Alexa Chung Has Made The Perfect Autumn Trench Coat

Alexa Chung skipped London Fashion Week – save for the glossy screening of In Vogue: The 90s – because when facing the quandary of whether to support her favourite designers or her nervous system, the latter won. Having just been to New York twice in the space of five days for her latest Madewell launch, the newly minted creative director of Barbour’s The Edit for autumn/winter 2024 had a celebratory dinner to plan at Brat (incidentally the scene of Charli xcx’s pre-LFW shenanigans ). Any weary fashion PR yawning at their desk this week will tell you that mapping out a seating plan is no mean feat.

Still, Chung, brilliantly witty as per, Googled “how to make people happy”, learnt that “you should put the person nearest to death near the loo”, and landed upon a ’70s-tinged playlist kicked off by the Alessi Brothers, family-style plates of anchovy bread, beef ribs and burnt cheesecake, and a warm atmosphere designed to feel decidedly anti-fashion and more like a gathering of friends. “What makes anything good is authenticity,” she shares, while perched on the edge of her bed surrounded by dress options for the evening ahead. “I genuinely love these people, these clothes, this food – it feels like a curated thing that is honest.

The ones that feel dodgy are because someone has got a cheque for trying to pretend they like something.” With a gaggle of wax-jacketed friends, including Isamaya Ffrench, Marco Capaldo, Christopher Kane, Pixie Geldof and Henry Holland, it was mission accomplished on a cosy autumnal night in E8. This blast-from-the-past guest list is Barbour X Alexa Chung through and through.

The beloved collaboration, which threatened to conclude in 2022 and has now returned with another capsule of classics (this time, wellies!), has been a quiet fashion favourite for years thanks, in no small part, to her loyal inner circle. To watch Chung et al document their Glastonbury escapades while kitted out in their Liam jackets, inspired by Britpop and Quadrophenia , and Dominic jumpers, calling to mind the style of John Waters, is to want to immediately buy into this indie-tinged world . Chung, it transpires, said yes to the reunion because “it felt like going home”.

After closing her own label , it was confidence boosting to create within the confines of familiar codes, and alongside people who understood her. “It was like being raised by boundaried parents – I was free to express myself because I felt safe and loved,” chuckles Chung, who missed her Barbour family and had a yearning to fashion an oversized mac to her exact spec. “It was an entirely selfish endeavour, really.

” Given full creative freedom again, Alexa had other pieces on her mental wishlist to realise: a baby-chick yellow cardi she never got round to making at her eponymous label, oversized knitwear to make her brother happy, and pared-back outerwear with tartan inners skewing a little less twee than the prints we have seen come out of Barbour’s South Shields HQ before. The concise, covetable line took Chung back to the nuts and bolts of making – “I forgot how much hinges on a minuscule fabric sample” – while taking her into new practical footwear territory via those welly-Chelsea boot hybrids and gardening clogs. “I don’t think it’s a case of swapping out old [Barbour X Alexa] pieces, but adding to a burgeoning collection,” she muses, when probed on why we should keep buying into this on-again-off-again partnership.

“All I want now is to wear a very masculine coat – the trenches have evolved.” Shrugged on over a festive red sequined mini, the Natalie jacket indeed looks like the mac everyone wants in their wardrobe, and was clearly a no-brainer for Barbour to greenlight. “I’m post-handbag!” Alexa adds of why the pockets are expertly cut for “queens of losing cards”, such as herself.

Despite both recent collabs being “trotted out in quite a whiplash-y way”, it was a slow and orderly design process to reach Barbour’s The Edit, by Alexa Chung. “I’m trying not to spread myself too thinly,” asserts the Vogue contributing editor, who now recognises that it’s “important to eat food and nap for a bit” away from fashion’s hamster wheel. If this is what home feels like for Alexa, it looks good on her.

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