Bang For Your Buck is a weekly franchise highlighting a single luxury item or brand that is well worth the financial investment. Cost-per-wear is the name of the game, and each piece featured in this series serves as a prime example of getting your money's worth.

A trench coat isn’t just a symbol of an older era of menswear, it’s a seasonal staple. As rainwear grows more technical and futuristic, it’s a bit of a marvel that one of the most traditional styles of outerwear has managed to remain relevant in men’s closets for roughly 150 years. Part aristocratic, part military style, part classic Hollywood (“Here’s looking at you kid”), it’s a silhouette that’s proven to be multifaceted in terms of both personal style and function. As a fashion icon, it’s natural that several other manufacturers have jumped into the game to produce their own variants. However, very few have staked their entire businesses on the trench quite like those at Burberry. If anything, this contemporary competition has spurred modern alterations to the original trench coat design, including (but not limited to): removing the epaulets, dropping the belt, shifting from a double to single-breasted silhouette and slimming down the proportions. Even if you’re concerned that such a traditional garment doesn’t fit your lifestyle today, various alterations made to the coat across Burberry’s history (thanks in no small part to a lineage of designers like current creative director Riccardo Tisci), has helped both preserve the signature Burberry trench, while offering options that streamline it for the future.

While Burberry trench coats retail for upwards of $1900, you can find them on Grailed for less than $400. For a jacket that fits nearly every style situation, can hold its own in a downpour and deliver designer-fashion name recognition, we’d be hard-pressed to find a better spring staple.

More About the Burberry Trench:
Legend has it that this weatherproof jacket was born after Thomas Burberry invented water-resistant gabardine twill in 1879. After seeing use during battles in World War I, which is how the “trench” coat earned its name, the style proliferated from British estate aristocracy down to officers in the British armed forces. Many of the details that truly define “classic” trench coats today—belted closure with D-ring detailing, epaulets (to show military rank) and the upper back storm flap—all emerged as a result of this period. While Burberry’s name fluctuated in and out of fashion thanks to its connections to “chavs” and a string of unfortunate international licensing deals throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Burberry brand has never been stronger. Most recently, this was epitomized in designer Christopher Bailey's passing of the torch to the forward-thinking former creative director of Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci. Since then, Burberry has gone to great lengths to continue to innovate and rework its signature garment, removing and adding various accents to iterate on Thomas Burberry’s earlier designs.

Want to know everything there is to know about Burberry’s famous Nova Check? Study up here.

Looking for more entry-level trenches? Click here.

Feeling trendy? See Burberry’s capsule collection with buzzy Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy here.

High-roller? Shop grail-status trench coats here.

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