I bought my first real trench coat in 2019, after a woman at the till in a Leeds shopping centre told me it would “elongate” me. I am five foot three. I have never, ever been elongated by anything in my life, yoga included, and I really should have known better than to listen to some random stranger holding a coat she was eager to sell me. But I bought it. Cream, double breasted, belted, every ugly stereotype. I wore it to drinks for a friend’s birthday two weeks later and felt like I’d cracked some mysterious style coding, until my friend Bronwyn looked at me and said “why are you dressed as a small, well meaning detective.” Cue disaster coats being retired into the darkest corners of my wardrobe for three years until charity donation fatigue took over.
I’m bringing all of this up because as inflated as my confidence was after buying that first coat, the idea that trench coats make you look taller is somewhere close to universal in the world of fashion advice. Everyone from professionals to your parents has repeated that sentence to you at some point. It gets said so often that people have stopped questioning it, and start repeating it the way they repeat “you should drink two litres of water a day”, certain of its authority but with no real concept of where it started or if it actually applies to them. And, after wearing enough embarrassingly bad trench coats to realise what went wrong the first time, I think it’s safe to say: trench coats only make you look taller sometimes, on certain body types, and only if they’re the correct length. That’s not the throwaway bit of knowledge we’ve all been bandying about. That’s half of the country undoing a decades-long myth.
Where the myth that trench coats make you look taller actually comes from
Look, the maths isn’t bullshit or unfounded, so credit to whoever started this rumour for starting somewhere logical. A trench coat, worn correctly, creates one large vertical shape across your body. There’s no horizontal break at your hips, no jacket cutting off at an unfortunate point, just one tall lean line running from your shoulder to approximately your knee or calf. We’ve been told by every style magazine ever that unbroken vertical lines are “lengthening” and sure, okay, when you put it like that it makes sense! It’s why you should wear all black, or those bloody articles about vertical stripes forever telling me to stripe up whenever I cover my legs.
The problem is taking that basic idea and applying it to every body, every trench coat, every hem length equally and that’s where it starts to fall apart. There is no one trench coat. Boden sells them floor skimming, ASOS sells them cropped to just above your hip. Some people belt them tight, some wear them open and swinging. Claiming “trench coats make you look taller” is like saying “trousers make you look taller.” Oh, do some? Fuck loads don’t. It’s relative to every person’s body in relation to every coat length, and you’re not asking a miserable person selling you a coat how it looks on you in particular on the shop floor, because they want to get back to the till. Believe me, I’ve worked retail.
I spoke to my colleague Idris about this because he’s six foot tall and wears a trench every winter so I wanted to know if it felt like it actually did make him look taller from the opposite end of the height spectrum. The effect itself wasn’t noticeable to him because, well, he already is tall, but he did mention how his trench makes him feel “sort of disappear into a column” and I’ve been replaying that description in my head ever since. That’s what’s actually happening. Not height, per sé. Silhouette. And different starting silhouettes will make that formula work differently.
The length is relative to your proportions.
This is the massive, gaping hole in the entire “invest in a trench coat” rhetoric. The length of your coat relative to your natural leg length is way more important than the coat itself. Because a trench that sits below your knee on a six footer is going to fall differently, proportionally, on top of my grandma-legs. On me, a midi trench coat—that’s the ridiculously hated through-the-calf-length ones, the exact kind I bought in that Leeds shop—all peaks out at around my calves widest part. Not my knee, not my ankle, right at the bit that you could probably fit two of my legs into if we were being perfectly honest. Suddenly my one tall vertical line became one tall block on top and then two tiny half lines of leg poking out at the bottom, as if the coat had tried to eat me whole. Once I actually looked at photos of myself in that thing instead of awkwardly shading my face in shop mirrors, Bronwyn’s detective comment made total sense.
The belt is affecting things you might not realise. Belting a trench off your natural waist, if you have one that other people can clearly see, will create that classic hourglass figure that in turn does actually make your body read more top to bottom, less side to side. But wear the belt too low (no, not on your hips, I’m looking at you social media), or belt your trench over chunky jumpers so that waist no longer has any definition, and you’ve just created a big ol’ horizontal line right across your middle. The opposite of what you were going for. I did this for a whole goddamn winter before I realised I was doing it because I kept layering chunky knitwear under my trench and cinching the belt over it. The coat looked less chic tailored and more like I’d wrapped my duvet in cream cotton.
My neighbour Fenella, who is several inches taller than me and looks great in basically anything she owns from what I can tell, summed up the whole trench length debacle to me one day over the garden fence: “it’s not the coat. It’s where it stops.” Gold. Honestly.
Why it actually doesn’t work for you
I want to get this bit very specific because I feel like this is the piece of the puzzle everyone skips over when they just want you to buy the classic trench. If your coat hits at the widest part of your leg/thigh/calf then it will always visually shorten you, regardless of how well it fits everywhere else. It’s not something you can throw cash at and bypass. I’ve seen expensive coats do this to people just as badly as that forty quid disappointment did to me.
Side note – another trench-specific failure I didn’t think about until writing this: sleeve length matters for height, too. Like, weirdly enough. Every trench coat I have loved the look of has had sleeves that either swallow my hand up or stop right past my wrist. And it’s exactly that small detail that kills the whole effect. Trench coats with sleeves that go even half an inch past your wrist make your hands disappear and for some reason drag the entire look of the coat down with them. I really noticed this when my sister Marguerite wore the same trench coat I had bought after the Leeds disaster. Marg is a good four inches taller than me, but where the trench hit her sleeve perfectly on the wrist bone, it swallowed about two inches of my hand. Same coat. Same trench length. Two totally different results.
Open vs belted is also a lot more Finna go super conspiracist about this but wearing your trench open vs belted really does make a difference. Open, leaving it to flap straight down either side of your body creates a physical column of sorts, two long lines sandwiching whatever is underneath, which can work to make you look taller if you don’t have much happening on the bottom half. But throw a pattern on under that open coat and you’ve instantly ruined the illusion by adding a third shape for the eye to follow. I learned that lesson when wearing my beloved floral dress under an open trench to a wedding. Got wasted and asked a boy to dance. Looked, in the words of my friend Priya, “like two different outfits fighting each other.” Remember outfits were supposed to look GOOD on me?
So, do trench coats actually make you look taller?
Long story short: FUCKING NO. Trench coats by themselves do not make you look taller. Understandably, you probably clicked on this article thinking I was going to tell you they did and was about to reason with you by giving you the tips and tricks to make that specific coat look amazing on you. Here’s the thing though. The only things that make a trench coat make you look taller are:
1) if the coat length actually stops above your calf’s widest point.
2) if the sleeves actually stop at your wrist bone.
3) if you belt it at your natural waist, God bless you if you have one.
Pretty much everything I just said is not about the coat. It’s about fit. It’s about the boring, basic answer nobody wants to write but is 100% correct. Get your trench tailored properly to your specific leg and arm length and yes, it will give you height. Ignore #1-3 and suddenly that luxe wool number you wanted becomes a bitter lesson in why you should actually try things on. Spending more doesn’t fix poor centring.
I still own a trench coat, by the way.
Bought the second attempt myself, went to Nordstrom and spent an actual hour in the fitting room making sure #1-3 were applied before buying. Wear it more than anything else these days come October. Just please, please don’t let someone sell you that line about how trench coats make you look taller. It’s not true for me. It didn’t work the first time around. And I doubt it works for most people who buy into that myth on their first try. It’s not the coat, it’s where it stops. On you.
