Mr Stuart Vevers explains how the Beastie Boys and My Own Private Idaho influenced his new collection.

On a late summer afternoon Mr Stuart Vevers settles into a leather banquette at The Waverly Inn. “It’s my local,” says the Yorkshire-born designer about the gastropub that sits on a postcard-perfect, brownstone-lined block in the West Village. It has been nearly two years since Mr Vevers announced that he was leaving Spanish leather experts Loewe to become the executive creative director of the New York-based brand, Coach — known for its accessible take on luxury. At the time, people in the fashion industry thought he was crazy. Coach was dead in the water — both creatively and as a publicly traded company — while Mr Vevers, 41, was one of the ascendant creative directors within the LVMH firmament. From 2007 to 2013, he remade Loewe into a cool new apparel and accessories brand. His résumé was gold-plated, featuring stints at Bottega Veneta, Givenchy and Louis Vuitton.

“I’m drawn to these moments of change in the life of a brand,” Mr Vevers says of what appealed to him about the Coach job. He had done a similar revamp when he took over at Mulberry in 2005, winning the British Fashion Council’s Accessory Designer of the Year award the following year. “I was very reluctant to leave Loewe, but I was interested in trying to create this new youthful take on ‘luxe’. I don’t want to call it ‘luxury’ because while I’m using these fantastic materials, I’m exploring the tension between luxury and utility.”

It takes two seasons to turn a fashion house around, so it is this autumn’s collection — which made its MR PORTER debut this week — that will be a true test of whether he has succeeded in generating style cred into a leather goods company that will still be celebrating its 75th anniversary next year.

To Mr Vevers, the code of luxury is shifting away from couture and tailoring to casual, easy pieces — a great T-shirt, sweatshirt, dress sneakers and a pair of jeans. “I like the idea that the Coach guy gets dressed quickly. I’m referencing more the codes of American workwear than the codes of European luxury,” he says of the brand’s new DNA. One thing he enjoys about designing in the affordable luxury space is the creative freedom that comes with designing for a lower price point.

“You can be more spontaneous. You can have a playful moment - a seasonal moment - because it is a different proposition,” he says as the restaurant starts to fill with diners. He then adds, “I’ve gotten really into the idea that desire can come from something imperfect… that sometimes the immaculate perfection that’s so associated with high luxury can have less desire while something that is more rugged, more cool can create higher desire.”

Coach has had several incarnations over its history — all of them evolving around American leather goods. In the 1950s, the company famously mimicked the way leather in baseball gloves became softer and more supple as it aged. The brand adapted the process with great success for both women’s and men’s bags. Using this, and other bits of the brand’s heritage, helped Mr Vevers to bring Coach to a new place.

The first step in Coach’s reinvention involved Mr Vevers moving to New York in the autumn of 2013. His first winter here was one of the coldest on record. This was not one of your damp European winters. This was the polar vortex delivering a Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. “This autumn’s collection was inspired by that winter,” he says. “One day I was sitting in a shoe meeting and I said, ‘Cancel everything except sneakers and boots because that’s all I saw anyone wearing.’ ”

New York City and the US look began to influence his design in other ways. “There was just a few images on the mood board for this autumn’s collection — the Beastie Boys, in particular the period around [the album] Paul’s Boutique, and this photo of the Kennedys; they’re very comfortable, very relaxed. JFK is in a chair and Jackie is sitting on the floor.” Bits of Americana have also become touchstones for the rebranding of Coach. Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects, the photographer’s book of haunting images taken on a cross-country trip in the late 1980s, is one.

And his images have been used in backdrops for Coach shows, including the most recent women's one during NYFW. The High Line, New York’s reclaimed elevated railroad track, is another. My Own Private Idaho, director Mr Gus Van Sant’s re-telling of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, starring Mr River Phoenix and Mr Keanu Reeves, comes up in conversation, too. The washed-out colours of the Pacific Northwest, as they appear in the movie, have been part of Mr Vevers’ imagination since a poster of it hung on his bedroom wall as a teenager in Doncaster, UK.

“It was probably through music and pop culture that I started getting interested in fashion. I was never like a seven-year-old who dreamed of being a couturier,” he recalls. His first boyhood trips beyond Yorkshire took him to Manchester. He was 16 and “the city had a cool factor because of The Haçienda,” he says of the music club where he stood in line for hours to get in. His first trip to London was to see the Virgin Megastore and Madonna on her Blonde Ambition Tour. Even now, he keeps up on the music scene: Mr Neil Amin-Smith from Clean Bandit was the DJ at his wedding last autumn to Mr Benjamin Seidler (an illustrator and former MR PORTER Senior Fashion Writer).

Despite Mr Vevers’ pedigree, it was with some trepidation that industry insiders approached his first collection for Coach when he showed it at last January’s London Collections: Men. But the collection won the MR PORTER buying team over — in particular a shearling jacket worthy of a 1970s action hero, bomber jackets with shearling trims and totes whose leather harked back to Coach’s baseball heritage.

Consumers have also been responding favourably to Mr Vevers handiwork. In August, the company posted fourth-quarter earnings that exceed analysts’ expectations. Sales were $1bn in the period, which ended 27 June 2015, topping the $972.9m projection. CEO, Victor Luis, positioned the strong earnings as proof that one does not need to discount excessively to reach a younger consumer. It was also proof that Mr Vevers was on to something.

As we settle up our drinks bill and walk down Bank Street, the conversation jumps between how the first year of Mr Vevers’ marriage is going and what he loves about the High Line. Suddenly he stops in front of a perfectly manicured brownstone. “Well, this is me,” he says as he walks up the stairs of his new home.

Affordable luxury, it appears, can be interpreted in many different ways.