Long ago, at the dawn of the automobile age, whole fashion categories sprang up around the novel pastime of motoring. Certain staples from that era survive vestigially, their original utilitarian purpose lost to obscurity. You can still find a duster, for example—a loose, lightweight, ankle-grazing coat devised at the turn of the past century to protect clothing from the dirt kicked up by horseless carriages. Also still among us are low-crown, brimless motoring caps, built to withstand wind blasts.
Persisting from later, midcentury car culture are the car coat, cropped to a three-quarter length to avoid bunching up on the driver’s seat, and the driving shoe, thin-soled for flexibility, cleated for traction, and patented by the Italian cobbler Gianni Mostile in 1963.
