A lambskin shawl-collar coat by GUCCI, which we date to around the 1970s.
The moment I touched it, my hand stopped.
We have offered a great many leather products over the years, but to be won over this completely by the quality of the leather itself does not happen often.
The story begins at the Savoy Hotel in London.
Guccio Gucci, born in Florence in 1881, worked there as a bellboy in his youth.
What he carried, day after day, were the trunks and suitcases brought by the wealthy of all Europe. There, at closer quarters than anyone, he came to observe how fine leather goods define a person's standing.
He returned to Florence and, in 1921, opened a small leather goods shop on Via della Vigna Nuova.
Working with skilled Tuscan artisans, he carried the techniques of saddlery over into bags and shoes.
The horsebit, the green and red web stripe — every motif that symbolises Gucci was born of the equestrian world.
Sewn inside this piece is the script logo "G. Gucci s.r.l.", woven in brown on an unbleached ground.
Above it, a crest woven in green and red; at the upper right, the size within a circle.
On the lower lines, "MADE IN ITALY", "GENUINE LEATHER", and a half-worn line reading "Leather clean only".
Is this not a label that quietly tells us Gucci of this period was still a leather workshop?
Now, let us look at the details that define this model.
First, what settles the character of this piece is the shawl collar.
Neither notch nor peak: a collar that flows from the neck to the chest in one continuous curve.
Speak of a leather coat and the usual idea is to turn the collar up and wear it wild; this pattern goes precisely the other way.
A collar without corners makes the wearer's impression a degree softer, and more grown-up. Here, I think, is the crux of this piece.
The construction follows that of a tailored jacket.
A pocket at the left breast. Flap pockets at both hips.
And at the right hip, one more: a small change pocket laid over.
A change pocket is for coins, and adding one to the right side alone is a classical practice deriving from British tailoring.
That this vocabulary of tailoring should be deliberately used in leather says a good deal, I think, about the character of this coat.
The front has three buttons.
A single seam runs horizontally at the waist, and from there the coat opens quietly towards the hem.
For a pattern of this length, the silhouette is remarkably orderly.
The lining is likely rayon.
A warm beige close to apricot, and look carefully and you will find the "Gucci" script logo woven tone on tone across the whole of it.
It does not assert itself. Yet it is visible only when you take the coat off. That distance is exactly right.
The material is lambskin.
There is no sense of weight whatsoever. The instant you put it on, the feeling of wearing a coat simply disappears.
And yet it is not flimsy; it follows the body as though drawn to the skin.
It does not push back the way cowhide does, but goes with your movement exactly.
Look closely and an extremely fine grain runs uniformly across it.
There is no unevenness in the dye, and the lustre is restrained. Not the flattened surface one meets in cheap lamb, but a texture in which every fibre is alive.
To reconcile this softness with this evenness, no compromise is possible at any stage, from the selection of the hides to the tanning.
It is, I think, one clear answer to the question of what leather from a luxury house actually means.
And lambskin is a leather that grows with the wearer's warmth and movement.
Soft creases gather from the inside of the elbow, and a lustre comes up at the cuffs and the front edge.
The real business begins once it has reached that settled expression, which appears only after it has been worn in.
The colour is "camel brown".
A dry, caramel-like brown, holding back both red and black.
Brown in leather turns frivolous when lightened and heavy when darkened. This strikes precisely the mid depth, the most difficult of all.
Where light falls it is bright as milk tea; where shadow gathers it sinks to a bitter dark brown. That so wide a gradation should live within a single hide is admirable.
Including the apricot of the lining, the whole is unified in warm tones. Amid the heavy dress of winter, this colour will certainly hold body heat.
For styling, I think the correct answer is to take it towards the refined.
A knit, wool trousers, loafers or Chelsea boots below. The roundness of the shawl collar gathers the whole into something elegant.
Worn over a jacket in place of a Chesterfield, it works equally well. Built in the vocabulary of tailoring, it could hardly sit badly with a suit.
Taking it down to denim and letting the quality of the leather do all the work is interesting too. Where the material is good, dress grows stronger the more you strip away.
The size marking is "50".
I should say it corresponds to roughly a Japanese "L".
The measurements too show enough room to go over a jacket.
The hem opens gently against the chest into an A-line, so despite the length it does not look heavy. It should suit anyone from a standard build to someone rather more solidly made.
There are marks of use — soiling, scratches, replaced buttons — but no damage that would affect wearing, so there is plenty of life in it yet.
The front buttons have been replaced, but two spare buttons come attached inside, so anyone troubled by this can change them over at home.
We once handled a tailored jacket in the same colour and the same texture.
A coat, however, is a first for us. Leather coats from a luxury house are in themselves something one very rarely gets to meet on the market.
Gucci as a brand is still very much with us worldwide, but products standing in the direct line of the Florentine workshop, from the days when it called itself "G. Gucci s.r.l.", are of course no longer made.
Softness can be produced by technique. But to produce this softness with this evenness, the quality of the raw hide itself is required.
And that good hides could be secured consistently was surely because this was precisely the period in which a workshop was growing into a brand of international standing.
The bags a hotel bellboy once looked up at.
And in the direct line of those bags, this one coat. Put that way, does it not seem almost too neat a story?