It rained for eleven days in October 2023 and I was wet for nine of them.
Brooklyn in late October is not hard rain. It is the other kind — the kind that does not so much fall as hang in the air, sideways, at 5:40 in the evening when the light takes on the color of a wet sidewalk. You can hold an umbrella. You can also, and this is what I did for four years, wear a coat that was not made for rain and hope for the best.
The honest failure in this story is the $145 shell I bought in 2022. It leaked at the collar. Not the shoulder, not the cuff — the collar, where the fabric meets my neck, in a fine thread of water that ran down my shirt and collected in my belt. It did this for the whole month of October 2023, through eleven days of rain, and I wore it anyway, because I had nothing better.
I am a 38-year-old woman in Brooklyn. I work from home as a writer, which means I make four trips a day to the corner of my block and back — to the bodega, to the post office, to the dog run where Olive, my small terrier, refuses to move above a drizzle. My partner works downtown. My mother grew up in Pittsburgh and has, since 1997, owned exactly one raincoat, a green wool-blend swing coat she bought on sale for $88 and still wears, and she has never once had to think about rain.
Below is the list, in order of how much I spent on each jacket or poncho, and whether it stayed. I have changed my mind about several things I used to believe about rain gear. I have opinions on what to skip. There is a brief history of how the raincoat went from Eddie Rainer's 1913 New York shop to an $89 shell that folds into its own pocket. And there is, at the end, an honest summary — because anyone who tells you the right coat solves New York rain has not, in fact, tried to hold an umbrella, a dog leash, and a laptop bag in the same hand.
The list
1. Designer trench, $310 (bought 2022, kept, worn twice). A black double-breasted gabardine trench from an Italian label I found on sale in SoHo. It is, by every measurement, a beautiful object. It is also, by every honest accounting, a raincoat-shaped hole in my closet. It has a full lining, a buttoned throat latch that never latched, and a belt I have never tied. It weighs 2.2 pounds before the rain, and when it rained the cotton went from black to a slightly different black and dried in about six hours in a shape I do not want to sit in. Verdict: kept for the photographs. Never for the weather.
2. Vintage Burberry trench, $240 (bought 2024, sold 2025 for $185). A 1990s Burberry with the house check lining, bought on Atlantic Avenue and sold back to the same shop eleven months later at a $55 loss. Real gabardine. The tan one. It was, by every measurement, the best-looking thing I have ever owned, and also, by my standard, a raincoat that only works in a film. The check lining means it can only be worn lining-out or open, and a coat worn open in Brooklyn in October has already failed. It rained on the walk to a restaurant in April and left a mustard stain on the lining for the rest of its life. Verdict: sold. It was a beautiful object I was using as a raincoat.
3. Lined rain shell, $145 (bought 2022, kept, and this is the one that leaked). A hooded shell from an outdoor brand: fully seam-taped, mesh-lined, with a drawcord hem and a collar tall enough to cover my ears. It is, by every measurement, the most technically sophisticated thing I have ever bought for rain. It is also the $56 mistake. The collar seam is a single line of stitching about three inches long, and every single time it leaked. I did not return it, because that meant admitting I had spent four months in a jacket pouring water on my chest. Verdict: kept in the closet, for an apocalypse where seam-taped fabric is all that matters.
4. Unlined packable jacket, $89 (bought 2024, kept — this is the one). Black, unlined, 2.5-layer, no hood, a collar that stands up without being tall enough to be annoying, and it folds into its own chest pocket and weighs eight ounces. No lining to sweat in, no zippers to jam, no cuff adjustment to fiddle with. I have worn it 128 times since the day I bought it. Cost per wear: seventy cents. Verdict: the only piece of weather gear in my apartment that has made it to the hook by the door. It lives on the hook. It has never been in a closet.
5. Packable poncho, $59 (bought 2021, kept in a drawer). A three-in-one poncho that folds into a pouch the size of a paperback, which I bought in 2021 because of a video I saw at 1 a.m. The poncho is decent. It covers a backpack. It has a hood. It is also, by my standard, useless in a city with wind. A poncho is a garment for a place without wind. Brooklyn in October has wind. It caught the wind like a sail, the hem flipped over my shoulders, and my hands got wet anyway. Verdict: still in the pouch, in the drawer, for a very warm rain.
6. Vinyl poncho, $38 (bought 2020, given away in 2022). A hardware store poncho, translucent white, with snaps down the front. It was, by every measurement, the cheapest rain solution I have ever bought, and also, by my honest accounting, the worst thing I have ever worn in public. It is a shower curtain with a head hole. It cannot be folded or stored. It made a sound like a dry-cleaning bag every time I moved. Verdict: gone.
7. Supermarket windbreaker, $22 (bought 2019, still in the closet). A thin white windbreaker off the endcap in the plastic-pack aisle of a supermarket in Prospect Heights, in 2019. It is not a rain jacket. It is a windbreaker, and in seven years I have worn it in exactly four showers, and in three of those I was soaked within eleven minutes. It also packs into nothing, stays nothing, and creases permanently. Verdict: kept, because it cost $22 and it takes up the space a $22 jacket is allowed to take up.
Seven jackets and ponchos. Total spend: $903. Total recovered by resale: $185. Total spend on the jacket that is on the hook by the door: $89.
The three umbrellas are in the closet now — the good one, the terrible one, and an $8 pharmacy umbrella I forgot about in my partner's car until last spring. The $89 jacket does all three jobs.
What I changed my mind about
A few beliefs I held in 2022, when I first went looking for a rain jacket that worked, that the last four years have quietly killed.
