Pendleton Topster Shirt Jacket
- Eric Langlois
- Mar 28
- 3 min read
I’m on record as a proponent of casual tailoring and unusual jackets. A good portion of my articles for this site have extolled the virtues of corduroy work jackets, safari shirts, and suits and sport coats in relaxed materials. It should come as no surprise then that when I found a vintage sport coat with some unusual details, I ended up buying several more of them and going on a deep dive to research their origin.
Our story starts – perhaps surprisingly – with women’s clothing, more or less. During the Second World War, there was a flood of women into the workforce. Plenty of women spent the war in more familiarly female settings, like food processing or clothing production, but famously many women also found jobs in heavy industry, assembling aircraft, tanks, and ships at a rate never matched before or since. Over six million women took on war-related jobs in civilian industry, represented in culture by the popular song Rosie the Riveter and the J. Howard Miller and Norman Rockwell illustrations of female war workers which have been identified by that name.
With so many women in the industrial workforce, there was a sudden lack of women’s clothing that was suitable for industrial labor. In a time when new clothing was rationed to preserve resources for the war effort, many women bought or re-used available men’s clothing, wearing and altering blue jeans and work shirts to suit their purposes. Wool work shirts of the kind made by Portland-based company Pendleton were quite popular, even if the Pendleton company had changed most of its production to blankets and winter uniforms for the duration of the conflict.
Following the war, American women were largely discharged from their wartime jobs to make room for returning servicemen in more traditionally male jobs. While women wouldn’t reenter the workforce in the same proportions until the 1970s, the cultural image of working women caused a fashion for more masculine, casual women’s clothing in the postwar years. At Pendleton, designer Berte Wiechmann developed a piece for this market which combined Pendleton’s famous wool plaid materials with the details of men’s and women’s chore jackets of the period. Named after the year it was released, this jacket was called the ‘49er.
The ‘49er was a smash hit. Teenage and college age women incorporated it into their menswear-inspired wardrobes, pairing it with grey trousers and white shirts. Ad campaigns featuring the illustrations of Ted Rand pushed the line’s focus towards adult women, who found the ‘49er ideal for daily wear.
This is when we finally come to menswear. The ‘49er was followed the next year by a men’s version with three-button closure and a breast pocket added. This jacket was originally going to be named the Playmate, which could have led to some confusion after the publication of Playboy magazine three years later. Luckily, Esquire magazine was championing a trim fit style for men, moving away from the heavily structured shoulders and drapey silhouette of the late 1940s. The unstructured jacket was perfect for this look and Pendleton capitalized on Esquires “Mr. T” campaign (The T is for trim) by renaming their upcoming men’s jacket the Topster.
The Topster was joined on the market in 1961 by its slightly dressier cousin the Topsman, which replaced the shirt cuffs with a more traditional sport coat design. As with the ‘49er, both of the men’s jackets were extremely popular among college students, who were often required to wear a jacket and tie to class or chapel. The unstructured Pendleton jackets allowed them to obey the letter of the law, while still enjoying the comfort of a relatively weightless garment. Over time, the wider, leisure-suit style open collar of the Topster shrank to a more traditional sport coat lapel, but the barely-there structure and shirt cuffs remained.
While the ‘49er is still available for women, Pendleton last carried the Topster and Topsman in 2004, when they released a limited-edition retrospective series of shirts. I haven’t been able to determine when exactly the Topster was phased out of Pendleton’s main line production, but luckily there are many examples still on the market. If you don’t spot any at your local vintage sellers, searching for “Pendleton Blazer”on the usual clothing resale websites should turn up more Topsters than you can shake a stick at. The design has also inspired modern versions, like the four button Loafer Jacket from Quaker Marine, or the Brycelands’ Easy Jacket, which elevates the style with a little more structure in the chest and shoulders for a more tailored look.
Eric Langlois is a writer, menswear professional, and history enthusiast based on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
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