Dear Winter Coat: Goodbye and Good Riddance

I know that when first spotted in late October, all tobacco moleskin and fair-trade goose down, you were everything to me. That was then. You might accuse me of having intimacy issues, and you would probably be correct. Four months of you turned out to be too much. It’s true you kept me warm and safe and, yes, I’m sorry, but it’s over. Familiarity, as it happens, does breed contempt. One entire interminable season in your company turned out to be more than enough. I’m ready to dump you in a plastic Hefty bag and kick you to the curb.

As it happens, I am not alone. “After wearing the same smelly coat, the same scarf, the same vile hosiery all winter, you just want to burn them,” Stephanie Solomon, senior vice president and fashion director of Lord & Taylor, said on the day of the vernal equinox. “The second the weather gets a little bit hopeful, you want to run right out and buy something that says spring.”

At issue, of course, is the question of when that hopeful day will arrive. It snowed on the first day of spring on the East Coast and remained so cold for the week thereafter that Olive & Bette’s boutique on Madison Avenue posted a placard outside with a popular and unprintable three-letter Internet acronym. “After Tuesday even the calendar goes,” what the heck, or initials to that effect.

And it is true that despite all the blather laid on about the importance of catwalks and star designers and top stylists and dictatorial magazine editors, there remains just one truly significant influencer in fashion, and that is Mother Nature. “We’re in the weather business,” Ms. Solomon said. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and it’s always been that way.”

Whatever the cause of nature’s mercurial whims — drenching biblical rains in Texas, arid Midwest states placed on fire watch, Boston a tundra — they have run up against that immutable law of consumption retailers refer to as “pent-up demand.”

I know it well.

On a rare recent afternoon of mild weather, I slipped on my hated puffer (the same one I’d coveted, circled, stalked and finally stretched the budget to purchase last fall) and went window shopping along Madison Avenue. In terms of pleasure, this is ordinarily an activity I would rate next to root canal. Yet I felt compelled that day, if not to buy new clothes for spring, at least to assure myself that others believed such a thing may one day exist.

And, while an immense abominable snowman clutching a mannequin at Dolce & Gabbana was not exactly encouraging, it was good to see that many merchants had followed the lead of Ralph Lauren in breaking out the pastel Easter egg colors, the expected flora and the jaunty prints retailers in general count on to trigger a Veblenesque seasonal response.

(Image:princess wedding dresses)

“Pent-up demand is a very real phenomenon,” Tom Julian, an industry analyst at the Doneger Group, said. “After this hard winter, designers have had to look at the calendar and be particularly proactive.”

The problem, at least for East Coast retailers, is that there has been no “after.” They seem doomed to promote the next season while the last tenaciously hangs on. As recently as mid-March, Mr. Julian found himself swaddled in the same down jacket, Frog jeans and fleece-lined Sorel boots that had been his uniform for what seemed like months.

“At this point, I don’t even want to touch those jeans or those boots,” he remarked on Tuesday, glumly noting that his weather app gave little indication of a rise in the mercury any time soon.

“Suddenly, I’m looking at loafers, and I don’t even wear loafers,” Mr. Julian said. “A part of me wants a designer sneaker, which is something I would never, ever wear.”

For me, the craving manifests itself in a sudden desire for a $98 Lacoste throwback polo shirt from the storied French sportswear label’s recent collaboration with J. Crew, the one that comes in kooky Ilie Nastase colors and with a blue logo crocodile.

For some prosperous consumers spotted on a weekend outing to the high-end Highland Park Village in Dallas — where Tom Ford, Carolina Herrera and Stella McCartney compete for the custom of those who actually drive a Lamborghini Aventador for a spin to the mall — the must-have was seemingly a Brunello Cucinelli wool crepe vest with an ostrich feather fringe.

Despite what a sales associate there termed “the funky weather we’ve been having,” referring to the recent deluge, and a daunting $2,185 price tag, the elegantly flimsy vests had been “flying out” of the store.

“There is definitely a rhythm” to shopping cycles, said Mario Bisio, president of Mario’s, a specialty retailer with stores in Seattle and Portland, Ore.

“People look in their closets and anticipate the season changing,” he said, adding that women in general venture forth boldly to shop in the reliable cycles of nature, whereas men tend to “wait to unlock their wallets until they actually see the sun.”

Retailing, said Ms. Solomon of Lord & Taylor, “is about emotion and science, about exploiting that moment when I go into a store and suddenly I’m not thinking about how much money is in my wallet or do I require this. It’s ‘I must have this flowered ’70s print right now.’ ”

Even if only symbolically, those groovy flowers are hopeful, said Alexis Bittar, a local boy who started out selling his jewelry designs from a cart outside his parents’ house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and who now has stores throughout the United States.

“Particularly after the last two years of extreme winter, where in places like Boston you could not even go out,” Mr. Bittar said, “the cadences of retail say it should be spring.”

Even the notion of spring “tends to trigger a euphoric cycle,” he said. What has been selling at his stores — despite the mercury’s stubborn refusal to budge above 40 — “is literally anything that has a flower on it, anything that resonates spring.”

I know exactly what he means. Have you seen the new Valentino men’s wear, with the butterfly camouflage patterns? There’s a modified bomber jacket in the collection I spotted and am already saving pennies to own. It is just the thing, I have convinced myself, to put the last dreadful winter behind me and with it the hated winter coat.