There are really only two reasons to buy a luxury coat: desperation or revenge. The first time I bought one, it was a black Rick Owens trench from the Fall/Winter 2016 collection that I found at Dover Street Market in New York City. Was that out of desperation or revenge? It was the first time I got a check in the mail for something I’d written, and I was desperate to prove to myself that this is the kind of person I was and who I would be: an aspiration and a promise. And I was taking revenge against all of the gatekeepers and lackeys who had never paid attention to me, a public school kid from the Los Angeles suburbs who was, by most accounts, a “nice guy.” Now I felt like a goth villain from Final Fantasy, which wasn’t exactly the goal, but closer. Almost all of the coats I’ve bought have been to complicate my reputation as “a nice guy.” The Prada snow coat, with a print of sunbathers on the beach, brought out a sense of irony: nostalgia or optimism, it could go either way. I wore my black 1999 Raf Simons coat, structured and single-breasted with buttons attached to a chain, the night the editor of Viscose threw a birthday dinner in Mexico City, the first destination party I’d ever attended. One night at Berghain in Berlin, where I lived for four years, I wore a tan Burberry trench coat with nothing underneath except Calvin Klein underwear.I had an impatience to be noticed. Somewhere in the national subconscious, coats commemorate a kind of arrival — at adulthood, on the scene, or at a personal milestone. I watched the movie Kramer vs. Kramer so long ago that I can’t remember the plot, except for the opening scene, when Dustin Hoffman says the first thing he did after getting an important job was buy a Burberry coat. When the fashion critic Rachel Tashjian first saw an Alaïa coat, from Pieter Mulier’s first collection in 2022, she thought to herself, “This is the kind of coat an adult wears.” It was a thick wool peacoat with enormous lambskin buttons, bunched at