Why we made the 60s Campus Shirt

Why We Made the 60s Campus Shirt

It started with this shirt.

(Deadstock Brooks Brothers button-down, circa 1960s, complete with its original paper tags)

A deadstock Brooks Brothers button-down from circa the 1960s, complete with its original paper tags still attached.

I had kept it for some time, partly because of its history and partly because it was such a good example of the kind of shirt I have always liked.

But there was something particularly useful about this one.

It had never been worn or washed.

The button-down has become such a normal part of menswear that it's easy to forget that somebody had to come up with the idea in the first place.

And the story goes back much further than the 1960s.

 It Started on a Polo Field

In 1896, John E. Brooks, the grandson of Brooks Brothers founder Henry Sands Brooks, was visiting England when he noticed something interesting at a polo match.

The players were fastening their collar points down to stop them flapping around while riding.

It was a small, practical detail.

But Brooks saw something in it.

He took the idea back to America and, around the turn of the century, Brooks Brothers introduced what it called the Polo Button-Down.

Two small buttons.

That was basically it.

But those two buttons changed the character of the shirt completely.

The collar was softer and more relaxed than the stiff collars commonly associated with formal shirts at the time.

And because of the way the longer collar points were held down, the fabric naturally curved between the collar band and the buttons.

That created what we now know as the collar roll.

It wasn't really designed as decoration.

It was the result of function.

And I think that's often where the best details come from.

Over the following decades, the button-down moved a long way from the polo field.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Oxford cloth button-down shirts had become closely associated with American college life and what we now call Ivy League style.

Harvard. Yale. Princeton.

Students wore them with chinos, loafers, Shetland sweaters and sports jackets.

Sometimes with a tie.

Sometimes without.

That was part of what made the shirt so good.

It wasn't really formal.

But it wasn't completely casual either.

You could wear the same shirt under a jacket and tie, then take the jacket off, roll the sleeves up and it became something entirely different.

That versatility seems completely normal today.

At the time, it helped define a new, much more relaxed way of dressing.

By the 1950s and particularly the 1960s, the button-down had become one of the defining pieces of American menswear.

It wasn't just a university look anymore.

It was worn by politicians, actors, musicians, writers and ordinary people.

It became a uniform.

And Brooks Brothers' version was one of the benchmarks.

A generous body.

A long, soft button-down collar.

A natural collar roll.

Simple cuffs.

A chest pocket.

Nothing particularly complicated.

But somehow, when all those proportions came together correctly, the result was just right.

Like most classics, the button-down never really disappeared.

But it changed.

Fashion became slimmer.

Shirts became shorter and narrower through the body.

Collars became smaller.

The generous collar roll that gave older button-down shirts so much character was often reduced or disappeared altogether.

Some collars became stiffer.

Others became so short that the buttons seemed almost decorative rather than functional.

None of this necessarily made them bad shirts.

They were simply responding to a different time.

But somewhere along the way, I think some of the character of the old button-down was lost.

Which brings me back to the shirt that inspired ours.

What makes this particular shirt so interesting to us is its condition.

It is deadstock.

It has never been worn.

More importantly, it has never been washed.

The original Brooks Brothers paper tags are still attached, marked with the size, style information and the original $12.00 price.

(The original Brooks Brothers label and paper tags remain attached)

(The original Brooks Brothers paper tag, priced at $12.00)

That matters when you're trying to understand an old garment.

Most vintage shirts have already lived a life.

They've been washed hundreds of times.

Cotton has shrunk.

Collars have softened.

Sleeves have shortened.

Fabric has twisted and changed shape.

And decades of wear can gradually alter the proportions of the original garment.

With this shirt, none of that had happened.

We were looking at something much closer to the shirt as it originally left the factory.

The original body length.

The sleeve length.

The generous width.

The long, curved tails.

The collar shape.

And, importantly, the relationship between all of those proportions.

Because the shirt has never been washed, its original proportions remain remarkably intact.

At the back, a single centre box pleat gives additional movement through the body.

The chest pocket is simple and softly rounded.

The cuffs and sleeve plackets are equally straightforward.

There is nothing particularly decorative about any of it.

And then there's the collar.

The collar points are noticeably longer than those found on many contemporary button-down shirts.

The placement of the two buttons allows the collar to sit with space and shape rather than simply being pinned flat against the shirt.

That soft roll gives the front of the shirt much of its character.

(The original long button-down collar — one of the most important details we studied)

When we started developing the Allevol 60s Campus Shirt, this deadstock shirt gave us something quite unusual.

An unwashed starting point.

We could measure the garment before decades of washing and wear had changed it.

The body.

The sleeves.

The shirt tails.

The centre back pleat.

The pocket.

The collar length.

The position of the collar buttons.

And especially the way the collar was designed to roll.

The idea wasn't to make a reproduction of an old Brooks Brothers shirt.

It was to understand why the shirt felt so right.

From there, we could make our own decisions about how those proportions should work today.

But the starting point was something we rarely get to see with vintage clothing:

the original shirt, almost exactly as it was made.

That became the reference for the Allevol 60s Campus Shirt.

Please check out our 60s Campus Shirts Here