For designer Norma Kamali, the relationship between utility and style crystallized on a camping trip in the 1970s, when she wrapped herself in her sleeping bag for a bathroom run. “As I was running,” she recalled, “I was thinking, ‘I need to put sleeves on this thing,’” and the sleeping bag coat was born. Photographed throughout the 1980s for editorials featuring models in cocktail dresses and stilettos, the coat came across more like an avant-garde accessory rather than a re-imagining of a practical piece of outdoor equipment.
Additional text from Fashion as Design online course, Coursera, 2017