Are Duffle Coats Back in Style? Marie Claire Told You to Shelve Your Barn Jacket 18 Months Ago

In February 2025, Marie Claire’s Emma Childs wrote that duffle-curious shoppers “might start shelving the chore jackets they bought last fall in favor of a fresher catch.” That was the barn jacket she was filing away, the one we spent two articles on, demoted after roughly twelve months of service. Her replacement had toggles, a hood, and runway receipts from Simone Rocha and Coach.

Eighteen months later, you’re maybe holding that thought and a credit card. We haven’t worn any of these coats, so what follows is a desk read of what the shops printed on August 27, because the racks turned out to be stranger than the trend call.

Start with the search boxes. Type “duffle coat women” into John Lewis and you get 328 results. In the first 25 the page renders, I counted three actual duffel coats, at £199, £465, and £1,299. Two more hits were a Michael Kors puffer whose colorway is named “Duffle.” The coat is a color now. ASOS is blunter: its “duffle coat” results are duffle bags, Nike and Berghaus, padded around wool coats with zero toggles in sight.

A man in a navy duffle coat with rope toggles over a grey sweater and trousers, walking a wet Paris street scattered with autumn leaves — A navy Gloverall duffle worn open in Paris. Via @jinji_shop. View on Instagram

Are duffle coats back in style in 2026?

Duffle coats got their comeback call in February 2025 from Marie Claire, with fall 2025 runway backing from Simone Rocha and Coach, and the accessible version sold through: the $147 Free People Alma that article recommended is sold out at Nordstrom as of August 27, 2026. And yet in the five fall 2026 trend lists we cross-referenced last week, the duffle doesn’t appear once. The headline energy has moved on. Year two of a comeback is quieter, and honestly, cheaper to shop.

Here’s what the fabric lines print across the price ladder, read from each seller’s own page:

The coat	Price	What the fabric line says
Gloverall Original Monty	$695	90% wool, 10% polyamide, wooden toggles, made in England
Gerard Darel Alsa, at John Lewis	£465	100% wool
L.L.Bean Classic Lambswool Duffel	$279 in Childs’s piece	shell 100% wool, insulation 65% olefin
Barbour Connie, at John Lewis	£199	65% polyester, 33% viscose, 2% elastane
Free People Alma	$147, sold out	91% polyester, 9% viscose

A vintage camel monty coat with rope-and-toggle closures and patch pockets displayed on a mannequin against a grey studio backdrop — A mid-century monty coat, the naval original the civilian duffle descends from. Photo: Museum Rotterdam via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Are duffle coats warm?

A duffle coat is warm when the cloth is wool, and on the current racks wool starts at roughly $279: Gloverall’s $695 Original Monty prints 90% wool and the £465 Gerard Darel prints 100%, while under £200 the fiber flips, with Barbour’s £199 Connie at 65% polyester and the sold-out $147 Alma at 91%. The silhouette was built as insulation. The original navy-issue coats were boiled wool so dense they doubled as blankets, which is the whole reason the hood and toggles exist (toggles work with frozen or gloved hands, a detail every product page has quietly stopped needing).

So the toggle turns out to be the cheapest part to copy. It’s the one part of the coat you can see in a listing photo, and the one part that tells you nothing about February.

Close-up of horn toggles and leather loops on a dark brown wool duffle coat worn over faded blue jeans — Horn toggles on a late-'70s Gloverall duffle, made in England. Via @horos_____. View on Instagram

If you bought the barn jacket last fall, keep wearing it. Its year-two discount logic works the same way, and coat season markdowns haven’t even started. If you genuinely want a duffle, the trend has already done you a favor by leaving: the polyester ones sold out with the hype, and the wool ones, the £465 and $695 kind, were never trending in the first place. They just get bought, slowly, by people who checked the fabric line.