By Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com
This set of pages looks at costume history pictures fashion designs from 1974. The costume pictures of women's coats in the main chart all enlarge to A4 size when clicked. You can see more fashion images of mid 1970s fashion skirts and suits on the 1974 fashion image page.
In the 1974 costume history images below you can see a variety of coat styles typical of the mid 1970s. These images reflect classic clothes of the era and were probably directed at woman of 25+.
At the same time fashion history had many hippy influences in dress. However although the 1970s is often depicted as a hippy fashion era the truth is that in many conventional circumstances many people had to wear what was considered conventional dress to work.
More outlandish hippy looks were often kept for out of office hours, travelling and holidays. These fashion designs of 1974 women's coats are typical of garments worn in daily professional life at work, although the hats were less likely to be worn unless it was very cold.
Ladies and girls still wore coats both summer and winter. Women would generally own both a winter coat and also a summer coat for cooler evenings.
Shorter reefer jackets, car coats, suede or leather jackets, denim or swing jersey jackets had grown in popularity as more casual wear became usual. By the late 70s shorter quilted padded jackets were an acceptable alternative to a tailored coat as car use increased.
For a detailed analysis of the 1970s read the 1970s fashion history page.
See other images for 1977 here.
1970s Fashion History - Fashion Designs Coats of 1974
The thumbnail pictures in this main chart all enlarge to A4 size when clicked.
The four coats above are all double breasted, but show the variety within this phase. The coats are all worn on or just above the knee.
In the late 1960s, early 1970s many women's coats had featured yoke styling such as this yellow coat shows far left. Interesting collar shapes abounded and many collars had elongated points or shaped contours.
Matching/coordinating dresses and jackets were still worn, but these lost ground by the 1980s. Large Russian style fur hats as shown in the third image above became desirable and were often worn with Afghan embroidered and fur trimmed Hippy suede coats of the same 70s fashion era.
For me a far more representative, but one-off coat of the mood of the fashion era, is the 1976 picture coat by John Jones called Akhnaton.
