What Is a Raglan Coat? The Sleeve, the Name and How It Should Fit

A raglan coat is an overcoat whose sleeves run all the way up to the collar. Instead of a seam on top of the shoulder, each sleeve is joined to the body by a diagonal seam from the neckline down to the underarm. The result is a softer, rounder shoulder and easy room to wear the coat over a jacket.

How a raglan sleeve is built

On an ordinary coat the sleeve is "set in": the body has an armhole that curves around the shoulder, and the top of the sleeve is eased into it, so a seam sits on the edge of your shoulder. A raglan has no armhole of that kind. Its seams run from the neckline to the underarm, and the top of the sleeve becomes part of the neckline itself.

A raglan sleeve can be cut in one piece, shaped over the shoulder with a dart, or in two pieces, with a seam running down the length of the sleeve to give the shoulder its shape. On a coat you can tell at a glance: follow the sleeve seam upwards. If it climbs diagonally to the collar, the coat is a raglan.

	Raglan sleeve	Set-in sleeve
Where the seam runs	Diagonally, from the neckline to the underarm	Around an armhole at the edge of the shoulder
Shoulder line	Soft and rounded	Defined and structured
Over a jacket	Forgiving, with room to move	Needs the shoulders cut to fit over the jacket
How to check the fit	By the drape and movement	By where the shoulder seam sits

Where the name comes from, and what is only a story

The raglan is named after FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan (1788–1855). He lost his right arm after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, commanded the British troops sent to the Crimea in 1854, and died at Sevastopol in 1855. English dictionaries date "raglan", meaning a loose overcoat, to the late 1850s and early 1860s, the years just after the war.

The story usually told is that the sleeve was devised so he could dress easily with one arm, often with the London house Aquascutum, which supplied coats to the British army during the Crimean War, as its maker. Treat that as tradition, not history. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes the sleeve as "supposedly" named after Lord Raglan and repeats two competing stories, and no record from the time shows who first cut it, or why. What is certain is the name and its link to Lord Raglan. The rest is a good story.

The balmacaan: a raglan coat with its own name

A balmacaan is a loose, single-breasted overcoat with raglan sleeves and a small collar, often cut in tweed. The name comes from Balmacaan, an estate near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and dictionaries date the word to about 1915–1920. Every balmacaan is a raglan coat, but not every raglan coat is a balmacaan: the raglan is the way the sleeve is cut, and the balmacaan is one coat built around it.

Why the raglan suits an overcoat

An overcoat has to go over something, usually a jacket or a heavy knit. Because a raglan has no shoulder seam that must land exactly on the point of your shoulder, it settles over what you wear underneath rather than fighting it, and the cut gives the arms more room to move. The trade-off is the silhouette: a raglan looks relaxed and rounded where a set-in coat looks sharp and squared. Neither is better. They suit different coats and different shoulders.

How a raglan coat should fit

Try it on over the jacket or knit you will actually wear with it, then check four things.

• The drape, not the seam. Ignore the old rule about the shoulder seam sitting at the edge of the shoulder; it applies to set-in sleeves. Look instead for a clean fall from the collar, with nothing crushing the jacket's shoulders or pushing its collar out of place.
• The front. Buttoned, it should close without pulling across the chest while leaving the jacket underneath uncompressed.
• Movement. Reach forward, walk and sit. The coat should not grip the upper arms or drag the jacket up.
• Sleeves and length. With your arms relaxed, the coat sleeve should cover the jacket sleeve without swallowing your hand, and the hem should cover the jacket's hem.

With vintage, compare the flat measurements with a coat that already fits you rather than trusting the size on the label; our guide to knowing whether a vintage piece will fit explains how. And read the cloth label first: whether the coat is wool, camel hair or cashmere decides its warmth far more than the cut does.