How the Gap Logo Hoodie Became an American Icon

When does a style become iconic? Gap told us it'd be celebrating its first ever Hoodie Day, on October 15, for the style's 30th birthday. I wasn't sure the style was ready for a branded holiday.

Then, the question went around the office. Do you consider the Gap hoodie iconic? Point one for Gap: no one needed to be told what was meant by "Gap hoodie." If I said J.Crew rollneck, half my time would be spent explaining the garment and its relevance. That's a data point. The second and more revelatory point in favor of Gap was a point put forward by a coworker: It's already iconic, and you just can't see it because it's too familiar.

That made me think back to the French exchange students that came to my town as a kid. They had two things they wanted to buy from America, energy drinks (governed more strictly than alcohol over there) and Gap hoodies. To them a Gap hoodie and hanging out at the mall—like they do in the movies—were the pinnacle of the American exchange experience. Maybe I was just missing something.

This was corroborated on a trip to the Gap archive. Under the brand's Tribeca headquarters lives a sprawling collection of old clothes. The archive is a somewhat recent venture for the brand. It started with an intra-company competition to bring in the best vintage Gap pieces that employees owned or could find on eBay. Since then, the collection has amassed thousands of pieces of Gap and Banana Republic, plus other vintage fashion (for reference) that serves the New York-based design team. For a vintage fashion nerd, it's as good as it gets. No wonder Sean Wotherspoon has had a field day as the brand's Global Vintage Curator. I killed a quick 20 minutes digging around, but it could've easily become a few hours.

When Ben Tsujiura, Gap's Head of Merchandising for Men’s & Collabs, got down to the archive, I asked him about the state of the Gap hoodie. The answer was that it's never been bigger, but that means there are a lot of different demographics to please. It's a war on many fronts.

First off, he said, there's pleasing the menswear nerds. Esquire's staffmembers (and a lot of guys on the internet) love the extra heavyweight hoodies, so it got the Gap logo treatment. Women on TikTok love the thinner, cropped VintageSoft version, so it's become a regular in the lineup. High school-aged boys like my nephew love the regular VintageSoft hoodie, which feels like the one I have in the bottom of my closet. Then, there's a stream of collaborations—like the Malbon one I loved this past summer—keeping the brand relevant in the streetwear and fashion worlds.

When we got to talking about collaborations, I asked if any of Gap's recent collaborators dived into the archive like I did. Tsujiura immediately mentioned the guys from British skate stalwart Palace. For them, Gap was intimately tied to San Francisco, the mecca of skate that they'd fly to as often as they could afford. The brand became something they coveted, collected, and stuffed in their suitcases for flights back to London.

I got a bit excited and dropped my thesis about non-Americans having a better understanding of Gap's icon status. Tsujiura confirmed that, saying the arch logo hoodies do huge numbers with partners abroad. Europe loves them. Asia as a whole loves them, but Japan's menswear-driven market was a standout; it's somewhere that the brand can constantly release new (often more out-on-a-limb) colorways and special editions.

Funny enough, those two biggest mentions—hype-fluent Palace and Japan's fervent menswear market—are big drivers in what Tsujiura and team are looking at for the future of the Gap hoodie. From a collaboration with Palace, the brand got insight into how masters of the craft build buzz. From drops to imagery to copywriting, the Gap team gleaned a lot from the (formerly) bootstraps skate brand. And from Japan, Gap has a model for creating a real fashion culture around a product.

Walking out of the archive, I had a renewed interest. I saw three arch logos on the way back to work, and I haven't gone 48 hours since without seeing one. The hoodie is on the same track as Levi's jeans and a Brooks Brothers suit. I don't think that's up for debate anymore. What I'm more interested in is what comes after 30. Given the way things are going, I'm ready to buy back in. The Gap hoodie is going to take over the world.