Ben Sherman

Ben Sherman is a British clothing company, producing shirts, suits, shoes, accessories and other items.

 

Ben Sherman clothing designs sometimes feature the roundel and colours of the Royal Air Force, often called the mod target. More recent Ben Sherman shirts are often identified with unusual and complex designs, and the so-called Carnaby-style of fitted shirts. The company has four ranges of clothing: Women's, Men's, Youth and Kids.

 

The company was founded in 1963 by Arthur Bernard Sugarman (1925-1987), who was born in Brighton as a son of a Jewish salesman. He emigrated to the United States in 1946, via Canada, and changed his nationality to American. He married the daughter of a Californian clothes producer and later returned to Brighton, where he bought a shirt factory. Sugarman had realised that early 1960s London-based modern jazz fans were eagerly buying the Oxford-cloth U.S. button-down shirt brands such as Brooks Brothers, Arrow and Hathaway, as sported by visiting U.S. jazz artists like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson. At the time, these were only available from official importers who had in effect, cornered this growing market.

 

Sugarman, decided to produce a version of these shirts, along with a collection of the colourful resort-wear vacation clothes that were growing in popularity, in both the post-war US, and Mediterranean Europe. The mods responded immediately, especially as Sugarman was using higher-quality materials and stitching-detail than the imported shirts. The Ben Sherman Originals label was created. By 1965, the company had opened a small office on the upper floors of a shabby office-block in a London back-street, at 9 Carnaby St., which acted as the showroom for their shirt and beachwear collections. During that time, black R&B and soul artists were beginning to regularly visit the UK for nationwide tours. The male fans of this new music genre, in turn, created further demand for the Ben Sherman shirt. This, initially, was a clean-cut UK street-style, that the mainstream fashion world and media later adopted, and remodelled.

 

By 1970, the high-fashion demand had passed, and the shirt was adopted by the skinhead subculture in the early 1970s, and later again by the mod revivalists of around 1979. The Ben Sherman brand is now one of the largest and popular men's casual wear brands in the UK.