It may be surprising to some that the Banana Republic played a starring role in helping to mainstream khaki, olive drab, and surplus styles in American fashion. For those of a younger generation, the name Banana Republic will only conjure up images of a bland mall brand selling business casual. But before its fall, Banana Republic was a phenomenon that swept through American retail, popularizing a safari look rooted in military surplus styles of the late 1960s.
Founded by Mel and Patricia Zeigler in 1978, Banana Republic opened its first store in Mill Valley, California, just North of San Francisco. The couple met while working at the San Fransico Chronicle, Mel a writer, and Patricia, an illustrator. Both children of the 1960s, the Zeiglers lived in a way that would have been considered counter-cultural only a decade before. “We were interested in money only so it could buy us the freedom to paint, write, and travel. We didn’t spend much. Our entertainments were hiking, biking, reading, and home-cooked meals with friends,” they wrote in their memoir Wild Company. An Esquire profile later would describe Patricia as “an artist, a painter, an ex-hippie, a purebred, all-California girl who ate natural foods.” Another would describe Mel as “a devotee of the radical/hippie ‘60s Army surplus look.”
On a reporting trip to Australia, Mel stumbled into a Sidney Army Surplus store and bought a WWII-era British bush jacket. “I had been drawn to military surplus clothing since my days as a college student in the 1960s,” he wrote in their memoir. “Like others of my generation, I liked to wear surplus clothing because it was cheap. I also got a tickle from the paradox of being stridently antiwar yet happy to attire myself in military detritus.”
Patricia loved it, and with other compliments rolling in, the two of them decided to start Banana Republic. At first, the idea was to sell clothing like the jacket Mel had found in Australia. Entering the world of surplus dealers, their first purchase was 500 Spanish Army shirts for $1.50 each. Setting up at a local flea market, they are able to sell their whole inventory at $12.00. And just like that, Banana Republic was born.
They opened their first store in Mill Valley right after. Upstairs was an Aikido studio, and before they took over the downstairs, the space had been home to a head shop. Their choice of retail space seems illustrative of the overall change happening throughout American culture. The radical, mind-expanding countercultures of the 1960s were giving way to the “Me Decade.” A head shop replaced by a studio for a Japanese philosophical martial arts studio and a clothing brand. As if the death of the 1960s had to be made clearer, the week Banana Republic opened its doors, San Fransico Mayor George Moscone and Councilman Harvey Milk were assassinated, and Jonestown cult mass suicide occurred.
Patricia and Mel went looking for more surplus, like the bush jacket and Spanish shirts but came up short. Digging through warehouses around the bay area only yielded American surplus. But Patricia saw an opportunity. Patricia noticed that nearly all the military surplus they were looking at was made from natural fibers like wool, cotton, and linen. They began to buy military surplus not for the styles, but for the textiles and materials.“She turned white wool arctic pant liners into chenille jackets, soft cotton mosquito nets made for Pakistani soldiers into diaphanous blouses, and quilted black satin linings from French fire-fighter coats into quilted handbags,” Esquire wrote in 1986. Before the opening of the shop, Patricia and one seamstress worked around the clock to transform surplus equipment like mattress covers into jackets.
Banana Republic’s emphasis on natural fibers struck a rich vein in American consumer tastes. By the late 1970s, there was a prevailing feeling that American popular fashion had become more disposable and made from an increasing number of synthetic materials like polyester. The fashion industry seemed incapable of making “some sincere yet attractive body covering made of God’s own cotton or other honest fiber,” lamented Esquire. “Such items had existed in earlier epochs of American history (like the Sixties), but heaven knows where they’d gone.” In the mid and late 1970s, people turned again to military surplus stores for the answer.
Unlike the previous decade, Military surplus wasn’t seen as countercultural or rebellious but devoid of political valiance. Surplus was seen as a smart choice for its well-made, natural fiber content, authenticity, and utilitarian nature. Unsurprisingly, this new emphasis on surplus, especially its well-made construction and perceived authenticity, coincided with the beginning of the offshoring of the American textile and garment industries.
This new trend for surplus was not a counter-culture but “an emerging culture,” said one New York-based retailer. Nearly simultaneously with the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the industry began to shape a market around it – selling the counterculture back to itself. With the death of communal utopian thinking of the 1960s, the mass class politics of the New Left, and the State’s wholesale assassination of the Black Liberation movement, all that was left was the trappings. It was now self-improvement, not societal change. Natural food stores and outdoor recreation instead of psychedelics and taking to the barricades. As the counterculture youth of the 1960s became yuppies, so too did Army surplus.
Military surplus was positioned not as a way of opting out of American consumer culture but as similar to health food – good for you. “The same people who put health foods in their cupboards put health clothes are their backs,” reported the LA Times the same year Banana Republic opened. “Surplus clothes are definitely healthy,” said Harvey Russack of New York’s Unique Clothing Warehouse in the same article, “because they’re pure, unadulterated, high performance clothes made of natural fibers.” Macy’s opened up a surplus boutique on one floor of their Manhattan flagship, and smaller boutiques selling army surplus opened in trendy neighborhoods. Banana Republic was just one example of this burgeoning trend.
From the beginning, Mel and Patricia viewed surplus as “a proxy for safari clothing.” The surplus they were attracted to was more often than not foreign, like British Army shorts or Swedish leather bandoleers. But they still carried some American surplus like M-1965 field jackets. Quickly, they moved away from sourcing surplus to creating their own garments based on surplus military and safari gear they were sourcing. This included making their own version of the M-1965 field jacket and OG-107 fatigues in premium natural fibers and new colors never envisioned by the military. Today, nearly all fashion brands, from boutiques to mall brands, make their own versions of field jackets and fatigues, playing with different colors and materials. Banana Republic was one of the first to bring these classic military uniform silhouettes fully into mainstream fashion, not making reproductions but homages to these authentic military designs.
Till next time,
C.W.M.
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