The Harrington: 100 Years of History

The Men's Jacket That Refused to Go Away

The Harrington jacket has been around for the better part of a century and it has never once felt like it was trying to keep up. It doesn't follow trends because it never needed to. It arrived fully formed, practically perfect, and every generation since has simply adopted it as their own.

That's not luck. That's design.

The story starts in the 1930s with a lightweight blouson jacket - practical, cut for movement, built for the outdoors. Functional by necessity. What nobody anticipated was that a men's jacket designed for the fairway would end up on the backs of everyone from Hollywood icons to British subcultures that had no interest in golf whatsoever.

By the 1950s it had crossed the Atlantic on the shoulders of American servicemen and found its way onto Ivy League campuses and California boardwalks. Steve McQueen wore one. James Dean wore one. Elvis wore one. Not because anyone told them to - because it was simply the right jacket for a man who knew what he was doing when he left the house.

The Harrington Jacket and British Subculture

What happened to the Harrington jacket on the streets of the UK is one of the more remarkable stories in the history of men's fashion.

The Mods adopted it in the early 1960s - clean, sharp, perfect over a slim suit or a polo shirt. Then the skinheads took it. Then the punks. Then the casuals on the terraces in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Each subculture made it their own without changing it. That's the thing about the Harrington - it absorbs identity rather than imposing it. It doesn't tell you who to be. It goes along with whoever you already are

The Ska revival brought it back. Britpop brought it back again. Every decade produces a moment where someone looks at the Harrington jacket and thinks - yes, that's still it. Because it always is.

This isn't a men's jacket that comes back into fashion. It never left.

Why LUKE 1977 Made a Harrington Jacket

In 2001 Luke Roper, Simon Poole, and Deborah Poole started a brand with a very specific point of view about men's clothing. The idea was simple and remains simple twenty-five years later - clothes should have personality, craft should be visible, and the British man deserves better than the high street has historically offered him.

For twenty-five years that point of view has produced some of the most distinctive menswear in the UK. Bold checks. Considered details. A refusal to be boring.

So when the question of a men's Harrington jacket came up it wasn't a trend decision. It wasn't a response to what anyone else was doing. It was the inevitable result of a brand with twenty-five years of instinct meeting the jacket that has always rewarded exactly that kind of instinct.

Why LUKE 1977 Made a Harrington Jacket

The customers who buy the Parry won't be buying it because they read that men's Harrington jackets are having a moment. Harrington jackets are always having a moment - that's the point.

This is a men's jacket that has been on the terraces and in the clubs and on the high streets and on the back roads of the UK for a hundred years. It has been worn by people who had something to say and people who let their clothes say it for them.

The Parry is here. It isn't going anywhere.