New Dad Stuart Vevers Has Created A Coach SS´21 Collection Inspired By Family

As if the events of 2020 weren’t monumental enough, in the middle of lockdown in June, Stuart Vevers became a first-time father of twins. “It’s been a busy few months, let’s say that,” the Coach designer smiles on a video call from his New York office the evening before his spring/summer 2021 presentation. The arrival of the twins – named River and Vivienne – fuelled a new perspective for Vevers, who had the option to extend his paternity leave and skip a season, but decided not to. “I thought, actually, it’s really important that we continue creating and try to understand what Coach’s role is in the world now.”

The answer to his question was to be found in the way his team’s interactions changed during quarantine. “We had a lot of conversations as a team. We were more a part of each other’s lives. You saw into each other’s worlds. You had to turn up more human. That’s how we approached designing the collection: what felt important to us as designers, what we wanted to convey.” Like many in the fashion industry, Coach was faced with an autumn/winter 2020 collection that inevitably “wouldn’t get a lot of airtime” once it hit stores, as Vevers put it. “People had other priorities.”

Sensing the winds of change in fashion – from calls for sustainability and anti-disposability to an appetite for anti-obsolescence – he decided to make his last collection part of his new one (the two effectively are integrated on Coach.com). It inspired him to dig deeper into the existing treasures of the brand and unearth his favourite pieces from Coach’s history. From Bonnie Cashin’s bags from the 1960s to jumpers and slippers from Vevers’s own seven-year residency at the brand, he re-issued garments and accessories he felt deserved a second wind.

Then, he added the season’s touch: childlike doodles on otherwise sophisticated coats, meant to imbue the garment with a certain sense of history and soul, as if someone had been scribbling on them over an extended period of time. Through their many emotional conversations as a team, the Coach gang arrived at the idea of family. “We talked about how we’d connected more with our families during this time,” Vevers recalls, “which led us to think about our Coach family.” He invited a cast of famous faces, all part of his own history at the brand, to star in a campaign shot around the world through iPhones, orchestrated remotely by Juergen Teller in London.

Vevers’s friend Megan Thee Stallion is pictured in a desert setting in Los Angeles wearing a re-issue of the first bag Bonnie Cashin designed for Coach in 1963. Shot in London, Kate Moss wears the Jean-Michel Basquiat-adorned coat from autumn/winter 2020 layered over a new dress, with an upcycled vintage bag embellished with seasonal doodling embroidery. Kaia Gerber is photographed in New York City wearing a dress that looks like an old hand-me-down with her name embroidered on it. Other guest stars include Cole Sprouse, Debbie Harry, Kiko Mizuhara, Jeremy Lin, Jon Batiste, Paloma Elsesser, Hari Nef, Binx Walton, Lexi Boling, Xiao Wen Ju, Kelsey Lu, Bob the Drag Queen and Rickey Thompson.

Captured – also remotely – in a short film that serves as Coach’s presentation in lieu of its traditional runway show at New York Fashion Week, the collection is an illustration of the themes that have filled the minds of the fashion industry and its consumers since our worlds changed this spring. Resourceful, thrifty and with a stripped-down, back-to-basics quality that seems to resonate with the our current mindset, it’s Vevers testament to the monumental makeover we’ve all experienced this year. And, no doubt, the new perspective gained with fatherhood.