Leather Coat Daydreams: December 2018

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Reflections of Christmas past

Happy holidays to all who follow this blog!

As my writings indicate, the autumn and early winter have always held a certain degree of magic for me because they were the beginning of "leather weather". Through much of my childhood and early adult life I anticipated seeing fashionable women button up in leather coats as it grew cold outside.

A JCPenney Christmas catalog arrived in the mail in early September. I would anxiously flip though it to the women's outerwear section in high-hopes of discovering a full-page advertisement for a ladies long leather coat. And during the 1990s it rarely disappointed.

This was only part of the joy heralded by the season, though. Mail order catalogs came regularly advertising women's leather coats. Everybody still got newspapers in those days before the Internet, and they were stuffed with ads from department stores. Every day when I got home from class or work I would scour these ads, and much to my delight they often contained images like these.

Even black-and-white ads offered glimpses of ladies in leather coats, including this one from 1991 which is one of my all-time favorites.

Thanksgiving celebrated on the last Thursday of November meant that the newspaper would be tremendously thick, packed full of Christmas sales for the retail phenomenon known as Black Friday. What better gift could a man buy a woman for Christmas than a luxurious long leather coat? These three pictures were from the same Macy's ad on Thanksgiving 1995.