There is something deeply American about the idea of sharing clothes. Not borrowing. Not trend-chasing. Sharing. At Stuart Vevers’ Fall 2026 show for Coach, that distinction wasn’t sentimental. It was strategic.
Titled What We Share, the collection positioned American fashion as mindset, not map. Seventh Avenue sportswear met honest, salt-of-the-earth workwear. Youth counterculture brushed shoulders with the cinematic sweep of The Wizard of Oz. Vevers references that sepia-to-Technicolor shift, and on paper, it sounds like nostalgia bait. On the runway, it felt sharper. Less fairy tale. More coming-of-age in real time. We are all somewhere between Kansas and Oz right now. The color has arrived. The complexity came with it.
Coach leaned into that tension with clothes that looked pre-loved but not performative. Repurposed leather baseball gloves cut into patchworked pieces that felt equal parts Little League and Lower East Side. Tailored jackets turned inside out so the lining, the hidden work, became the flex. High-waisted A-line checked skirts gave just enough school uniform to suggest innocence, but paired with slouchy knits and scuffed boots, they read as rebellion with manners.
And the varsity jackets. Always the varsity jackets. In another brand’s hands, they’re merch. Here, they felt like membership cards to something bigger than a trend cycle. Who wore it first matters. Who inherits it next is the real story.
Vevers has always romanticized vintage technique, the fade of denim, the burnish of vegetable-tanned leather. This season, though, sustainability moved from industry buzzword to emotional currency. Recycling as intimacy. A tear as testimony. A hand-me-down as generational dialogue. It’s one thing to study circular fashion in a boardroom. It’s another to frame it as a sister passing down her favorite jacket with the sleeves pushed up just so.
Right now, everyone seems to have an opinion about what America means and who gets to define it. Coach sidestepped the noise and proposed something steadier. American style isn’t a costume you reach for when it’s convenient. It is raw material. Varsity patches, thrifted denim, skater shorts, kisslock bags, stars and stripes that don’t scream but hum. These symbols have traveled from mountains to boroughs to Instagram feeds, and they still hold.
The show closed with a dedication to Vevers’ newborn daughter, Fawn. It could have felt soft-focus. Instead, it landed like a promise. We pass things down so the next generation can remix the archive, not archive themselves.