The Varsity Jacket Began With One Letter H

In 1865 the Harvard baseball team added an Old English H to its gray flannel shirts. It was a uniform detail, nothing more, the kind of thing a team does so the crowd knows who is batting. Within a few years players badly wanted to keep that letter, and a century and a half later it is sewn on jackets worn by people who have never played anything.

Which makes the varsity jacket an odd thing to own. It was designed to be earned. Almost everyone who wears one now has bought it.

An H worth keeping

Harvard's football team took up the H in 1875. For roughly 25 years after the letter first appeared, team captains let players who had taken the field in the big games, against Yale or Princeton, keep their H jerseys. Everyone else handed theirs back. That rule, according to the history of the varsity letter, is probably where the letter as an award begins. The cloth was the prize. The shirt was just what it happened to be sewn on.

In 1891 the baseball team started regularly wearing a letter sweater, black with a small crimson H on the left breast. The idea spread fast. By 1911 a yearbook from Phoenix Union High School, in what was then still Arizona Territory, showed a student in a V-neck sweater with a P on the front, the earliest known high school example. For about forty years, from the 1890s to the 1930s, the sweater was the standard way to wear a letter. Some schools also handed out stadium blankets in the 1920s and 1930s.

From sweater to jacket

The jacket we know took shape in the 1930s. Lettered wool jackets with leather sleeves in a contrasting color, finished with chenille letters, appeared on campuses and quickly became the look. The combination made practical sense. Wool kept a body warm in a cold stadium, leather sleeves stood up to wear at the cuffs and elbows, and the thick looped chenille made a letter you could read from the far side of the field.

That basic recipe barely changed. A modern varsity jacket still has a wool body, leather sleeves, a snap front and striped knit trim at the collar, cuffs and hem. The only real update is practical. Some letterman makers now add an inside pocket sized for a phone.

The jacket also kept its social weight. A letter on your chest meant you had played, and in American high schools the jacket became a kind of portable résumé. It sat alongside the campus staples of the era, from the oxford button-down to the hooded sweatshirt, which Champion first made as a sideline layer for athletes, as we cover in our history of the Reverse Weave hoodie.

A San Francisco maker

One maker with a long run in the category is Golden Bear Sportswear in San Francisco. Its first customers, in 1922, were the city's longshoremen, who needed coats that would stand up to the wind off the bay, and it worked out of a workshop on Howard Street. About two decades later it introduced a bomber jacket inspired by World War II fighter pilots, and the varsity jacket followed as the bomber's younger brother, as Mr Porter put it in a profile of the brand.

Golden Bear supplied varsity jackets to local schools and motorcycle jackets to the local police, and its client list grew well beyond both. David Letterman designed custom jackets with the company during his run on the Late Show, which is either a coincidence or the best joke in the business. The company still makes jackets by hand in San Francisco, now on Potrero Avenue.

If you want a military cousin with the same short, rib-trimmed shape, read our history of the MA-1 flight jacket. Golden Bear made both, for very different customers.

How hip-hop took the letter

The jacket's second life began off campus. In the 1980s hip-hop adopted the varsity jacket, and in the 2010s it did so again. Avirex, Phat Farm and Rocawear all made their own versions. The move made sense. A varsity jacket is already a garment about belonging and status, and hip-hop style has always been fluent in both, as our piece on hip-hop and menswear explains.

The letter no longer has to mean you played. It can stand for a label, a crew, a city or nothing at all, and the jacket still reads as American from a block away.

Buying one

Go for wool and real leather if you can, because the whole appeal is how the two materials age differently. A plain jacket with no letter is easier to wear than one with somebody else's school on the front. Keep the fit close at the hip. A baggy varsity jacket looks borrowed, which may be intended, but it is not the original shape. More classic American clothing is on our menswear history hub and in the Style section.

The newest feature on a letterman jacket is that phone pocket. The wool, the leather and the fat chenille letter would all be familiar to a halfback in 1935.