This year, Gant celebrates its 75th anniversary. Founded in 1949 by Bernard Gantmacher and his sons, Marty and Elliot, as a shirtmaking company in New Haven, Connecticut, Gant has continued to define and evolve American sportswear decade-by-decade. It was the brand during the 50s and 60s, when American college students began loosening their ties and swapping stiff tailoring for collegiate knitwear and relaxed suits – Gant’s iconic button-down shrits made exclusively for the Yale Co-op were a campus must-have. In the 70s, Gant channelled a spirit of easeful leisure, epitomised by the brand’s first collection of American Sportswear consisting of ties, loose trousers and rugby shirts, while in the 80s, Gant was adopted by the John Hughes crowd and celebrated for its cool, Ivy League stylings. In the 90s, the mainstream popularity of the previous decade broadened as the brand was reframed by musicians and subcultural movements.

Having been appointed Gant’s creative director in 2019 (after years working on and off with the brand) creative director Christopher Bastin has made it his mission to rebuild the brand’s lost archives, sourcing, collecting and curating heritage pieces to create a sartorial timeline. Using these vintage pieces as source material, for Gant’s 75th milestone, Bastin and his team have designed a special anniversary collection of replicas that reimagine those classic pieces for today’s generation. An early-80s bleach-stained classic rugger shirt sourced from a vintage dealer in South Korea has been refreshed, crisp, softly washed and stain-free, a 70s candy stripe poplin shirt has been revived in all its vibrant glory, and a heavily worn 80s brown varsity jacket has been reworked with a rib collar and collegiate ‘G’ embroidered patch. There are also twill shirts, 5-panel caps, silk ties and a relaxed Ivy Harrington with a leather-trimmed collar inspired by one from the late-90s. Everything is underscored by a commitment to craft and heritage as Bastin continues to tell stories from the brand’s storied history on a contemporary beat.

Alex James Taylor: Hey Christopher, can you take us through the idea behind using the archive to celebrate the brand’s year anniversary?
Christopher Bastin: I’ve been with Gant for such a long time now. I was here when we turned 60, I was here when we turned 70. For us, it becomes more of an opportunity to talk about our history and our place within the world of American sportswear. Since what we do is product, when we turned 70 we were very specific and created seven icons from each decade, this time… I’ve been building the archive for almost twenty years now, and I’ve always had favourites in there, and everybody’s always like, “Oh my God, I love this, we should make this again.” Then when the opportunity came, we quickly decided to do a tribute to our history as a brand and not just talk about the shirts, but the other things we’ve been doing. Also, for it to be relevant now, rather than just looking at the 50s and 60s and the very early years – there’s so much history there – but we also did so much good stuff during the 80s and 90s, and all of a sudden that silhouette is what everybody wants. Like, all the kids are running to vintage shops buying heavy ruggers from the 80s. The silhouette is perfect as it is. So it became a really fun project to curate our favourites – a best of.

AJT: You mentioned seeing kids buying Gant now, I’m interested, how have you seen them style the pieces and how this has influenced you? It must be cool seeing different generations wearing the clothes their way.
CB: If we’re talking about kids buying vintage, vintage shops are really good at picking up stuff very early on. So it’s almost like you can go in there and trend forecast, because the kids decide what the shops are selling, and all of a sudden, two, three years ago, I went in and they had all these rugby’s hanging up. And there were lots of Gant shirts – which I started buying for the archives. [laughs]. Then they wear it in a way which is completely different from how I wore it growing up. It’s more about taking that part of Americana, American sportswear, preppy, or whatever you want to call it and doing it in a very different way, like how they pair things. Also, we’re seeing trends like ‘Old Money’ on TikTok, for instance. It’s all these little codes from preppy and from American sportswear that get interpreted in a way I wouldn’t have thought about, which makes it very fun for me as well. It’s about pushing boundaries, especially when it comes to how we put outfits and lookbooks together.

AJT: American sportswear seems to be timeless, it always comes back in different ways. And now there’s the influx in American workwear and Western also.
CB: There’s this big workwear thing going on right now, which is really fun to work with because it gives things a very different dimension. And everything happens for a reason, so you realise that the entire world has been watching Yellowstone…

AJT: We all started planning our ranches in Montana. [both laugh]
CB: Yeah. I’m like, “Maybe I should learn how to ride…” There’s something innately masculine about that whole look and then when it gets turned into womenswear, it becomes something entirely new and very cool. I have a lot of female friends DMing me about the women’s workwear jackets we’ve made.

