Polo Coat Day Is a Great Day

When treasured threads become old friends.

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As free citizens, Americans have the right to invent and celebrate whatever holidays they wish. My own personal commemoration is “Polo Coat Day,” which like Easter, has no fixed date but is determined by seasonal happenstance. In this case, the first day cold enough to throw a heavy camel hair overcoat around my shoulders.

Polo Coat Day fell on November 2nd this year, when I pulled a vintage Ralph Lauren polo coat out of my closet before running across the street to pick up a falafel wrap. Its observance does not require any special rituals or foods (the falafel wrap, while delicious, was entirely coincidental)

Today’s subject matter.

What it does entail is appreciation for the object itself, which spends half the year idling in the closet. Its annual return feels as if I’ve added a wonderful new piece to my wardrobe, but is in fact even better as it’s a “new” garment that comes with built-in memories.

I can’t recall precisely when my quest for a polo coat began, but I’d date it to roughly the winter of 2016-2017. At the time I was living in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, which had a healthy contingent of old men shuffling about in their ancient Andover Shop tweeds to pick up a pint of milk or walk the border collie. There was one man, silver-haired and patrician, that I’d see ambling out in a voluminous, double-breasted camel hair coat with a flapped pocket at the chest.

Thanks to pots from Put This On and Ivy-Style, I was able to identify his coat as likely being the Ralph Lauren model, owing to its flapped chest pocket and pronounced lapped seams. I knew that I absolutely had to have one, though the price of $2,500 for a new Polo coat fresh from RL was far above my freelance writer means.

How I think of myself in a polo coat.

So for the very first time, I got into eBay. Searches were saved, utilizing different combination of “Polo coat”, “Ralph Lauren” and “camel hair” (you can imagine that “Ralph Lauren Polo coat” is not exactly a precise search term on eBay). Each morning, I’d monitor my emails for any suspects, and within a few weeks found my white whale—only to have it sniped from me in a last-minute bidding war.

I waited, crestfallen, for months to have another bite at the apple. Finally, a listing appeared with the coat in question, bearing the old white-and-navy Polo logo and certainly used, with visible fraying along the hem and sleeves but in fine shape overall. Whoever the seller was, they knew its value: the coat was listed at $1,200.

Gritting my teeth, I made a relative lowball offer of $850, at the time a greater sum than I’d ever paid for an article of clothing. The binding offer went out—and in less than a minute, was accepted.

The polo coat in its native habitat.

Days after it was delivered, I traveled to Toronto with my now-wife, for what was our first international trip together. Making our way through passport control on the way back, an unsmiling security agent wordlessly waved me over to his station at the far end of the room. I was indeed interrogated, but not in the way I expected — “I want to know where you got that coat,” he asked in a deadly serious but admiring tone.

In the more than six years since, I’ve learned a great deal more about clothing and have consequently sold off and rebuilt my closet several times over. But the polo coat—whose exact provenance I’m not aware of, though a friend who’d designed at RL dated it to the 2000s or early 2010s—remains.

My own coat just before undergoing its sleeve-lengthening operation.

A threat to its continued use emerged last winter, after I’d purchased the Donegal overcoat made by Permanent Style and Private White V.C. and had my tailor alter its sleeves to properly cover my absurd, 37” arms. Afterward, the polo coat’s sleeves, which I’d realized were an inch or two too short but didn’t really bother me, became impossible to ignore. I found myself obsessing over the inch of sport coat sleeve that would stick out below it, started scrutinizing its appearance in windows—in short, I began to no longer enjoy it.

I brought it back to my tailor, who felt reluctant to touch it as he couldn’t guarantee that whatever fabric remained inside the sleeve would match the exterior. It was highly likely that 10 (or 20?) years of wear and sun could have faded them to wholly different shades.

One of the happiest moments of my life.

A compromise was reached. While I waited with the anxiety of a man watching a loved one undergo invasive surgery, my tailor delicately opened the jacket’s folded-over cuff with a razor. Miraculously, we discovered that the fabric below was indeed a match, and that there was enough to cover the more than two inches needed to bring the cuff down to my wrist.

That’s not to say that the surgery didn’t leave scars : a line leftover from where the cuff originally ended is now visible on the sleeve. But thanks to the fabric’s thickness it’s quite subtle. It also means that I’ve finally managed to leave a mark of my own on the garment, which still bears the frays and scuffs of those who treasured it long before it was mine.

Cut, Make and Trim

• Welcome to an all-polo coat edition of CMT! I don’t intend for this stream-of-consciousness section to always be dominated by a single subject but it turns out I have a lot to say about polo coats.

• The market for vintage Ralph Lauren polo coats has become quite competitive, I’m told. If you’re. on he hunt, I’d recommend keeping tabs on Crowley Vintage and Vintage PRL.

• I don’t know enough about the different makes of RL polo coats to state the differences between them with real authority. But broadly speaking, vintage makes seem to have a lower buttoning stance, greater length and slouchier fit than the contemporary offering. RL Grails posts on IG about these quite distinctions frequently.

• I wrote about polo coats for Robb Report in 2022, when there were some very interesting models on the market from J. Mueser and a Todd Snyder x J. Press collaboration.

• If I were to buy a new one today, I’d probably pull for The Anthology’s model, which is another Permanent Style collab. Angel Ramos also has a great-looking version this season with an Ulster collar.

• For a long time, polo coats were a standard offering of trad shops. Ben Silver and J. Press would regularly stock them, though I don’t see one offered by either retailer online currently. O’Connells continues to sell a reasonably priced version, as does Brooks Brothers, though I find the BB model to be too short (below-the-knee or bust!).

• On a less traditional note, I really dig the Barleycorn tweed polo coat just put out this season by Wythe.