## The Coat Maker
The Coat Maker
Stephen Doig stands at a cutting table in Castleford, Yorkshire, holding a pattern piece against a length of gabardine that cost more per metre than most people spend on a winter coat. He has been cutting trenches for Burberry since 1998. The pattern has not changed since 1914. His hands have.
"You learn the shape before you learn why it works," he says, running a rotary blade along the grain. "Then one day you put it on someone and the back yoke settles and you understand what Thomas Burberry was doing with the raglan sleeve."
Doig is one of eleven cutters working in Burberry's Yorkshire facility, which produces around four thousand trench coats each year. The building opened in 2019, but the benches inside are older than that. Some were relocated from the Treorchy factory in Wales, which closed in 2007. Others came from a contractor in Rotherham. When you buy a heritage trench today, it is assembled by people whose training predates the brand's 2001 relaunch under Rose Marie Bravo.
The trench requires fifty-two separate operations. Doig handles three of them: the body panels, the sleeve, and the storm shield. He does not touch the collar. That belongs to Marie Hepworth, who joined Burberry in 2003 after two decades at a Savile Row shirtmaker. Collars are set by hand, with a curved needle and a stitch density most tailors reserve for lapels. Hepworth uses a thimble worn smooth on one side. She replaced it once, in 2011, and went back to the old one after a week.
"The new thimble sat wrong," she says. "I know that sounds precious, but your hand learns a pressure. You can't reset that."
The Stitch No One Sees
Burberry does not advertise the names of its artisans. There is no plaque in the Castleford facility. The company's website refers to "our makers" in the collective, which is both accurate and convenient. But spend an afternoon in the trench coat section and you begin to see how responsibility is distributed.
The storm shield—the fabric panel that covers the right shoulder and channels water away from the chest—is attached with a stitch called a fell seam. It is the same construction used in sailmaking, and it holds without topstitching. Doig learned it from a man named Peter Rourke, who worked at Burberry's Rotherham contractor in the 1980s and is now retired. Rourke learned it from his father, who worked in upholstery. There is no manual for this. You either absorb it by proximity or you approximate it poorly for the rest of your career.
Doig has trained four cutters in the past decade. Two of them are still at Burberry. One works in the company's repair programme, which returned 11,200 trench coats to service in 2023. The other, Sam Greaves, cuts for the made-to-order line, where clients can specify lapel width, sleeve length, and lining fabric. Greaves is thirty-one. He did not grow up around tailoring. He studied graphic design at Leeds and took a job at Burberry's call centre in 2016 because it was twenty minutes from his flat. He moved to the factory floor a year later.
"I liked the idea of making something you could hold," he says. "I didn't expect it to be this specific."
Greaves now cuts roughly sixty trench coats per month. He works from the same patterns Doig uses, but his cuts are marginally wider at the chest and higher at the armscye. This is not a mistake. It is an accommodation for the American customer, who tends to order a size down and expects the coat to close over a suit. Greaves adjusts the pattern by three millimetres at the side seam. It is enough to matter and small enough that most people would not notice unless they laid two coats side by side.
"You learn the tolerances by ruining cloth," he says. "There's no other way."
What Training Looks Like Now
Burberry's apprenticeship programme runs eighteen months. It is not an apprenticeship in the traditional sense—there is no day release to college, no City & Guilds exam at the end. It is a structured onboarding process designed to produce machinists who can handle the trench's more demanding operations: setting sleeves, attaching the throat latch, hemming the belt loops without a pucker.
The programme accepts between six and eight candidates per year. Most come from the local area. Some have sewing experience. Many do not. What Burberry looks for, according to production manager Anne Clarkson, is "people who can sit still for six hours and care whether a seam is straight."
Clarkson has worked at the Castleford facility since it opened. Before that, she spent twelve years at a bridal manufacturer in Pontefract, where she ran a team of fourteen machinists producing made-to-measure gowns. She does not romanticise the work.
"This is production," she says. "We are not a bespoke atelier. But we are also not making fast fashion. The trench has to last fifteen years, minimum. That means the stitching has to be correct the first time."
Correct, in this context, means a stitch length of 2.5mm on all visible seams, with no variation greater than 0.2mm across a metre of fabric. It means backstitching at every stress point—the belt loops, the epaulette tabs, the base of the storm shield—without leaving a ridge on the face of the cloth. It means pressing each seam open before the next operation, even when the seam will be hidden under a lining.
This is not work that can be rushed. A machinist in her first year might complete one trench coat per day. An experienced hand can finish three, but only if the cutting has been done properly and the cloth has been inspected for flaws. Burberry's gabardine is woven in Yorkshire by Halley Stevensons, the same mill that supplied Thomas Burberry in 1879. It arrives in fifty-metre bolts, and every metre is checked for slubs, skipped threads, and dye inconsistencies before it reaches the cutting table. Roughly two per cent of each bolt is rejected. The rejected cloth is not discarded. It goes to the sample room, where it is used for fit prototypes and internal training.
The Piece That Defines the House
The trench coat is Burberry's foundation and its problem. It is the reason the brand exists, and it is the reason the brand has spent the past two decades trying to prove it makes other things. Under Daniel Lee, who joined as chief creative officer in 2022, the trench has been deconstructed, abbreviated, and rendered in leather, but it has not been replaced. It cannot be. The coat is too legible, too tied to the company's identity. Every collection since Lee's arrival has included at least one trench variation. The Spring 2025 show featured seven.
Stephen Doig has made all of them. Not personally—he does not cut for the runway—but his patterns are used for the samples that go to the atelier in London, where they are fitted on models and adjusted for the show. When a trench walks down the runway, it has passed through Doig's hands in some form, even if his name does not appear in the show notes.
"I don't need credit," he says. "I need the pattern to work."
He is fifty-three now. He has been cutting the same coat for twenty-six years. He does not plan to retire soon, but he is conscious that the knowledge he carries is not written down anywhere. Burberry has tried to document the process—there are video tutorials, technical drawings, annotated patterns—but Doig does not believe you can learn to cut from a screen.
"You need to feel the cloth resist the blade," he says. "You need to know what it sounds like when you're cutting with the grain versus against it. That takes time."
He has started holding monthly sessions for newer cutters, where he works through a pattern piece in real time and answers questions. The sessions are not mandatory, but attendance is high. People want to know how the thing is made. They want to understand why the raglan sleeve is cut on the bias, why the storm shield is double-layered, why the belt has seven loops instead of six.
"Once you know the reasons," Doig says, "you stop making mistakes."
The trench coat he is cutting today will be finished in three days. It will be inspected, pressed, and shipped to a store in Tokyo, where it will sell for ¥298,000. The customer will not know Doig's name. They will not know Marie Hepworth set the collar or that Sam Greaves adjusted the chest width by three millimetres. They will know the coat fits, that it moves correctly, that it does what it is supposed to do.
That is enough.
