Americana Didn’t Die. It Evolved.
“Can we talk about Nike being a heritage brand?” Brian Davis rhetorically asks. “It’s more interesting to me than dressing head to toe in that urban lumberjack shit.” A vintage buyer and collector, Davis operates Wooden Sleepers, the most recent incarnation of which was a small shop in the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook. Wooden Sleepers offered a tightly curated selection of collegiate sweatshirts, Levi’s 501 jeans, and other ne plus ultras of Americana, the menswear style that over a decade ago made the selvedge stripe an aspirational totem before it was overtaken by streetwear. Marked by a surge of interest in so-called “heritage” brands, Americana put formerly dusty or overlooked manufacturing stalwarts back on the map for a younger generation and helped lay the foundation for our style, and shopping, savvy present. But what happened when menswear moved on and the factory visits stopped? Read more at Esquire.
