Ben Sherman

Ben Sherman is a British based clothing company, designing shirts, suits, shoes, accessories and other items that are, in common with many British brands, now made overseas, largely in the Far East. Their designs sometimes feature the Royal Air Forceroundel which is often called the mod target. Some of the recent Ben Sherman shirts have unusual and complex designs, and have a Carnaby-style fit. The company makes clothing predominantly for men. It has been owned by Oxford Industries since 2004.

History

The company was founded in 1963 by Arthur Benjamin Sugarman (1925-1987), who was born in Brighton. He emigrated to the United States in 1946, via Canada, and changed his nationality to American. He married the daughter of a Californian clothes producer and later returned to Brighton, where he bought a shirt factory. Sugarman had realised that early 1960s London-based modern jazz fans were eagerly buying the Oxford-cloth American button-down shirt brands such as Brooks Brothers, Arrow and Hathaway, as sported by visiting American jazz artists like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson. At the time, these were only available from official importers who had in effect, cornered this growing market.

Sugarman decided to produce a version of these shirts, along with a collection of the colourful resort-wear vacation clothes that were growing in popularity, in both the post-war US, and Mediterranean Europe. Mods responded immediately, especially as Sugarman was using higher-quality materials and stitching detail than the imported shirts. The Ben Sherman Originals label was created, and by 1965, the company had opened a small office on the upper floors of a shabby office-block in a London backstreet. This acted as the showroom for their shirt and beachwear collections. By the late 1960s, the shirt was adopted by the skinhead subculture, and starting in the late 1970s, the shirt became popular with mod revivalists.

On 11 October 2010, Ben Sherman opened a store at №39 Savile Row.