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Elliot Gant
Co-founder of the clothing label Gant who popularised the button-down shirt and catered for Ivy League tastes
He may not have invented them but Elliot Gant will always be associated with button-down collars — must-have fashion items in the 1960s that still inhabit many men’s wardrobes.
With his brother, Marty, he established the clothing brand Gant in 1949 to cater to the “preppy” tastes of Ivy League students and Madison Avenue men. They manufactured their shirts close to Yale University in New Haven, which was once described in the 1950s by Life magazine as “the home of the American East Coast University Look” — casual loafers, grey flannel slacks and V-neck sweaters rather than double-breasted suits.
With a distinct sense of style , Elliot was in charge of marketing. “Let’s not try to be everything to everybody,” he would tell his brother. His first advertisement in The New Yorker implied that Gant was an Ivy League shirtmaker. “How does a man get preppy?” he asked. Their slogans included, “The complete gentleman wears Gant.”
Sporting a moustache that he nicknamed “the bush”, slicked back hair and a range of smart tweed jackets, Elliot Gant was often described as a “man about town”. It was said that every New Haven girl of a certain era had dated one of the brothers.
Elliot Bernard Gant was born in Brooklyn in 1926. The family name was Gantmacher, which was old German for glovemaker but later shortened to Gant. His father, Bernard, had come from Ukraine to New York, where he sewed shirt collars while studying at Columbia University to be a pharmacist. Working in a factory, he met his wife, Rebecca Rose, who made buttonholes.
Bernard and a partner, Morris Shapiro, founded the Par-Ex Shirt Company, which supplied stores with shirts to sell under their own name. The button-down style had long been used in Britain by polo players to stop their shirt collars flapping and had been adopted by Brooks Brothers in 1896. In 1927 the family company moved to New Haven, Connecticut, a flourishing shirt-making centre because of its large Italian immigrant community.
As a boy, Elliot would help his father by sweeping the floor and fusing collars. He used to see Yale students increasingly wearing button-downs in the 1930s and knew how many Brooks Brothers were selling. He was called up by the navy at the start of the Second World War and served until 1947.
Afterwards, he joined the new shirt venture, and married his childhood sweetheart, Ina Romanoff, whom he had met at high school when they were both 13. They had a son, Bernard, and a daughter, Carol Leventhal, who is a management consultant. Another son, Steven, died in 2013 aged 64.
With his brother, Eliot persuaded their father to sell shirts under the Gant label, branding those made for retailers with a “G” on the tail. They introduced a box pleat in the back of the collar to keep the tie in place, and a patented button tab that connected beneath the necktie to push the knot up and out — the tab later won an award from Esquire magazine.
They also added a loop on the back of the shirt so that it could hang on a hook. In those more innocent times, schoolboys or college students used to remove the loop to signal that they were “going steady”. Gant also expanded into bold colours and stripes — and banned the sales staff from wearing white shirts to work.
The company was sold to Consolidated Foods in 1968, but Elliot stayed on for ten years. After several changes of ownership, it is now owned by Maus Frères, a private Swiss group.
Elliot Gant was involved with many philanthropic organisations in New Haven, raising money to provide housing and food for the poor. He was also an avid Zionist, supporting Israeli efforts to build a homeland, and frequently met Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974. He will be most remembered though for the button-down shirt.
Elliot Gant, co-founder of the Gant fashion label, was born on March 21, 1926. He died on March 12, 2016, aged 89