What started out as one man’s vision; to create the perfect Oxford cloth button-down, has over the years developed into a global lifestyle label for the entire family, in over 70 countries.
In 1910, Bernard Gant, a Ukrainian, started working in New York’s garment district making shirts. After some years, he relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, where he began manufacturing shirts for some of the best brands in the business. Just above every shirt’s bottom hem there was a discrete “G” stamped as a sign of quality craftsmanship.
In 1949, GANT of New Haven was established, together with his two sons Marty and Elliot who had just returned from World War II. Those who appreciated the excellence of the “G” shirt could now experience GANT as a brand in its own right.
The time was right. After World War II, there was a need among American men for a more casual way of dressing, a style that later became known as American Sportswear.
The GANT shirt became an overnight sensation in campus stores thanks to several innovative tailoring features, such as the box pleat and locker loop, the more casual unlined collar, the addition of size tags inside the neck, and a slimmer silhouette. This new shirt style turned out to be the cornerstone of the East Coast “natural look” that spread around the world during the 1950s and 1960s.
By the development of the brand by three swedes in the 1980’s followed a European touch in terms of fabric, designs and lifestyle influences. This fusion of an American heritage with a European touch would from now on distinguish Gant from any other design label.
What started out as one man’s vision: to create the perfect Oxford cloth button-down, has developed over the years into a global lifestyle label for the entire family in over 70 countries.
In the fall of 2010 Gant came back to where it all began. The recently opened GANT Campus Store in New Haven, CT is housed in a historic building originally built in 1910 and designed to match Yale’s Collegiate Gothic architectural style. And in honor of this homecoming, another legend has been reborn: a brand new selection of Yale Co-op shirts, recreated from GANT’s 1960s originals. The shirts bear all the typical Ivy League-look attributes that were documented in the cult book “Take Ivy” published by the Japanese photographer, Teruyoshi Hayashida, in 1965, and was republished at the same time that GANT “returned home” to Yale.
A coincidence? On the contrary. It demonstrates that nothing has changed. Because despite the fickle nature of the fashion industry, there will always be one style that outlives them all: American Sportswear.
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