AJT: Womenswear is a key drive for you?
CB: Absolutely. From the start, we were more in the academic world and traditional Ivy League style, which has always been very menswear-driven, and we were a menswear brand for the first, like, 60 years or so. But I’m in love with this menswear look on women. I think it’s a very beautiful thing. From these great 80s movies like Working Girl and Farrah Fawcett, it’s very beautiful.

AJT: I’m interested in your personal relationship with American sportswear – what sort of things would you wear in your youth?
CB: The thing is, I was never a fashion guy – I’m still not, but I love style. Also, I was never very adventurous when I was a kid. But I do remember… my grandfather was a painter, and his wife was a trained photographer, so they were very artistic, and then my grandmother on my mother’s side worked for Christian Dior all her life, she was the account manager for Dior in Sweden at the department store. Then my mom, where we lived they couldn’t care less about aesthetics. But I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, so I was surrounded by beautiful things, furniture, art, photography, paintings. My grandmother was very chic, she was always in gold lamé little dresses and had her hair done five times a week. But it wasn’t so much about clothing, it was much more about product, and fashion was never a part of my life growing up. I grew up on this small island outside of Stockholm, which is a quite affluent suburb. The first time I started thinking about coats and what people were wearing, and how that set people apart was when I was in fifth or sixth grade and the kids from affluent families wouldn’t touch sports gear, but the kids from average household income were all into Sergio Tacchini, which was massive at the time. I didn’t really care because all I wanted to do was play the drums and be a rock star. And then when bands like Depeche Mode became big, it was like this big wave of synth that came across, and then it was like the punk scene.

AJT: You weren’t all safety pins and chains…
CB: No, I never went into that. In sixth grade you could choose between workshop and textile shop and I remember stitching up this pair of pants, and at that time Human League were massive, Depeche Mode, it was all British synth, and it was all black and pastels. So I stitched up a pair of pants that were black in the front, and then checkered black and mint green on the back. I thought they were fantastic but I got so bullied for wearing them. That was my only fashion adventure when I was a kid, I went back to the 501s, button-down shirt. And here I am 40 years later, still wearing the same things. I think that’s the beauty of American sportswear, it’s very timeless and it’s very today. I always say that we’re not a fashion brand, we’re more of a style brand. You have to have your feet on the ground and stay current. So if it’s like a little bit more workwear influenced, we can work with that, it’s more challenging if all of a sudden disco becomes a massive hit, until you go into the archives and start looking at the 70s stuff, monkey-printed Gant shirts from 1975, huge collars, so then you’ve got to borrow from different angles.

AJT: I’m really interested in how you source pieces for the archive? Do you spend days on eBay?
CB: I used to – I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time and money on eBay. When I joined Gant, there was nothing from our early years. I was like, “Where’s the good stuff?” So I ran to my CEO like, “We need an archive.” Basically, he gave me a blank check to build the archives. So I started buying and meeting with a lot of people in New York, LA, Paris and London, and I quickly built a network of people who are helping me still today. I got a text from a guy in the US two days ago with 25 amazing vintage Gant shirts.

AJT: That must be a really fun part of the job.
CB: It is, but also the more I learn about our history and the history of American sportswear, how things are connected and how it’s influenced a lot of other things within style and fashion, the more obsessive I get about finding specific things. The challenge now is that it’s becoming really expensive to buy good vintage. I used to pay maybe five or ten bucks, and today I pay no less than 60 or 70.

AJT: I love seeing pieces that have been worn, distressed, ripped. I noticed one of your archive shirts has ‘MG’ initials written on the label – those details are special, they tell a story.
CB: To me, true prep is also about caring for your clothes, repairing them, flipping the collar and stitching it back on so it’s not frayed anymore, stuff like that. If I see someone has scribbled their name on a label, like ‘Tom Jefferson ’62’, I then have to find them. All those little stories make my job very fun because I get to tell them through clothes that I think are really beautiful.

AJT: Lastly, you’re producing shirts in the US again for the first time since 1979 – I know you’re very proud of this achievement.
CB: That’s something that I made my mission. When I came back, I was like, “OK, let’s fucking do this.” But it turned out to be much more difficult than I thought, because there are very few really good shirt manufacturers left. Then I found one that kind of filed for chapter 11, but then I heard rumours on some nerd blog about them being back in operation. So I did it like the old way and called them. Like, “Hi, my name is Christopher and I work for a company called Gant. I don’t know if you know the company?” And the guy goes, “Gant, yeah, I know Gant, we stitched Brook Brothers between 1954 and two years ago. We’ve been making button-downs for decades.” So now we make them in North Carolina with Garland Manufacturing. When I got the first prototype, it was the first US-made Gant shirt since 1979. I held it up like a trophy and ran around the design department. I literally had tears in my eyes. “Look at this beautiful thing!”

Shop the Gant 75th-anniversary collection here.