The Best Barn Coat Is the Final Boss of Fall Layering

Style is subjective, we know—that’s the fun of it. But we’re serious about helping our audience get dressed. Whether it’s the best white sneakers, the flyest affordable suits, or the need-to-know menswear drops of the week, GQ Recommends’ perspective is built on years of hands-on experience, an insider awareness of what’s in and what’s next, and a mission to find the best version of everything out there, at every price point.

Our staffers aren’t able to try on every single piece of clothing you read about on GQ.com (fashion moves fast these days), but we have an intimate knowledge of each brand’s strengths and know the hallmarks of quality clothing—from materials and sourcing, to craftsmanship, to sustainability efforts that aren’t just greenwashing. GQ Recommends heavily emphasizes our own editorial experience with those brands, how they make their clothes, and how those clothes have been reviewed by customers. Bottom line: GQ wouldn’t tell you to wear it if we wouldn’t.

We make every effort to cast as wide of a net as possible, with an eye on identifying the best options across three key categories: quality, fit, and price.

To kick off the process, we enlist the GQ Recommends braintrust to vote on our contenders. Some of the folks involved have worked in retail, slinging clothes to the masses; others have toiled for small-batch menswear labels; all spend way too much time thinking about what hangs in their closets.

We lean on that collective experience to guide our search, culling a mix of household names, indie favorites, and the artisanal imprints on the bleeding-edge of the genre. Then we narrow down the assortment to the picks that scored the highest across quality, fit, and price.

Across the majority of our buying guides, our team boasts firsthand experience with the bulk of our selects, but a handful are totally new to us. So after several months of intense debate, we tally the votes, collate the anecdotal evidence, and emerge with a list of what we believe to be the absolute best of the category right now, from the tried-and-true stalwarts to the modern disruptors, the affordable beaters to the wildly expensive (but wildly worth-it) designer riffs.

Whatever your preferences, whatever your style, there’s bound to be a superlative version on this list for you. (Read more about GQ’s testing process here.)

Maybe it’s just us, but it sure seems like fall is getting shorter each year. That new reality is, objectively speaking, absolutely terrible for the planet—and gut-wrenching for the menswear fans that occupy it. But it also presents an opportunity: to buy a barn coat hardy enough to double as a parka replacement with a beefy cable-knit beneath, but light enough to rock solo with a threadbare vintage tee when the spring thaw hits. Scant other jackets boast that degree of season-agnostic versatility (trust us: we’ve checked), and that’s reason enough to cop one right now.