing. It just comes down to which one you'd reach for on a normal morning.

Two car coats, reworked. November.