The Modernist Style

Heritage

Banana Republic Looks to its Archive for Inspo

There was a time, before the mall stores, before the fleece vests, and before the brand became synonymous with business-casual invisibility when Banana Republic was the strangest, most theatrical retailer in America. Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by journalist Mel Ziegler and illustrator Patricia Ziegler, the original stores sold genuine military surplus and safari gear out of catalogs illustrated like colonial travel posters, with copy that read like dispatches from a Graham Greene novel. It was a costume shop for people who wanted to look like they’d just come back from somewhere exotic and perhaps a little dangerous. Gap bought the company in 1983 and sanded off every eccentric edge until “Banana Republic” meant khakis, not khaki-clad correspondents. Which is what makes the brand’s return to its own history this past year so unusual with two different initiatives that approach nostalgia in opposite ways.