As the coats come out again, Nicole Junkermann makes the case for a winter wardrobe built on warmth, texture and pieces you keep for years.
Words by Nicole Junkermann
Entrepreneur, investor and longtime patron of the arts, Nicole Junkermann has always thought of winter as the season that asks the most of a wardrobe and gives the most back. In this guest essay for 1883, Nicole Junkermann writes about warmth, texture and the pieces worth keeping. In her own words.
There is a morning every year when the air finally changes. You step outside in what worked perfectly well last week, feel the cold come straight through it, and go back in for the coat. I love that morning. It is the point at which a wardrobe stops being decorative and starts being useful, and the clothes that have earned their place come out of storage like old friends.
Summer asks very little of what you wear. Winter asks for everything at once: warmth, weight, a little armour against a dark afternoon, and enough elegance that you still feel like yourself at the end of a long day. That is a demanding brief, and it is exactly why winter dressing is the most satisfying kind there is.
What Nicole Junkermann looks for first
Warmth, always, and warmth of a particular sort. Good wool, cashmere with some substance to it, tweed with a bit of weight, shearling if the winter is the serious kind. The cloth does the work, and all the styling in the world will not rescue a coat that gives up in a cold wind.
Then the practical details, which are where most of the pleasure hides. A coat cut generously enough to go over a jacket. Sleeves long enough to cover the wrist as you reach for a door. Pockets deep enough for gloves. A collar that turns up and stays up. These sound like small things. They are the whole difference between a coat you admire and a coat you live in.
The case for fewer, better layers
Layering is the real craft of the season, and it works best with a handful of pieces that all speak to each other. A fine knit that sits under a heavier one. A shirt with enough body to be worn on its own indoors. A scarf, which remains the most useful thing anyone owns in January and the quickest way to change the mood of everything underneath it.
Keeping to a quiet palette makes this effortless. Navy, charcoal, camel, cream and grey get along with one another without any thought at all, which matters on a dark morning when the last thing you want is a decision. A wardrobe like that is quick, calm and oddly freeing.
Winter rewards the clothes you keep, rather than the clothes you chase.
NICOLE JUNKERMANN
Texture is the winter luxury
Summer has colour. Winter has texture, and to my eye it is the better of the two. A ribbed knit against a smooth wool coat, corduroy against leather, a heavy scarf against a crisp collar. It reads quietly in a photograph and beautifully in person, because texture is something you feel before you consciously notice it.
Cloth of that quality also ages in your favour. Wool softens where you wear it. Leather takes on the marks of the places you have been. A coat in its fifth winter carries a little history with it, and it looks the better for that than anything straight off the rail.
What craft has to do with it
The same instinct runs through everything else I write. In my journal of reading, travel and the cities I walk in, the things I come back to are the ones somebody made with care and meant to last, and that is as true of a winter coat as it is of a book, a chair or a building.
The things Nicole Junkermann keeps
Care is the part nobody talks about, and it is most of the secret. Brush a wool coat and it stays sharp for years. Air knitwear rather than washing it constantly. Have boots resoled by someone who enjoys the work. Mend the small moth hole in October, long before you would otherwise find it in February.
Buying slowly follows naturally from that. I would rather wait a season for the right coat than come home with three that almost work, and the waiting is part of the pleasure. The pieces that stay with you are rarely the ones bought in a hurry.
Where this leads
On the coldest mornings I think dressing well is mostly a kindness you do for yourself. You are about to spend a whole day in this, in queues and on platforms and in rooms that are never quite the right temperature. Warm shoulders, dry feet and a collar you can turn up against the wind will improve that day more than almost anything else you own.
So let the wardrobe be small, warm and worn constantly. Keep the coat that has proved itself. Learn the two or three combinations that always work, and wear them without ceremony. Winter is long, and the great luxury of it is having exactly the right things to reach for.
Nicole Junkermann is an entrepreneur, investor and patron of the arts. She writes about art and culture at nicolejunkermann.info.
