Okay, so all our talk of cocooning hasn’t rendered us totally immune to some fall and winter’s new looks, especially ones that are being compared to security blankets, like the Lindsey Thornburg hooded cloaks featured in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Styles “Pulse” section.

Maybe it’s this cold snap, or the fact that we recently re-watched The French Lieutenant’s Woman,  (Oh, the way that cloak billowed out around her as she strode along the the seawall!) 

   
    Or maybe it’s just visual fatigue from so many seasons of tightly tailored outerwear.
  But, for some reason, the idea of a wrappy, cloaky, capey-type coat is is beginning to intrigue us.
Seriously, how great would it be to throw one on to walk the dog on a chilly morning like today, or for traveling?  (Now that we have to pay extra for one of those Kleenex tissue blankets, having a coat that can double as one is a bonus, as far as we’re concerned.)

To be honest, we’d always felt that the whole Indian blanket/alpaca sweater look was better left to the cowboys

   
   
 
    and the slackers,

unless, of course, you have the bucks to go really uptown with something like this blanket coat from Ralph Lauren’s Fall ‘08 Collection:

   
   
    But we like the idea of some sort of pattern; black especially can be a little too Tragic Heroine (see French Lt.‘s Woman, above), or just flat-out creepy, like the people modeling these capes from a company called Half Moon, which specializes in apparel for…well, we’re not sure, and quite frankly, we’d rather not think about it too much.

(Like, is that a family?  We’re not sure which is more disturbing:  That photo or the fact that, according to the web page, those capes are one of their “most popular garments…”)

   
    Actually, we think this Stella McCartney Coat of Arms pattern is the cream of the cape/cloak crop, and you can bet that if we had $2795 laying around to spend on cloaks, we’d be all over it. (We love the way it perfectly straddles the line between Anglo and Indian influences, with colors that wouldn’t make us look like a walking pinata.)

It’s also the perfect length, which is another thing that has to be taken into consideration with these things, since going too long all but guarantees the tragic/creepy/Druid-like effect mentioned above, but anything too short defeats the warm-blankie purpose and comes dangerously close to resembling Liz Lemon‘s sweater cape, which we now know is NOT one of Oprah’s Favorite Things.

Okay, so maybe this whole concept is trickier than we thought. 

We need another opinion—where’s Oprah when we need her?