A handful of garments can make a single coat become shorthand for who’s actually at the top of fashion’s pecking order, and in autumn 2026 that coat is Conner Ives’s ‘All That Jazz’ robe coat. Built from a single bolt of Qing Dynasty-era silk tapestry and finished with vintage fox fur trim, the piece belongs to Ives’s Demi Couture collection, and it has been spotted on Jennifer Lawrence in London, Kate Moss in Paris, and Zoë Kravitz and Laura Harrier elsewhere, turning a one-off garment into a recognisable signal.
The reason it’s dominating UK fashion conversation isn’t a drop or a campaign, it’s that nobody can simply order one. Coverage from The Gloss Magazine and Who What Wear has tracked the coat’s every appearance, and the exact phrase behind this trend, that wearing it is a true sign of a high-fashion 2026 it girl, has become the shorthand people reach for when trying to work out what, precisely, the robe coat is doing that no amount of money can replicate.
Conner Ives, the robe coat and a new kind of flex
Look closely at how each of these women wears the coat and a pattern emerges that most coverage mentions but never quite spells out. JLaw, Moss, Kravitz and Harrier all leave it open, slung over minimal, almost invisible bases, a slip dress, all-black tailoring, nothing that competes with the fur trim or the tapestry panels. The robe coat isn’t loungewear borrowed for the street; it’s being worn deliberately as outerwear, the same way a blazer gets thrown over a shoulder rather than buttoned up.
That styling choice is the real flex. Treating a one-of-a-kind couture piece as something casual enough to leave hanging open signals a kind of ease that no logo or price tag can communicate. Alexa Chung’s own approach to layering oversized outerwear over simple basics has long pointed in this direction, and it’s no accident that the robe coat has landed in a year when London Fashion Week and the run-up to its New York Fashion Week SS27 debut have both rewarded exactly this kind of understated maximalism.
The image shows precisely that open-coat silhouette circulating among the stylists and editors who first flagged the trend, proof that the styling rule, not the garment alone, is what’s being copied.
What a Qing-era tapestry says about status dressing
Strip away the celebrity names and the robe coat is, at its core, a garment built from Qing Dynasty-era kesi weaving, a tapestry technique historically reserved for Chinese imperial court textiles, repurposed here as the back panel of a Western coat. Conner Ives has been candid about sourcing antique textiles for the Demi Couture collection, pairing the silk tapestry with crêpe silk satin and cherry blossom embroidery. No outlet covering the coat’s rise has actually sat with the question of what it means to lift antique court textiles into a celebrity dressing cycle, even as the garment is marketed purely as a sustainability story.
The fur tells a similarly uneasy story. Ives frames the vintage fox fur trim as guilt-free because the animals involved aren’t newly harmed, but that framing sidesteps a long-running argument from animal-welfare groups including PETA and the Humane Society, both of which have publicly pushed back on using any fur, vintage or otherwise, as a way of normalising the material’s return to runways and red carpets. Reviving vintage fur doesn’t erase the ethical debate around fur, it just relocates it.
That clip, part of the coverage The Gloss Magazine has been tracking, shows the coat under studio light, the kind of close-up that makes the tapestry’s weave, and the question of where it came from, impossible to ignore.
How to read the 2026 it-girl code without buying in
None of this means the only way to participate in 2026’s status dressing is to buy the unbuyable. The robe coat is really a masterclass in a wider decoding exercise, and the other it-items currently doing the rounds, Jude heels, the cinch-waist leather jacket favoured by Sienna Miller and Chloë Sevigny, grey socks worn with everything, bucket hats, follow the same internal logic even though every one of them is, technically, purchasable.
The common thread is restraint dressed up as confidence: one statement piece, left open or slightly undone, says more than full head-to-toe branding. Apply that rule to a vintage leather jacket cinched at the waist, or a pair of heels worn with socks instead of bare legs, and the silhouette starts to read the same way the robe coat does, minus the antique tapestry.
Who What Wear and The Gloss Magazine will keep tracking every fresh sighting of the coat itself, but the more interesting story is which of this season’s more attainable pieces starts getting worn the exact same way.
Photo: Ciné Zooms 2, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, modified: subject cutout on an editorial collage background.
