The Hoodie Started on a Rochester Sideline

On August 9, 1938, a Rochester, New York, man named Samuel N. Friedland was granted a patent for an athletic shirt built on an odd idea. Instead of cutting the knitted fabric with the grain running top to bottom, the maker would turn it 90 degrees and run it sideways. The cloth would still shrink in the wash. It would just shrink across the body instead of up the torso, so a shirt that fit a halfback in September still covered his stomach in November.

The company holding that patent was Champion, and the method was sold as Reverse Weave. It is the reason one particular gray sweatshirt feels heavier and squarer than the rest, and the reason vintage dealers flip a hoodie over and run a thumb down its sides before they quote a price.

A knitting mill in Rochester

Champion opened on May 6, 1919, as Knickerbocker Knitting Mills, run by members of the Feinbloom family. By 1922 the brothers Bill and Abe Feinbloom had control and renamed it Champion Knitwear Mills. The early customers were institutions, not shoppers. Wentworth Military Academy bought sweaters for its cadets and then asked for athletic uniforms as well, and by 1928 the company had stopped relying on stores and was selling straight to coaches.

That choice shaped the product. Coaches wanted warmth and durability, and they laundered uniforms in enormous batches, so shrinkage was a constant complaint. Champion also got into campus merchandise early. In 1934, after a trip to Michigan, Abe Feinbloom struck a deal with Moe's Sport Shop to sell University of Michigan apparel. The college sweatshirt as something you buy, rather than something you earn on the field, starts roughly there.

Why the hood?

Warmth on the bench, nothing more. Champion designed the hooded sweatshirt in the 1930s as a sideline layer, pulled on between drills or while a player waited out a cold upstate afternoon. Put a hood on heavy cotton fleece and you have a portable shelter.

Reverse Weave arrived with Friedland's patent in 1938. A second patent, granted on October 14, 1952, to Friedland and William Feinbloom, fixed the fit problem that sideways grain created. It added stretch side panels and a ribbed gusset, so an athlete could lift his arms without the whole body of the sweatshirt riding up. Those panels running down the flanks are the tell. Cheap copies skip them.

The payoff was a garment that survived years of hot washes. Champion's own heritage page sells Reverse Weave as heavyweight and shrink resistant, which is the honest pitch. New, it is stiff and boxy. After a few years it softens without losing its shape, which almost nothing else in a gym bag can claim.

Off the bench and onto the street

For decades the hoodie stayed near the gym. Champion added the mesh nylon jersey in 1967, and the embroidered C logo first showed up on a Notre Dame basketball uniform in 1978. That small C became the thing people went looking for.

Then the hoodie left campus. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Reverse Weave was claimed by hip-hop artists, West Coast skaters and the New York punk scene, three crowds that agreed on very little else. It was cheap in thrift stores, tough enough for a skate park and anonymous enough to wear anywhere. We trace how that era rewired men's clothing in our history of hip-hop and menswear, and the hoodie sits right in the middle of that story.

The pro game kept the brand in front of everyone. Champion was the NBA's official outfitter from 1989 to 2001 and made the uniforms for the 1992 Dream Team in Barcelona, which Textile World credits with building the label's name in Europe. Meanwhile Japanese secondhand shops were importing used American clothing by the bale, and buyers dug through it for Reverse Weave. The same reverence for old American basics drives the obsession in our guide to raw and selvedge denim.

From the museum to a $1.2 billion sale

By the late 2000s the hoodie was the default top for a whole generation, and the labels defining that moment went back to the source. Collaborations with Supreme, Vetements, Todd Snyder and Off-White reminded a new crowd where the good sweatshirts came from. The mechanics of turning a basic into a sellout are laid out in our piece on Supreme's drop model, and Abloh's wider influence gets its own treatment in our look at the Off-White legacy.

In 2017 a Reverse Weave hoodie appeared in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern?, and in 2018 it entered the museum's permanent collection. A layer designed to keep a lineman warm on the sideline is now museum property.

The business moved too. Hanesbrands sold Champion to Authentic Brands Group in a deal valued at about $1.2 billion, finalized in the fall of 2024, with the core US and Canada business placed with a licensing partner. Collectors are watching the heavyweight line closely, and they have reason to.

How to buy a good one

Ignore the logo and check the build. A proper Reverse Weave sweatshirt has those side panels running from the armpit to the hem, a thick ribbed cuff and a hand closer to canvas than to the brushed fleece of a fashion hoodie. Pieces from the 1980s and 1990s have already softened in the places you want. If you buy new, take your normal size and expect it to feel wide at first. The cloth was cut that way on purpose.

The other piece of campus clothing those early customers wore is covered in our history of the varsity jacket, and there is more on our streetwear topic hub and across the Style section.

Run your fingers down the side of a good one and you'll find a separate strip of cloth set in along the ribs. It has been there since 1952.