“While jogging through the predawn landscape, he protected himself from the winter cold with sweatpants, a knit cap and a well-worn gray hooded sweatshirt. And as Rocky pulled himself out of anonymity, he brought with him what would become a mainstay of American fashion: the hoodie.”

The New York Times journalist Denis Wilson looks into the classic piece American clothing, the hoodie from a filmic angle in his article, A Look Under the Hoodie published more than a decade ago. Reviewing the 1978 film Rocky, in which Rocky Balboa, played by the young Stallone, runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his heather grey hoodie, Wilson celebrates this timeless item with its most iconic cinematic presence in the history of American film. Fashion and the visual culture is always enmeshed together, one informing the other.

It is still refreshingly relevant to revisit this article today. You can shop our design at the Garmentory as well.

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Once an innovative fastening technology that made the “automatic, continuous clothing closure” possible, the zipper today is one of those peculiarly banal gadgets that are so deeply embedded in our quotidian life that we hardly notice or think twice about.

The very first attempt to employ zipper in clothing design is by the rubber company called B.F. Goodrich. It released a pair of rubber boots called “The Mystik” equipped with a zipper in stead of shoelaces in 1922. When sales lag, company president Bertram G. Work muses, “What we need is an action word, something that will dramatize the way the thing zips.” The boot was rebranded “The Zipper” , and since then the zipper as a fastening mechanism has dictated the way wearable things open and close. The biggest supplier of zippers in the world today is the Japanese manufacturer YKK, who is allegedly responsible for half of the zippers production around the globe, which is roughly 7 billions per year.

(Slow and Steady Wins the Race Zipper Shirt available online.)

A familiar silhouette now in surplus utility nylon. Back in stock, online.