Stuart Vevers.
Eight years after he moved to the New York to become creative director of Coach, British designer Stuart Vevers is perfectly at home – but still retains the objectivity of a perpetual outsider. He describes how he has instilled an ethos of individuality and belonging at the youthful all-American brand that’s 80 years old – creating an optimistic antidote for tumultuous times.
Stuart Vevers doesn’t drive. But he has been on a perennial mindscape of an American road trip at Coach since 2013. It’s the USA of his imagination bolstered by pop-cultural iconography that has shaped his vision at Coach. When Vevers was appointed as creative director at the American leather-goods house, he was coming from a place of Parisian conglomerate luxury. Sharp-shouldered jackets on editors’ shoulders. Instagram was still in static square format. An American fashion house? Sniff sniff. C’est quoi? There was work to be done to shift the perception of a brand weighed down with a logo toted by American mall mums.
Eight years on, Vevers’ Coach vision is entrenched and bedded in. Vevers has two bona fide American kids, River and Vivienne, born on American soil. No longer a tourist, and yet perpetually an outsider. Or perhaps Vevers is eager to stay wide eyed. Only then can you go forth and push for change. Vevers’ time at the American house neatly coincided with a period in fashion when it is rightly under pressure to check itself. Check its privilege. Check that its brand values for real align with the customers it is trying to push product upon. Vevers, his team and Coach have heeded these calls with gusto and have done so in a way that makes sense.
The clothes are ‘kewt’. The vibe is genuinely inclusive. But backing up the fun shearling jackets, prairie dresses and bags like the Rogue or the Ergo that can be chucked around rather than toted meticulously is a genuine commitment to do better and really meaning it without ramming corporate social-responsibility jargon down your throat. A Coach bag – whether resurrected as a vintage piece and restored, reissued as an archive redux, or reinvented as a soft Pillow Tabby bag – is carried with youth-driven pride. During a year like no other, Vevers like everyone went existential.
What the hell are ‘we’ as designers doing? How do we truly engage an audience that have other things on their minds? It seems blindingly obvious, but when the first instalment of Coach TV opened online with its version of an episode of Friends where K-pop stars Hyuna and Dawn break out into a dance battle over a cookie, there was a collective laugh track. Everyone could relate after their hours spent watching an inordinate amount of TV. Vevers had latched onto a good thing, realising things can be done differently and actually doing things differently without over-labouring the point of being different.
Vevers’ road trip at Coach is very much still in flux. On the road, forging ahead. Even as the rest of luxury world is still trying to hold on to what has gone before. Maybe it’s being at an American house. Can fashion be truly inclusive, approachable, fun and responsible? Yes it can. It’s all open borders at Coach. Me casa su casa. Wide open roads in Vevers’ ever-curious mind. That is until he finally gets his driving licence.
You’ve been at Coach eight years now, and this year Coach is celebrating its 80th anniversary. When you began you were like an American tourist, exploring the house on a road-trip trajectory. But now you’re not the tourist any more. You’re living it.
Yes, with American children now! It’s been extraordinary. I started with a vision for Coach. That vision was very much inspired by the fact I was joining a house that was very different to the experience I’d had before. And the appeal for me was that it was for everyone, and that idea of belonging and individuality go side by side. Another important thing is that Coach is where heritage and pop culture or youth culture can come together unexpectedly. Over the last year and a half, particularly, that’s really gained momentum. Sometimes it just takes time for things to really make sense. Something about the last year reminded me of all the things that I love about Coach and really pushed me further, creatively and aesthetically. And we deliberately kept working, and somehow we pushed ourselves in directions I don’t think we realised we would go. A lot of what I do is built on the legacy of American style and there has always been an ease about how we approach things, which comes from being unapologetically practical, authentic New York. This sense of freedom and this sense of possibility here is still very much an inspiration. And while I’m embedded in the city and I understand it more, I still feel like I see things from the eyes of an outsider. I’m not sure that will ever go away, because I didn’t grow up with so many of the things that I see every day. They still seem exotic. They just do!
You have very cleverly tapped into this idea of fashion as entertainment over the past year in a way that made Coach TV as a show format feel like actual compelling viewing. It was actually engaging, in a way that many other digital shows just aren’t.
It’s about doing things that feel authentically Coach that other brands just couldn’t do. It was honestly that thing of sitting down and going, ‘What do we want to see right now?’ And I was having these conversations with people having a tough time – not being able to see family, family not being well, with so much going on in people’s lives. And there was a moment where I really was like, ‘What does fashion mean in this moment?’ That feeling that you get with a new piece of clothing or a new bag gives you that boost or feel-good factor. So how can we present that? Obviously we were watching a lot of TV – specifically, old TV – so we wanted to just channel-surf with our Coach family.
