EDITOR’S NOTE: Featuring the good, the bad and the ugly, ‘Look of the Week’ is a regular series dedicated to unpacking the most talked about outfit of the last seven days.
Attention! The fashion set has just deployed a new fall jacket that could become a wardrobe mainstay for us all. Earlier this week at the Victoria’s Secret after-party in New York, Jodie Turner-Smith arrived in a pair of relaxed, low-slung light wash jeans, a white vest and a black, white and red military jacket that looked nothing short of Napoleonic.
Identifiable by elaborate braiding, decorative buttons, and often toggles across the chest, military coats — also known as the Hussar jacket or Pelisse — appear to be making a comeback. While Turner-Smith, who also attended the brand’s latest runway show as a VIP guest, got her Hussar coat from Georgian-based brand Keburia, she’s not the only celebrity who has been spotted in military-style outerwear in recent weeks.
At Paris Fashion Week, Zendaya was snapped outside the Louis Vuitton show at the Louvre, dressed in a metallic, fur-trimmed dress-coat with a Rococo edge. While some fashion enthusiasts may be revisiting Marie Antoinette as a source of sartorial inspiration in the light of the blockbuster London exhibition dedicated to the French Queen’s style, Zendaya’s look took more cues from King Louis XVI. The following day at Dior, Jenna Ortega was seen in a gothic black sleeveless Hussar vest, the frog fastenings embroidered intricately with gold thread and finished with shining buttons. She completed her look with aviator sunglasses, bleached brows and a denim mini-skirt.
Of course, this isn’t the first time modern dressers have dusted off 18th-century military outerwear in the name of fashion. The late American guitarist and singer Jimi Hendrix, who once briefly enlisted in the US army, owned and wore several different types of Hussar pelisses in the 1960s. Hendrix wore the coats unbuttoned, sometimes shirtless, and adorned with pendant necklaces; other times he styled them with vibrant silk scarves or blouses, subverting their original context as strict uniforms for obedient, militant officers.
This playful, bohemian upending of a rigid, historical garment started a wave of subversive iterations from luxury brands, including Saint Laurent, Balmain, Gucci and Marc Jacobs — which in 2002 presented cream wool Hussar jackets trimmed with red and finished in gold stitching, worn with paisley blouses that seemed to be in the Hendrix style. But when The Beatles wore the decorated military coats of yore on the cover of the 1967 album “Sargent Peppers and the Lonely Hearts Club,” it was less about communicating sex appeal and more about anti-establishment and anti-war sentiments. They wore their delicious, candy-colored satin guard coats buttoned to the top, like four fanciful colonels on the regimen of peace and love.
Since then, the Hussar pelisse ironically became something of a uniform in the early aughts for musicians, including Michael Jackson, Beyoncé and Rihanna, and bands such as British alt-indie group The Libertines and US pop-punk band My Chemical Romance. In 2005, Kate Moss, then-girlfriend of The Libertines front man Pete Doherty, led the charge in making the trend mainstream with an ivory version worn to the Glastonbury music festival.
Now, the style is back on our catwalks, as seen at Jonathan Anderson’s debut menswear collection for Dior, as well as in recent collections by McQueen, Vaquera and Ann Demeulemeester. And word spreads fast — according to Molly Rooyakkers, who runs the data-driven fashion Instagram account @styleanalytics, global searches for “Hussar jacket” have increased 300% in October compared to the previous month. Roger that.