I used to think the expensive trench would solve it. The $310 trench was, in 2022, the most beautiful object I had ever bought. It also weighed 2.2 pounds, had a throat latch that never latched, and made me carry an umbrella in the hand that was holding my laptop. The $89 jacket weighs eight ounces and needs no second object.
I used to think waterproof-breathable fabric was the point. For about a year I thought the phrases "hydrostatic head" and "fully taped seams" meant something to me. They mean something to a person who will spend eleven hours outside. In a city, the difference between $89 and $145 is the difference between a jacket that works and a jacket that costs $56 more while leaking from the collar.
I used to think the hood was the feature. The hood on the $310 trench was deep and architectural. The hood on the $89 does not exist. In a car, in a doorway, on a crowded subway platform, a deep hood is a thing you fight. A collar that stands up four inches and does nothing else is the correct amount of hood.
I used to think a good umbrella was enough. For eight years I carried an umbrella and nothing else. An umbrella covers my head and my shoulders if I hold it correctly, which takes one hand, and one hand is also the hand holding Olive's leash and my coffee.
I used to think I needed a separate winter coat. I do not. My mother still wears her green coat from 1997. She is not a fool, and there is a hole in my reasoning here — an $89 unlined shell is not a winter coat and I do not pretend that it is. But in Brooklyn, in the autumn, the shell is enough, and I would rather own one jacket than two.
What I would skip
Any lined jacket under $200. A mesh lining is the most expensive thing in cheap rain gear, and it buys you warmth you do not need and a sweat problem you will notice in October.
Anything you have to iron. The $310 trench needs pressing after every rain. The $89 jacket comes out of my tote bag crumpled and I shake it for four seconds.
Any product page that says "waterproof" and gives you no numbers. Look for the fabric weight, the number of taped seams, the pack size, and the weight in ounces. If the page has none of these, the manufacturer is guessing, and so are you.
Ponchos. Not in a city. Not in October. Not with a dog.
A designer trench as your primary rain jacket. Keep it. Wear it to the wedding. Do not let it into the weather.
Carrying more than one umbrella. Keep one in the car for standing still. Stop carrying one on your body.
A brief history
The raincoat of 1913 was not the trench coat. It was a gabardine coat with a storm flap, a belt, and a collar that turned up, patented in Britain in 1901 by Thomas Burberry, who invented the tightly woven wool that shed water because of how densely it was woven. Eddie Rainer was a Manchester rainwear manufacturer who opened a New York shop in 1913 to sell gabardine to Americans. The American raincoat of 1913 was a European export with a New York address.
The trench coat as a garment belongs to the 1920s. The name comes from the trenches of the First World War, and Thomas Edward Lawrence was the officer who made it famous. The military version had shoulder epaulettes, a gun flap at the right chest, and a storm flap on the back — all three still on the coat hanging in a store in 2026, and all three still meaning nothing to the person wearing it. In the 1920s it came off the battlefield, onto the platform, and into the office. By the end of the decade the trench was the standard raincoat in Europe and America, and it has been the standard raincoat in various disguises ever since.
Then, in 1946, the Shirley Institute in Manchester developed Ventile, a cotton woven so tightly that water could not pass through it while the fabric stayed breathable. It was the cloth of the British wartime raincoat and is still, in 2026, the cloth in the $500 heritage trench. The principle running through the whole history of rain gear is the same every time: a weave dense enough to stop the water.
Everything changed in 1976, when Bob and Wilbert Gore made a fabric with microscopic pores — thousands of times smaller than a drop of water but large enough for a vapor molecule to pass. The first commercial Gore-Tex jackets came out that year and cost about $70, roughly $400 adjusted for inflation. The word "waterproof" changed meaning. Before 1976 it meant a fabric. After 1976 it meant a membrane, and after the 1990s it meant a brand.
In the 1970s the raincoat took a strange detour through American sport. The Yankees began handing out cheap vinyl ponchos to anyone who stayed through a rained-out game at Yankee Stadium, and for about five years the poncho was a mass-market American object in a way it has never been before or since. It was a giveaway. It was a thing you were handed rather than a thing you bought, and it made no attempt to be anything other than exactly what it was.
And then, in the 2020s, the raincoat got small. The packable jacket — a shell that folds into its own chest pocket, weighs under ten ounces, and costs less than a nice dinner — went from a travel accessory in the 2010s to the default answer to "how do I stay dry" by the middle of the decade. It is, by every measurement, the most consequential change in rain gear since the Gore-Tex jacket, and also the least glamorous. The raincoat did not get better. It got cheaper and smaller, and the market rearranged itself around that.
The honest summary
Rain gear in New York is an $89 jacket and one umbrella you leave in the car.
Everything else I bought was a way of feeling like I had solved the problem without solving the problem. The $310 trench was beautiful and weighed 2.2 pounds and made me carry a second object in my hand. The $145 shell leaked at the collar for a month. The $240 Burberry was a costume. The $89 unlined packable weighs eight ounces, has no lining to sweat in, has no hood to fight with, and has been in the top of my tote bag every day for two and a half years. It is not a designer object and it is not a status object. It is, by every measurement, the most useful eighty-nine dollars I have spent on my own body, and it has cost me three umbrellas' worth of money I no longer spend and one pair of wet shoes fewer a year, which is the metric nobody prints on a label.
The honest part is that I still own an umbrella. It lives in the trunk. I use it when I am standing still at a bus stop, which is the one job an umbrella does better than a jacket. The rest of the time I walk home with my hands free, holding Olive's leash and nothing in the other hand, and I get to my door in four minutes instead of six.
My mother still has her green coat from 1997. She has never asked me where mine came from. She knows.