2025's Classic Duffle Coat Trend Will Replace Last Year’s Barn Jacket

Welcome to fashion’s fresh-air era—a time when tastemakers long to log off and get lost in nature. Barn jackets are a way for city dwellers to cosplay as crop farmers. Latent horse girls adopt English countryside-inspired style as an excuse to buy equestrian riding boots. Now, a fleet of fashion folks is using a duffle coat trend to feel like they're far from their city life, cast out at sea.

Recognizable by its toggle-and-rope closures, patch pockets, and oversized hood to stave off sea spray, you’d typically envision a duffle coat (spelled interchangeably with 'le' or 'el') on a windswept sailor luring in carp off the Dutch coast. (Alternatively, on Paddington Bear, who sports a rather dashing navy toggle topper). But as fashion becomes increasingly swept up in the fisherman aesthetic—with the tides also rising on sea-faring staples like boat shoes and Breton stripe shirts—the nautical coat trend is washing up on the mainland.

An off-duty Jennifer Lawrence wears a duffle coat to run errands in New York City’s concrete jungle, while Alexa Chung sports hers indoors for Instagram OOTDs. “Nothing sexier than a duffel coat, in my humble opinion,” the British It-girl wrote in her caption. Meanwhile, fresh duffle coats the color of the deep blue sea recently walked down Simone Rocha and Coach’s Fall 2025 runways—instant crowd-pleasers among show guests who were already wearing their own toggle coat versions from Altuzarra, Toteme, and Ralph Lauren.

But before it had the ‘fashion’ component we’re seeing now as a 2025 trend, the duffle coat was foremost rooted in function. Named after the Belgian town where the waterproof, durable duffel cloth was initially produced (duffel bags have the same origin story), toggle coats were developed by British outerwear manufacturer John Partridge in the 1850s and worn primarily by British Royal Navy officers. Like its trench coat counterpart, the duffle coat found popularity among the masses post-World War II due to a surplus textile stock.

Fast forward to the present, and style arbiters are hooked on the sea-faring staple—including Marie Claire’s editor-in-chief, Nikki Ogunnaike, who waxed poetic about the vintage duffle coat she scored on The RealReal in a recent Self-Checkout newsletter. So much so that Jalil Johnson, author of the fashion-focused Substack newsletter Consider Yourself Cultured, predicts some might start shelving the chore jackets they bought last fall in favor of a fresher catch—which is, of course, just the way the trend cycle works; once a silhouette has its fun in the sun, another It-thing comes along to take its place.

But Johnson also sees the outerwear journey that’s taking shoppers from the field to the sea as connected to a bigger, overarching theme in fashion. “We have a fascination with taking utilitarian pieces out of the settings they usually would be and bringing them into our modern wardrobes,” he says. Like the barn jacket, the duffle coat has a greater purpose than being worn to brunch downtown or for a leisurely day of window shopping. But the contrast that comes from putting a functional piece in a fashion-forward context is why the mariner's coat is such a delightful fashion trend, explains Johnson, who just wore a navy Gloverall duffle coat with a gray pleated midi skirt and crisp blazer to Thom Browne’s Fall 2025 show at NYFW.

A duffel coat is an unexpected oddball option that—pardon the pun—feels like a fresh catch. And, again, when your day-to-day doldrums consist of corporate cubicles and grocery shopping, it's nice to put on a piece that helps you embody a seaside escape.

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