I used to believe zip side was arbitrary. Like how towels should fold, a convention invented purely so people could have an opinion on it. Ask me where the zip should face on a men’s coat ten years ago and I’d say either side didn’t matter, it was purely whichever way happened to be quickest at the factory that morning it went onto the coat. Then I found myself examining a really nice vintage field jacket on a Glasgow car boot sale six years ago convinced it was fake purely because the zip faced the “wrong” way and had to actually stop and consider why I thought there was a right or wrong way in the first place.
The stall was one I almost walked straight past, relegated all the way at the back behind the guy selling nothing but kettle leads, and the jacket was hung inside out on a rail with three identical wax anoraks. I flipped it the right way round, spotted the zip pulling up from right to left instead of left to right, and my immediate instinct was that it was fake. Fake!, someone’s put a waxinerscription label on a coat that’s never seen the 1930’s let alone been preserved in aspic since.
I had to look closely at the stitching and ask the stallholder, an elderly chap who’s now a vendor I always stop and chat to these days, before realizing I’d actually had it the wrong way around in my head my entire life and been oh-so-confidentally wrong about it for years.
Where the side actually comes from
The truth is it’s not actually about fashion at all, it’s down to who was doing the dressing and what hands they were using to do it with.
Men’s coats and jackets have always been designed to be closed with the right side sitting on top. This means you’re pulling up the zip or fastening the buttons with your right hand, dragging the fastening up across your own body rather than reaching across it. Womenswear is reversed, and the most popular reason given is that it’s historic, dating back to servants dressing their mistresses and standing opposite them as they worked so the fastenings were mirrored to suit the maid’s dominant hand instead of the wearer’s. I don’t know if that explanation is entirely accurate or just the easiest version of a longer story, but it stuck enough that it became convention and nobody since had needed reason enough to challenge it.
The thing that shocked me, when I started looking at jackets rather than just grabbing ones I liked, was how absolute it is when you know what you’re looking for. Every vintage mens field jacket I’ve owned, every old motorcycle coat I could get my hands on, every wax jacket I’ve bought that legitimately dated to when it claimed to be retains the same orientation. It’s one of those little indicators of quality that lets you know a coat’s provenance is accurate rather than something made last week, because a fake or poorly made repro will sometimes get this wrong since the person who made it was copying the outline without understanding why the details fell where they did. Jacket in question at the boot fair, incidentally? Totally genuine. The guy who sold it to me just happened to have it hanging on his rail inside out. And I almost didn’t stop to ask about it because of my own incorrect assumption rather than his atrocious stock control.
Why it still matters once you’re wearing the thing
This is the part that elevates it from interesting fact to something you should care about. Unless you’re left handed, zipping yourself up across your right shoulder feels unnatural when done the “wrong” way.
Your elbow has to bend funny just to get your hand on the tab, and the convention is there because it’s comfortable for the majority of people closing the jacket, not because anyone sat down and decided it looked better.
Wear a coat with the zip on the incorrect side all winter and you’ll curse it every morning, not gamechangingly so but enough that a decent quality coat shouldn’t create that much friction in your movements. I still catch myself hitting the zip tab on my old work jacket wrong every now and then. The one I have at home that zips the other way.
I can even see a warmth argument here too, that doesn’t properly occur to you until your outside rather than stood looking at coats in a shop. Zipwise the coat overlaps in a way that keeps the outermost layer pushed against your body and into the wind if you wrap up and zip up quickly, rather than leaving a gap that flaps open in a strong gust when you’re not paying attention. It’s literally that small, maybe 0.5 degrees of additional protection against the elements but half a degree is enough on a bus stop in Glasgow come February when your coat should be functioning as everything it claims to. No, zip orientation is not just tradition masquerading as intentional, there’s a reason it stuck around rather than being discarded as an outdated mannerism that people got too lazy to question.
To be clear, because I’ve been permanently corrected on this ever since I learned the right answer. Zip side is not arbitrary, there’s a history behind it being the way it is and yes it still matters. If the zip faces the “wrong” way it’s likely because the coat was deliberately made for a left handed wearer, and leaving room for lefties is itself reason enough to do it that way but if it’s positioned contrary to tradition on a “standard” fit men’s coat with no obvious reason or inverted stitching elsewhere… That’s on trend wearing you something sloppily made.
