Often imitated, never duplicated, this is the jacket that kicked off a camouflage resurgence among menswear designers in the 2010s.
The story:
The idea to make the M81 Woodland Camouflage Chore Coat with Pointer Brand came to us while visiting their factory in Bristol, Tennessee.
We traveled there to learn how to make some of their signature products, and while walking around the factory, we noticed the women had fashioned work aprons, tool bags, and various carriers out of the woodland fabric.
When asked if they had any more, someone at Pointer pointed to the heavens.
“We probably got some up in the attic.”
They definitely did. When they pulled the massive dusty old roll of the deadstock 12 ounce duck canvas from the rafters of their factory, the label was marked "December, 1980," the month and year in which I was born, making this one of the earliest prints of the now ubiquitous M81 camouflage, a larger print repeat of the U.S. Army's earlier M65 camouflage.
We asked them to use the remaining yards to make chore coats exclusively for us in their famed chore coat pattern, something which they'd never done before.
The jackets proved so popular we printed new fabric, made several versions, were copied by several, large multinational corporations and soon after by the factory itself.
In the immortal words of Oscar Wilde, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness."