One of the most interesting things was that I was referencing things that I grew with – the Seventies, the Eighties and a bit of the Nineties. But my biggest question was, ’Is this going to resonate with a younger audience?’ And fortunately it did – it really resonated with the younger generation and it started to really create a shift in our clients to a much younger audience. There’s been a lot of buzz with the pillow Tabby bag that exploded on on TikTok – we literally can't keep it in stock!
And then Coach TV also brought in a different audience, who were like, ‘Oh, wow, this is Coach?!’ It is unusual to have an American house crossing over into pop culture and entertainment without any kind of detriment to the core product, because it is also rooted in heritage. It’s quite unique to have 80 years of heritage, crafts, codes and designers in America, but it’s not even that old. It’s young and has lived through generations of youth culture. If you think of Coach coming up in the Forties, it coincided with the birth of counterculture and the birth of rock and roll. In fact, I actually spoke to a ‘professor of cool’ who tracked the birth of the word ‘cool’ to the jazz scene in the 1940s, which for me is always an interesting parallel with Coach to have that story.
There were so many questions during the past year: ‘Do we really need this? What is actually necessary?’ Coach seems to have hit that sweet spot of celebrating the fun of fashion while asserting values that feel aligned with a new generation.
Yes – do we need this? Because there are so many bigger things going on in people’s lives. I mean, I was expecting twins at the beginning of the pandemic and they were born in June last year! We needed to understand how we’re going to be relevant going forward, we need to dig deep and talk to each other as human beings. At one moment during the pandemic, there was a point where I really did think, ‘What are we doing?’ So we need things like joy and optimism and feeling good. We saw this shift in our clients wanting joyful prints and happy colour-blocking and novelty shapes – a desire for something that brightens your day.
And feeling good is connected to doing good – for instance, with Coach Forever and the upcycling of materials or reviving archive shapes. New is not necessarily necessary.
I had never tackled it as a designer head on. I felt a bit afraid of it in the beginning. What if you get it wrong? What if you say the wrong thing about it? I thought it was the responsibility of the production guys. But no, I now know I have a huge responsibility in affecting how things are made. By challenging ourselves and experimenting, we’re going to learn along the way, but we’re not going to be perfect all the way. I’m going to spend a lot of time talking to people and brainstorming, playing and creating, and approach it from a design mindset. Like using waste materials to create a woven leather. But it’s also about giving the archive a new lease of life. In Tokyo I see people carrying old Coach bags that are often 50 or 60 years old. They get better with time and can go through second and third lives. We work with this amazing lady called Debi the Restorer and she has the basement in her house in Montana for restoring old Coach bags. This can become the new normal.
It’s been an acutely tumultuous year for everyone. But in America, from Black Lives Matter to the changing of the administration, perhaps within an American house the need for change feels more pertinent? And that those changes are more tangible and achievable, in comparison to a luxury house in Paris where there might a bigger resistance to change?
I just think there needs to be the right environment to make those changes in. What happens when you hear from different voices and really think about what my role within the company is in all of this? We have always had very diverse interesting castings, but it’s also important that behind the scenes we are diverse in the same way. Being in New York and being a part of all the marches, I would come home and think, ‘OK, what am I going to do? Who am I going to talk to to make real concrete changes and not just talk about them as ideas?’ I do feel a sense of responsibility as it’s important to me and therefore important to the company.
What else is on your Coach trajectory? Where does this road trip lead to?
One thing I really want to do is actually learn to drive! It’s my new goal. I have to take that road trip that I’ve talked about as an inspiration all this time. But on a serious note, I really want to push sustainability, but from a design point of view. I still feel like I have so much to do and so much to learn. The thing I don’t want to hear about is ‘going back to normal’. I don’t even know what that is any more. I’ve changed the way I work completely. I’ve challenged everything we do. We’ve done nothing the same for a year and a half – how we create collections, how we present them. I don’t want to go back to normal because I feel creatively energised, ironically. I want to keep that momentum, push forward and learn and try new things. As a designer, though, I’m conscious it’s very easy to slip back. And that doesn’t feel right to me. At the end of the day, it’s about being welcoming and warm and, you know, making people smile. Those attributes didn’t historically sit within a traditional luxury world. It’s interesting that now that world is also trying to get into that zeitgeist. At Coach we can do that very authentically. At the end of the day, we can all change, move and evolve. But that’s kind of what Coach has always been about.
