The coat of kings, rude boys and Doctor Who Given that these coats wear out their owners rather than the other way around it is probably useful for Lewis that "we used to sell 50,000 coats into Soviet Russia, and when I went to Russia I asked where the Crombie coats were." He was told that they were being worn by the nomenklatura; Gorbachev was wearing a Crombie long before he started advertising Louis Vuitton luggage. It says something for the versatility of an overcoat that it can be simultaneously popular with the ruling elite of the Soviet Union and the tribal subcultures of British youth. The Crombie name has a sort of magic that knows no barrier and its appeal is nowhere better summed up than in The Way We Wore, Robert Elms's sartorial autobiography. The flattering and forever sharp silhouette of the Crombie, with its fly front, velvet collar and carmine lining, hovers over this book. One of the most moving passages comes when the laureate of late 20th-century urban style describes the moment of epiphany when he finally slips into his first Crombie. Early skinheads were not caricature orcs of the Right, but detail-obsessed descendants of the suited-and-scootered mods of the Sixties. As a precocious pre-teen skinhead, young Elms assembled a comprehensive wardrobe, with one notable lacuna: "I never got a Crombie, not even a snide one off a market stall." He waited almost a quarter of a century until he could wear the real thing. I never let go of the idea that there was only one pukka overcoat. Then one day, when I was in my mid-thirties, strolling along Savile Row, planning suits which would never get made, I saw that a certain Crombie and Sons of Aberdeen, Scotland, had opened a new shop of their own and there in the window was the coat. Navy blue, heavy felt wool, fly-fronted, square shoulders, black velvet collar. I was nervous when I walked in. After 24 long years a tiny dream was about to be realised. Unlike most childhood ambitions achieved in later life, the coat did not disappoint. Long after the pre-teen skinhead had metamorphosed into a writer, Elms would find himself consulting the label to reassure himself that "it still spells out the same all-important word. I wear it to football sometimes when it's cold, which makes me smile. It's an excellent coat. And what worked for the British Army in the trenches of the First World War, the Politburo atop Lenin's tomb and the chilly terraces of Britain's football grounds is more than equal to the Daleks and Cybermen.