Eleven coats, one hat with ambitions, and four days on a headland where the forecast was treated as a rumour.
Photographs — Ilse Varga · Styling — Benoît Achterberg
The first rule of the headland is that nothing stays where you pin it. Achterberg, who has dressed duchesses and one very patient greyhound, arrived with a trunk of wool and a roll of gaffer tape, and by Tuesday had surrendered the tape.
What remained was cut: shoulders built like sea walls, hems weighted with lead shot, a cobalt gabardine that turns the colour of a bruise when it rains — and it rained. “You don’t style weather,” he says. “You negotiate.”
Gabardine trench, Atelier Morrow.
Umbrella, the lighthouse keeper’s.
Courage, model’s own.
“I wanted a coat that looked like it had opinions about the wind.”
Benoît Achterberg, on the dunes at Sarn HeadScarf, four metres, Maison Ferrault
Chapter two — what she wore when it finally cleared