In the early 1960s, a new shirt style appeared in the pages of fashion magazines like Esquire and Ebony : the shirt-jac. It's a cropped sports shirt with short sleeves. Sometimes it has a buttoned waistband. But it generally features side tabs for adjustment, a patch chest pocket, and a Cooper collar, a one-piece open collar popularised in the 1940s by Gary Cooper, also known as a Lido collar. At first glance, the shirt-jac seems to fit perfectly into the history of leisurewear. Indeed, in the wake of the First World War, the vogue for sports, the rise of leisure activities, and the desire of the younger generation to break with the strict rules of the pre-war dress code had led to a loosening of men's clothes. The Prince of Wales's « dress soft » was at the forefront of this aspiration. But it was really in the 1930s that this trend flourished. A whole new wardrobe emerged, designed for the elegant cosmopolitans of Cafe Society who moved between Palm Springs and Nassau, Palm Beach and the French Riviera during the spring and summer months. Sports shirts, in particular, were adapted for vacationing. They had looser cuts, open collars without a collar stand, and a straight hem, allowing them to be worn untucked. The fabrics used were lighter : linen, seersucker, and madras, and later, more affordable rayon and terry cotton. Finally, bolder colours and patterns emerged : batik, Art Deco, stripes, checks, and tropical patterns.
Looking back at the origins of modern menswear, the light construction of the shirt seems to have laid the foundation for casual style, embodied in particular by two types of garments: the shirt jacket and the blouse jacket.
The shirt jacket initially addressed the need for a comfortable garment, but also, in some cases, one suited to tropical climates. From the 19th century onwards, it evolved in two directions. On the one hand, the shirt jacket is a jacket constructed like a shirt and offers a casual alternative to the more formal sports jacket : the work jackets such as Adolphe Lafont's Coltin, the famous Brooks Brothers sack suit and the loafer jacket in the 1940s and 1950s are variations of this style. On the other hand, and this is what interests us here, the shirt jacket is a shirt that incorporates characteristics of a jacket : we are referring, of course, to the safari jacket and the Cuban guayabera.
The safari jacket, also called a bush jacket, was adopted by the British Army during the Second Boer War at the end of the 19th century. It was traditionally made of khaki cotton twill with an open collar, a belt, epaulettes, and four bellows pockets. It was thanks to figures in Cafe Society that the safari jacket shed its military connotations. In 1933, Ernest Hemingway designed his own version, made by Willis & Geiger Outfitters, for a safari in East Africa, an adventure that inspired his short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", which was published in August 1936 in Esquire. It thus eventually found its way into the vacation wardrobes of the stylish set in the late 1930s, as seen in Laurence Fellows' illustration "A Day at the Angler's Club, Key Largo" in the February 1937 issue of Esquire.
As for the guayabera, whose origins are a source of contention in the Caribbean and Latin America, it dates back at least to the work clothes of Cuban agricultural labourers in the 19th century. It is a long-sleeved shirt made of linen or cotton with four pockets, decorative bands (folded or embroidered), a straight hem and side vents. Interestingly, it is known as a « bush jacket » in Jamaica and a « shirt-jac » in Trinidad. According to Esquire's Encyclopedia of 20th Century Men's Fashions, Wanamaker's, the Philadelphia department store, launched a brand-new « jacket shirt » in 1936, a sports shirt which was a direct copy of the guayabera, made of linen and featuring a convertible collar, that is, a collar that could be worn buttoned or open.
