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Doyle's herringbone, along with the coats of Scott, Kermani, Shaughnessy and Laughlin, winds up at Our House, a social-services center attached to St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Chelsea, where condominium-dwelling yuppies coexist with derelicts who call a cardboard box home. Our House's director, Pamela Bradley, says this year the center has given 600 coats to people for whom "having one can make the difference between making it through the winter or freezing to death." Outside the church 20 men and women wait patiently in a cold drizzle for the doors to open. They will be admitted one at a time to choose among scores of coats arrayed across the pews.
All five coats are taken in less than 15 minutes. Kermani's raincoat and Shaughnessy's rumpled trench are snatched up by a man who will not give his name. Another nameless man struts out the door, his dishevelment suddenly transformed into dapperness by Doyle's herringbone. Clarence ("Larry") Locke, 56, lives in a welfare hotel on the Upper West Side. He pulls Terry Scott's gray mohair on over his tattered lightweight jacket and finds it fits him perfectly. "I am a gentleman, you know, and now I look like one," he says, running a hand over the thick material. And, indeed, he does.
The most exuberant recipient is Sondra Richardson, a slender 34-year-old woman who lives on the sidewalk in a shipping container with her fiance Perry Turner. Her only coat is a bedraggled red corduroy. She slips on Sheena Laughlin's blue down and, proclaiming that "I used to be a model," strikes a series of runway poses. "Sheena, God bless you, honey, and have a merry, merry Christmas and a beautiful New Year," says Sondra, then zippers up the ! coat and scurries out, on Perry's arm, into the damp and bleakness of the December afternoon.