Saturday, November 8, 2025

Coach Finds New Life in Old Corduroy

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Coach’s new partnership with Bank & Vogue transforms vintage corduroy into elevated, limited-edition handbags — showing how circular fashion can look, feel, and sell like luxury.

Coach has joined forces with Bank & Vogue, the parent company of vintage retailer Beyond Retro, to launch a capsule collection of upcycled corduroy bags. The partnership merges Coach’s signature craftsmanship with Bank & Vogue’s circular-textile expertise, transforming what might once have been waste into elevated accessories that feel fresh, tactile, and unmistakably modern.

Each piece — crafted from reworked corduroy sourced from pre-loved textiles — honors the nostalgic texture of the fabric while elevating it through thoughtful design and luxurious finishing. “Coming together in this way feels like a natural evolution,” Steven Bethell Founder of Bank & Vogue, said in a statement. “Coach’s craftsmanship and our expertise in textile reuse show how circular design can scale within the luxury space.”

Among the highlights are the Patchwork Corduroy Cargo Tote and the Cargo Tote 26, both featuring quilted patchwork made from re-dyed, repurposed textiles.

Corduroy Coach bag

This collection is part of Coach’s ongoing journey toward circularity. Two years after introducing Coachtopia — a sub-label focused on reusing waste materials and engaging younger consumers — Coach continues to evolve how it approaches sustainability. Where Coachtopia pushed design experimentation, this new collection demonstrates refinement: classic silhouettes, minimal waste, and an emphasis on materials that tell a story.

Bank & Vogue’s role goes beyond supplying vintage textiles. It operates one of the world’s largest post-consumer apparel networks, taking post-consumer waste and transforming it into “relevant, desirable products,” the company says. Bethell and his team have spent over two decades working with secondhand markets across more than 30 countries, gathering insight into how discarded clothing can be rechanneled into something aspirational.

Coach’s first collaboration with Bank & Vogue, which reimagined denim into handbags, proved the model’s potential. That project achieved an 80 percent reduction in emissions and 95 percent savings in water use compared with new denim production, according to a life-cycle assessment cited by 3BL Media. With corduroy, the environmental benefits are expected to be similarly significant — and even more scalable.

Woman in trench coat with Coach bag.

Behind the scenes, Coach’s manufacturing process for these pieces required rethinking everything from quality control to supply chain logistics. “We ended up creating a cross-functional checklist for using post-consumer materials,” said Megan Dawson-Elli, product sustainability manager at Tapestry, Coach’s parent company. This kind of precision is what allows the brand to bridge sustainability and high fashion — two worlds that haven’t always shared the same language.

The collaboration also signals a larger shift in what consumers expect from luxury brands. Across the industry, circular design is moving from niche to mainstream: resale programs, remade materials, and traceable craftsmanship are becoming status markers as much as design signatures. As Bethell noted, “Consumers, brands, and legislators alike are recognizing the urgency of circular solutions.”

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