/\  nice one AC!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/19/business/elliot-gant-marketer-of-the-button-down-shirt-dies-at-89.html

Elliot Gant, Marketer of the Button-Down Shirt, Dies at 89

By SAM ROBERTS
MARCH 18, 2016
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Linguists can’t precisely pinpoint when “button-down” was redefined from cutting-edge collegiate to uniformly conformist, but the marketing expertise of the Gantmacher brothers of Brooklyn probably had something to do with it.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Martin and Elliot Gantmacher popularized the button-down shirt as a de rigueur garment for Ivy League and Madison Avenue men. They were so taken with their success, in fact, that not long after their company was rebranded Gant in 1949, the brothers adopted the label as their surname.

Elliot Gant, the last of the founders, died on March 12 in Boston. He was 89.

The Gants did not invent the button-down; the venerable Brooks Brothers haberdashery had borrowed the style from British polo players decades earlier, and it had been romanticized here and there in popular culture.

In John O’Hara’s 1935 novel “Appointment in Samarra,” Caroline English dreamily recalls Ross Campbell as “one of those Harvard men, tall and slim and swell, who seem to have put on a clean shirt just a minute ago — soft white shirt with button-down collar — and not to have had a new suit in at least two years. He was not rich; he ‘had money.’ ”

But the Gants transformed the button-down into a mass-market must. Within decades the shirt had become so universal, as much a uniform of the day as the proverbial gray flannel suit, that the comedian Bob Newhart was riffing on Madison Avenue’s “button-down mind.”

Still, though the button-down became a symbol of uniformity, it was not immune to innovation.

The Gant brothers perfected the collar’s shape, known as the perfect roll, formed by the front edges of the buttoned collar. They introduced the box pleat in the back to allow more freedom of movement, the extra button in the back of the collar to keep the tie in place, and the patented button tab that connects beneath the necktie to push the knot up and out. (The tab won an award from Esquire magazine.)

They also introduced the hanger loop on the back of the shirt so that it could be hung on a hook — in a locker, say — without wrinkling. (The loop became for a time a collegiate and high school totem: A young man would remove it from his shirt to signal that he was going steady.)

Elliot Gant’s marketing and fashion philosophies were consistent: Leave some room to maneuver within the boundaries of good taste. “Let’s not try to be everything to everybody,” he said. “We’re individuals. When you think for yourself you can be tastefully different.”

Elliot Bernard Gantmacher was born in Brooklyn on March 21, 1926. His father, Bernard, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, worked in the garment industry on the Lower East Side while studying at night at Columbia University to be a pharmacist. He specialized in sewing shirt collars. Elliot’s mother, the former Rebecca Rose, focused on buttons and buttonholes.

Bernard and a partner, Morris Shapiro, founded the Par-Ex Shirt Company, which manufactured shirts for Brooks Brothers and other stores. In 1927 the company moved to New Haven, which was home to several shirt manufacturers. The family followed.

Elliot was introduced to the business by sweeping floors and fusing collars at the factory. He enlisted in the Navy in World War II and, like Martin, his older brother, graduated from the University of Connecticut. He majored in marketing, Martin in business administration.

In 1949, they persuaded their father to begin selling shirts under the Gant label and branding shirts made for other retailers with a “G” on the tail. (Bernard Gant died in 1955.)

Advertising first in The New Yorker to appeal to sophisticates, they positioned the company as shirt maker to the Ivy League. It helped that their factory was close to the Yale campus; at one point the company was called Gant of New Haven.

The brothers also introduced bold colors as well as Madras, candy stripe and tartan patterns. They forbade the members of the sales staff to wear white shirts to work.

They sold Gant to Consolidated Foods in 1968 but stayed on as the company expanded into women’s wear and sportswear. Elliot left about a decade later. Martin died in 1998 at 77. Today Gant is owned by Maus Freres, a Swiss family enterprise.

Elliott Gant, whose death was announced by Patrik Nilsson, chief executive of Gant, is survived by his wife, the former Ina Romanoff; a daughter, Carol Leventhal; a son, Bernard Gant; three grandsons; and one great-granddaughter.