It has become fashionable for apparel brands to emphasize their “heritage,” but Brooks really has one. Founded in Manhattan in 1818, it claims to have provided garments to forty-one of our forty-five chief magistrates. On the night he was assassinated, Lincoln was wearing a Brooks coat with “One Country, One Destiny” embroidered on the lining. Theodore Roosevelt ordered his dress uniforms for the Spanish-American War from Brooks’s then-thriving military tailoring operation.
More significant than its association with statesmen is Brooks Brothers’s central role in nearly every innovation in American menswear before the Second World War. In 1849, Brooks introduced the ready-to-wear suit, accelerating the transformation of clothing from an artisanal into an industrial product.
In addition to lowering prices, mass production of clothes encouraged an important aesthetic shift. Prior to the nineteenth century, European men’s clothing had been as intricately constructed, and as rich in color and texture, as women’s. By the dawn of the Victorian Age, menswear had settled on the basic elements of coat, trouser, and shirt in a palette of matte blues, grays, browns, black, and white. These relatively simple, interchangeable items were easier to make and sell on a large scale than their predecessors. Notwithstanding the continuing objections of aesthetic radicals, men’s style has never reversed what psychologist John Flügel called its “Great Renunciation.”
Brooks continued to provide custom apparel and military garb into the twentieth century, but the No. 1 Sack Suit, introduced in 1901, would become its signature item. A soft, tubular design that fit most men without extensive alterations, the sack suit was a happy compromise between formality and comfort. Quickly replacing the frock coat as standard businesswear, the sack suit was recognized as symbolic of the American way of life, just as closely tailored evening clothes epitomized the English gentleman.
The same inclination toward practicality informed the company’s other novelties. Brooks specialized in adapting for general use items that the rule-bound British wore only for sports. In this way, such enduring staples as the reverse stripe or “repp” tie, Harris tweed, the camel hair overcoat, and the Shetland sweater entered the American sartorial lexicon. So did that magical shirt, which family scion John E. Brooks claimed was inspired by English polo players’ habit of using pins to hold down their collar points.