ALL MEN are created equal, wrote Thomas Jefferson, and he was right as far as when we’re born. We are all naked and, but for a detail or two, all look the same. One detail is gender, the other, depending on our environment, is skin color. Trivialities both, so generally speaking: we all look the same, and that’s the main reason for wearing clothes. Because no one feels the same, and no two people have the same character. Clothes, as do haircuts and tattoos, make us look different from the neighbor. This is the Importance of Wearing Clothes, wrote Lawrence Langner in the middle of the previous century.
Well, you say, clothes also help against the cold. That’s right, but so does a blanket, and in the summer that argument hardly applies. Langner had a point, hence his thick book on the history of why people wear clothes. For example, many men don’t wear bright red pants. Elton John does. It’s a matter of character, of how you do, and don’t, choose to look. Lawrence Langer was a lawyer, specializing in patents. So he wrote about John van Heusen’s patent.
VAN HEUSEN, we are talking about families such as Klink, Van Wijk, Hermans, Van Noordstrand. About Theo, Hetty, Kees, Harmen, Kaatje. They all married the Van Heusens, and as the name indicates, they originally came from Husum. That is now undisputed German territory, but it used to be East Friesland and the Dutch all but owned the place. In America, the Van Heusens were considered Dutch immigrants, and John was an oddball.
You now see his name in every US clothing store and in department stores that sell men’s wear. Van Heusen shirts are a household name, and that is because in 1918 a judge granted John a patent on the shirt he invented. Van Heusen’s shirt came with a sewn-on soft collar that looked like a hard collar. Up until then, men’s collars were sold separately from the shirt, and ironed separately. Judge Learned Hand (that name alone..) himself hated the way people for generations had been constrained by stiff dress rules, and he thought this was a really welcome invention.
VAN HEUSEN’s shirt was more than just that, originally it also had underpants attached that you buttoned halfway down your thighs. John found a Mr. Phillips who was willing to put his shirt into production. Apparently America’s men were so fed up with their separate, hard collars and starched cuffs that the Van Heusen shirt had to go into mass production immediately. Phillips’ store on Fifth Avenue was crowded by customers, a shop window broke, and the riot squad was called in.
Now we don’t know any better, every shirt comes with a collar, but the name Van Heusen became famous for it. John himself sold his patent to Phillips and returned to the bottle. Isaac Phillip considered giving the shirt his own name, but thought better of it: America knew, and today still knows, the shirt as Van Heusen. It is the best sold shirt in the United States.
* John van Heusen’s patented collar. Made of soft material, knotted in the middle, attached to the shirt while still looking like any other loose collar. Men went wild as soon as it hit the market.
