The trench coat, fashion’s most dependable staple, is being pulled apart and reassembled for autumn/winter 2026. Rather than the familiar double-breasted cut and waist belt, this season’s versions arrive in glossy leather, cape silhouettes, contrast collars, cropped hems and exaggerated proportions.
Burberry set the tone at London Fashion Week, opening its show with a ruffled trench and closing on an embossed vinyl iteration, part of a wider outerwear-led collection from creative director Daniel Lee that also included faille trenches with ruffled necklines and a leather trench embroidered with a map of London. Bottega Veneta’s take leaned oversized, with a collar and epaulettes rendered in the house’s signature intrecciato leather. Contemporary labels are following the same script at more accessible price points: Toteme has an oversized cotton trench in beige, Róhe a double-faced cape trenchcoat, and Bottega Veneta a belted, leather-trimmed cotton version anchoring the runway-to-retail translation.
The shift signals a broader recalibration in outerwear. For seasons, the trench has functioned as a safe, transitional layer; practical, neutral, rarely a statement piece. This season’s reworkings treat it instead as the focal point of an outfit, with texture and proportion doing the work that print or colour might do elsewhere in a wardrobe. It sits alongside other A/W 26 outerwear stories, including Prada’s rumpled tailoring and Stella McCartney’s teddy coats, all pointing toward outerwear as the season’s primary vehicle for newness rather than knitwear or dresses.
Outerwear has historically been a limited category for Indian fashion brands, constrained by climate and concentrated demand in the north and in hill-station and destination markets. But that footprint is widening. Rising travel to colder climates, growing wedding and event dressing in Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and the Northeast, and the steady expansion of D2C labels into structured, layering-first collections have pushed jackets and coats further into the seasonal assortment than they were even three years ago. Indian labels building out contemporary outerwear — from tailored bomber and utility jacket silhouettes to structured coats — are the ones best positioned to absorb this trend, translating the trench’s new proportions and leather-look finishes into pieces suited to India’s shorter, more transitional winter window rather than a full-length wool coat.
The category also plays to strengths Indian manufacturing already has: leather-look and vegan-leather fabrication, a mature outerwear and jacket export base serving international private labels, and design teams already fluent in translating runway silhouettes for warmer-climate markets. For domestic labels, the opportunity lies less in the classic beige trench and more in cropped, cape-cut or contrast-collar versions that can double as evening or occasion wear — a reworking that suits India’s layering habits better than the traditional ankle-grazing silhouette ever did.
