American Sportswear Archive

The sweatshirt with no side seam, the chino gone pale across the knee, the oxford whose collar rolls without being asked, the field coat with corduroy at the neck. Made in volume for a country with cars and weekends, priced for people who worked, and drawn on the assumption that the garment would be worn out rather than kept. Almost none of it was designed to become valuable, which is precisely why it did.

The thing you will not want to hear is that the fade you love is labour you did not do. The cotton is thinnest exactly where your elbows are about to go, the ribbing has already given up, and the price of a 1960s sweatshirt in a Tokyo shop has very little to do with the garment and a great deal to do with a dealer who understood you before you did.

The mills did not vanish. A new heavyweight sweatshirt off a loopwheel machine costs a third of the old one, will outlast it, and will be properly yours by the fourth winter. Hunt the coats, which were overbuilt and are still overbuilt, and buy the soft things new.