Sport Jackets - A Brief History

The odd jacket – that is to say, the thing that is styled sort of like the top of a suit – has an aristocratic heritage. In Europe and particularly in the British Isles, where hunting was a sport long before there were Americans to engage in it, jackets of a hefty tweed cloth were designed and made to be worn to ward off the elements, protect one from briars and thorns, and hold the necessary accoutrements of the hunt: bullets, powder, duck calls or whatever. The fabric of the sport jacket was therefore not really suitable for indoor wear, (although in England and Scotland sometimes the difference in temperature between the two is indistinguishable, unless you happen to be standing right next to the – what’s that thing called, the “electric fire”?) It seems that the English “county” types, kids who came down to Oxford and Cambridge after the great war, had these jackets of sporty origin copied by their tailors, and they wore them casually, to their clubs or around town, over flannel or whipcord trousers, with a waistcoat sometimes, a throat scarf or necktie. In this way the dashing, devil-may-care atmosphere of the wealthy hunter made its way to the town and campus set and became the original “dressy casual” attire of a well-dressed man.

Or so says my friend and one-time collaborator Milena Canonero, whose intensive research on the period led to the excellence of the costumes in the movie “Chariots of Fire,” for which Milena was awarded her second of three Academy Awards.

American men first started wearing sport jackets in the 20’s, but only in the hallowed halls of northeastern secondary schools and colleges. Even as late as the early 30’s, when my great-grandfather Joseph Hilton was in his heyday, with ten big men’s stores in and around New York and a factory turning out over a thousand garments each week, the sport jacket was a bit of a rarity. It seems that Anglophiles among the St. Grottlesex crowd, the New England preparatory school elite, copied the British custom of wearing these unstructured, unpadded, softly tailored jackets made out of Scottish textiles in naturally colorful patterns taken from the clan tartans and district checks of the Highlands and the Outer Hebrides.

Thus did the “natural shoulder” and “Ivy League” styles become one and the same. My father’s big idea, after leaving Princeton, Harvard Business School and the US Navy in ‘46, was to use his grandfather Joe’s factory in Linden to manufacture these jackets and to sell them to independent retailers around the country. Probably because of the demand created by stylish Princeton-Harvard-Yale men of the time, Norman’s customers in the beginning were stores which had been opened by former traveling salesmen who represented the New Haven tailoring companies. The proprietors of Langrock’s in Princeton, Henry Miller in Hartford, and Arthur A. Adler in Washington, to name three prominent examples, were all originally representatives of New Haven houses. In time this type of store was replicated by entrepreneurs in other towns, and the age of the Ivy League Men’s Shop was on.

The importance of the sport jacket in this emerging style trend is evidenced by the fact that my father called his line Norman Hilton Country Jackets at first. It wasn’t until 1953 or so, when he started making suits, he dropped the sport coat reference and became just Norman Hilton. Sixty years on, I marvel at his decision to name the collection after himself. At that time lines had names like Botany 500, Worsted-Tex, Clipper Craft and Cricketeer. Lines with person’s names attached – in men’s apparel – were unheard of. Only designer collections were eponymous in those days: women’s dress and coat stylists like Chanel, Pierre Cardin, and Christian Dior. To sign the line with his name like that, completely green and only 28 years old, took almost futuristic marketing savvy, not to mention guts.

FYI   Most often the sport jackets of the early days were manufactured out of some kind of “tweed.” This type of fabric, often woven by Scottish farmers in their cottages, rich in color, rather raspy to the hand but beautifully primitive, was a product of the Lowlands area of Scotland called The Borders, through which runs the picturesque River Tweed. Just how the fabric came to be called after the river depends on whom you ask. Some old-timers maintain that the cloth was named for the river or surrounding area; others would have it that the name was simply a misspelling of the word that defined the type of cloth it was, since the twill was, in the brogue of the Scots, pronounced “tweel.” There is no way to be sure, since the art and the industry of tweed making has mostly vanished from Scotland and everywhere else. Harris Tweed and Shetland Tweed, the two most famous varieties of tweed, were made in the Outer Hebrides, on Shetland, and in the Orkney Islands. They found their way to the wardrobes of American Ivy League toffs in great numbers. Still today, there are crofters weaving tweed in their homes on the islands of Lewis and Harris. Perhaps they haven’t found a way to lay TV cable across the Irish Sea.