The Anxiety Uniform

Fashion psychologist Dr. Odessa Kimura — who consults with several luxury brands on consumer behavior — describes this as "preparatory confidence dressing," or what she more casually calls the in-transit look. "There's a whole category of getting dressed that is fundamentally about imagining yourself in motion," she says. "You're not dressing for where you are. You're dressing for the story of where you might be going."1

The in-transit look has become one of fashion's most durable unofficial categories — not a trend in the traditional sense, but a psychological posture that maps neatly onto a specific cultural moment. We are all, whether we admit it or not, performing a version of being somewhere else. The wardrobe is the set.

67% of women report dressing for a "possible better day" than the one they expect
3.4× more likely to buy "versatile" pieces than any other descriptor, per 2025 retail data
$2.1B trench coat market globally, with sales up 34% since 2022

What does perpetual lateness dressing actually look like? It tends toward the layered. It resists commitment to a single occasion. It says: I could go to your meeting, or I could go to the airport, or I could have a glass of wine outside and I'll look fine for all three. The shoes, critically, must be comfortable enough to walk fast in but polished enough that you don't look like you're exercising.

The Fantasy of Elsewhere

The four objects of perpetual in-transit dressing: a trench, a structured tote, flat boots with architecture, and something that implies you just got off a plane (or are about to). Prop styling: Kenji Okafor.

There is something particularly interesting, culturally speaking, about the fact that this is not new and yet it keeps being rediscovered. The trench coat — that most permanent of transit garments — has been in and out of fashion for a century. But its current ubiquity feels different. Less about rain, more about readiness.

"When we're in a period of collective anxiety, people tend to dress like they might need to leave quickly," says stylist and cultural commentator Jessa Rorke. "It's partly practical — if everything bad happened at once, could you move in this? — and partly a way of maintaining the fiction that you are someone whose life requires rapid transitioning between important things."

Dressing like you're late is the wardrobe equivalent of leaving your passport in your bag. It's optimism and anxiety in the same coat.
— Dr. Odessa Kimura, Fashion Psychologist

What the Trench Actually Does

Let's be specific about the trench, because it is the ur-garment of this entire category. The trench coat is the one piece of clothing that signals, simultaneously: I have places to be, I am on my way there now, I have enough personal style to have chosen this over a puffer, and also I am practical. It is maximum optionality at its most sartorial.

The problem is that everyone has arrived at this conclusion at once. Walk through any airport, any major city, any brunch spot where people are meeting to discuss things they read — and the trench is there. Which raises the uncomfortable question: if a garment is chosen specifically because it implies distinctiveness and having-somewhere-to-be, what happens when everyone has chosen it for exactly those reasons?

A uniform of non-uniformity: seven versions of the same decision, all made independently. Photography direction: The Cut Studio.

The answer, stylistically speaking, is that you have to commit harder to the specifics. The bag has to be more interesting, or the boots stranger, or you have to be so consistent in your version of the trench that it becomes yours rather than everyone's. What started as transit-readiness becomes, through sheer repetition, a character study.

Why Now, Specifically

Cultural critics have noted that the rise of the in-transit aesthetic corresponds almost exactly with the rise of remote and hybrid work — the period in which going somewhere became, first, optional, and then, once it became optional, meaningful in a way it never had been before. When you go somewhere now, you're choosing to go somewhere. And dressing for that going-somewhere is a way of making that choice legible.

"The pandemic created a generation of people who understood deeply, on a somatic level, what it feels like to not be able to go anywhere," says cultural critic Anais Bremer. "And once that restriction lifted, I think many people started dressing for the relief of movement. Not for any specific destination, but for the having of destinations in the first place."3

This also explains, perhaps, why the look is most prevalent among a specific demographic: women in their late twenties through forties who have, to some degree, fought for the ability to be somewhere. To have something to be late for. The outfit says: I have a life that requires this coat. Whether that is literally true is, fashion has always known, beside the point.

The Conclusion, Which Is That There Isn't One

I am not going to tell you to stop dressing like you're late, because I haven't stopped and I don't intend to. The in-transit wardrobe is too functional, too psychologically satisfying, and — this is the bit fashion writing doesn't say enough — too honest about the kind of life many of us actually want to have, even if we don't quite have it yet.

Dressing aspirationally isn't delusion. It's a form of intention-setting that happens to involve a good coat. The trench is not a lie. It's a bet you're placing on yourself, every morning, that today might be the day something requires you to be somewhere.

And honestly? That's not nothing. That might be everything.