The Ultimate Barn Coat

Every time we get a seasonal shipment of apparel in from one of our vendors we immediately ransack the boxes like 4 year olds hopped up on candy canes on Christmas morning. The running joke at LA Saddlery is inevitably we get to a piece of clothing, or sometimes several pieces, where I or my business and buying partner, look rather perplexed and shout “we didn’t buy this!” This burst of denial is usually followed by a confused contemplative silence and then a baffled…”did we?”

The girls always have a good laugh at us, especially when they witness the same reaction from both of us on totally different days! And the reason for these humorous senior moments is that we have to order the collections at least 8 months in advance. When you couple that with the fact that we have dozens of vendors, are hounded daily by new ones, and are still doing our regular weekly fill in orders, it is no wonder we can’t remember the long black fabulous winter trench coat and belt that appears at the end of August and it’s 110 degrees outside!

Every time we go into a new season of buying we come up with all kinds of new fangled ways to permanently imprint into our memory the images of clothing that we select…but once the racks of clothes are in front of us all that planning goes out the window because our obsession and love for jackets, sweater, scarves and handbags completely take over the rational budgeting center of our brains.

So yesterday we did our order for Barbour Spring 2013

…yes that’s right…the wonderful pieces we picked out won’t be here until February of next year! Luckily everything from Barbour is spectacular so we usually don’t have a “did we buy this?” moment. Instead, when opening the boxes from Barbour we usually say “why didn’t we buy this for ourselves!”

I have personally bought several pieces from Barbour, and have loved and worn them all!

I bought this Military Cardigan from them last fall, and it kept me from freezing my butt off during the first two weeks of my San Juan Capistrano trip!

But while Barbour makes fantastic knitwear and shirts…

…they are especially known for their fantastic jackets. In fact every real horsewoman should own a Barbour waxed or quilted barn coat!

I know I know they can be on the expensive side. But honestly they are worth it! Not only are they durable for all of the shenanigans at the barn, most of them are wind and or water proof, have plenty of utilitarian pockets to store all of your barn necessities, they literally last forever, and of course they are totally chic and cool.