The caption proclaims “Season’s Newest Look”. The jacket’s shape says otherwise. Boxy through the body, pockets wide enough for a fist, in heavy cotton that only softens with wear. It's the chore coat, and the fashion trade has made it the lead outerwear of the northern winter. It was worn by French labourers in the nineteenth century, men who needed their tools close and a jacket they could weather abuse.
The latest fashion trend goes beyond old; it's proven. A garment that spent decades earning its place, a long way from magazine pages, runways and “who are you wearing?” vox pop interviews. And that’s nothing new.
FASHION FOUNDATION
In August 1946, Sydney's Sun newspaper carried a Gowings advertisement that asked “WHERE'S BILL?” and answered “GONE TO GOWINGS to buy a shirt”. By then the store on the corner of George and Market Streets had been dressing the city’s men for nearly eighty years in hats, shirts and other gear.
Gowings didn't begin by dressing working men. The Mercery and Glove Depot that John and Preston Gowing opened at 318 George Street in 1868 sold gloves and silk umbrellas. Small refinements of a colonial city with ambitions. Gloves gradually gave way to menswear, and they advertised as "Austral clothiers, mercers, hatters" and ran a line that supported local manufacturers over imports: “Australian wool for Australian people”.
Fashion comes from the Latin "to make", and for its first century or more in English it described how a thing was manufactured. Shape and construction, not whether anyone admired it.
Bill wasn't buying a look. He was purchasing workwear. Go back far enough with almost any wardrobe staple and you'll find a job description. The singlet was underwear, a soft, washable layer beneath a man's shirt, until rowers, wrestlers and wood-choppers started wearing it in the open late in the nineteenth century. By the 1940s it was the working man's uniform, and Bonds' cartoon strongman, Chesty was flexing in the same Sydney publication looking for Bill.
The broad-brimmed felt hat was shade you could carry. Near Hobart in 1892, a hatmaker named Benjamin Dunkerley built a machine for dressing rabbit fur, a world first by his company's account, and the business he founded later registered a name for its hats: Akubra.
The oilskin is the most literal of the lot. Edward Le Roy cut coats for sailors from the lightweight sails of their own ships and proofed them with linseed oil. When sailors came ashore to work, the coats came too, and the stockmen took them up. The name on them now is Driza-Bone.
THE LINDY EFFECT
In 1964 the writer Albert Goldman reported a theory doing the rounds at Lindy's, a New York delicatessen where comedians gathered to "conduct post-mortems" on the business. The more a comic appeared on television, the theory went, the sooner he'd be finished. Over decades the idea inverted. Now the Lindy Effect suggests the longer something has lasted, the longer it's likely to last. Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it plainly in his book Antifragile: a book in print for forty years can be expected to stay in print for another forty.
A singlet goes at the seams in a few summers. A century since it showed up and it’s clear the idea holds long after the physical expression of it wears out.
Menswear writers like to tell of four cloths woven in Scottish mills early in the nineteenth century and named after universities: Yale, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford. Only one is still woven, and there's a fair chance it's hanging in your wardrobe. The brands that last seem to share a trait: the thing adopts their name. Nobody walks into a shop and asks for a rabbit-fur felt hat with a pinched crown. They ask for an Akubra. The technical term for this is proprietary eponym.
TRENDY AND TARDY
Fashion arrives late, and usually after the work has been done. In 1896 John Brooks, grandson of the founder of Brooks Brothers, noticed that Polo players had pinned their collars down to stop them flapping during a match. The family firm put buttons on the idea in 1900. Fifty years later the button-down Oxford was the campus uniform of the American Ivy League. Now it's what people wear when they'd rather not think about what to wear.
Blundstone began making boots in Hobart in 1870, "for farmers, for exporters, surveyors", as one historian puts it. They made half a million pairs for soldiers in the Second World War. Then Australian backpackers wore them around the world, and everyone else liked the look. From paddock to pavement.
Konrad Birkenstock began making contoured insoles in 1896, for feet that hurt. In 2023 the sandals had a starring role in Barbie.
The sheepskin boot was a staple of shearers in rural Australia from at least the 1920s. An Australian surfer carried them to California in the seventies. The business was sold to an American company in 1995 for US$14.6 million. Outside Australia and New Zealand, UGG is an American trademark. The boot made it. Its Australian makers' claim to the name did not.
In 2017 a writer at New York magazine's The Cut referred to trail gear on city streets as gorpcore. In 2025 it was the fishermen's turn: cable-knits, yellow bib overalls, beanies, and a Louis Vuitton bag shaped like a lobster.
JUST FOR THE LOOK
The look stays, the reason leaves. A year after the lobster bag, Louis Vuitton went surfing. In June, under a giant wave raised over a bed of sand in Paris, Pharrell Williams showed a monogrammed wetsuit and an orange sleeveless jacket looking very much like a life vest.
Psychologists have tested why the new thing needs to be familiar first. In 2003 Dutch researchers found that novelty and familiarity mattered equally, and worked against each other.
People liked a design to be new, if it stayed recognisable. The industrial designer Raymond Loewy had a phrase for it: most advanced, yet acceptable.
A garment with decades of familiarity behind it clears that bar before any trendsetter pins it to their mood board. Half the job is done. Fashion, wrote Walter Benjamin in 1940, is "a tiger's leap" into the past.
THE REBEL YELL
There's another way to grow old enough to matter. On 5 July 1946, at a Paris swimming pool, Louis Réard showed a two-piece so small that no model would wear it. He hired a dancer from the Casino de Paris instead, and named his suit after Bikini Atoll, where the United States had tested a nuclear bomb four days earlier. The bikini did nothing new or better. It caused an argument.
France banned it in 1949. In 1951 the first Miss World was crowned in one, the Pope condemned it, and beauty pageants banned it. In 1952 a woman in one of Paula Stafford's bikinis was ordered off the sand at Surfers Paradise, so Stafford sent five more women down in them. “I never paid for publicity, the media came to me,” she said later. Into the sixties, Bondi's beach inspector, Aub Laidlaw, was still ordering bikinis off the beach.
Then Ursula Andress walked out of the sea in Dr. No. By 1965 a woman told Time it was “almost square” not to wear one. From scandal to staple in 2 decades. Argument over. Revolution doesn't speed run the process, it just makes more noise. Even then, the bikini wasn't unprecedented. On the floor of a Roman villa in Sicily, in a mosaic laid around 1,700 years ago, young women are shown exercising in two-pieces.
Bill's workshirt is now somebody's ‘fit. Very little on a runway will become a staple by any other path. The riskier route is to start a fight and hold your nerve. Which means the easiest way to be wearing tomorrow's fashion is to buy the thing that works so well today no one would ever entertain the suggestion of replacing it.
Shop the story
Working hard, looking good
None of it was made for a runway. A boot that began with Hobart's farmers, a rabbit-fur felt hat and a plain rib singlet, each doing the job and looking good.
