Every June, the Hy-Line ferry from Hyannis unloads at Nantucket Straight Pier carrying coolers, bags of clothes and a statistically improbable number of men dressed as uncooked salmon. Their pants run a color spectrum somewhere between faded watermelon and a spectacularly healing sunburn. Insiders call them Nantucket Reds, and they’ll insist that the whole point is that they look better the more they fall apart. It’s an unusual sales proposition. Most clothing promises to last over time. Nantucket Reds are the only American pants whose warranty goes in reverse: guaranteed to fade.
Genius belongs to him Philip C. Murraysecond generation owner of Murray’s Toggery Shopthe Main Street institution was purchased by his father in 1945. The building’s retail origins predate the family—RH Macy ran a dry goods store on the site in 1843 before leaving the camp to found a certain Herald Square store—but it was Philip C. who, in the early 1960s, introduced a red cotton pant inspired by his canvas. Brittany. Breton fishermen had tanned their sails with tree bark to fight mold; sun and salt bleached the result from brick to brown. Murray filled in the rot and sold it as a feature.
Pants might have remained an island eccentricity if John F. Kennedy wasn’t filmed playing golf in revealing red pants in the summer of 1963, an endorsement no media could buy. By 1980, demand forced a trademark and Lisa Birnbach’s Official Prep Manual completed the canonization the same year, declaring Reds de rigueur at country and yacht club affairs and anointing Murray’s the island’s official clothing. The pants had completed one of fashion’s strangest arcs: Breton workwear, scoured through a New England thrift store, reborn as the loudest signal of leisure class. Menswear taxonomists filed Reds in the category known as “devil’s pants,” garments so cheerfully conspicuous that they suggest the wearer has either incredible confidence or enough family money to confuse one with the other.
Here’s what no one says at the yacht club: Reds are a laundry meritocracy. A crisp, tomato-bright pair that’s stiff as a veil marks you out as new money (or, worse, a renter). The pale pair of threads—pink as the inside of a seashell, soft as a beach towel—testifies to decades of summer, which means decades of accessorizing. You cannot buy fades. You can just buy the entrance fee and wait. In an era when half the fashion ships were pre-failed, Murray’s still makes you win the outfit yourself, one regatta at a time.
Its current popularity is its plot twist. Murray’s has become an unlikely darling of the new preppy revival, partnering with Tuckernuck for women’s knitwear and, more recently, Palm Beach slipper house Stubbs & Wootton, which pressed the sailcloth into smoking slippers priced at nearly a grand—something the early Inland fisherman would have marveled at. Rowing Blazers has also worked with Murray’s and its founder, Jack Carlsonhas argued that the store, a department store that invented its own fabric and color, belongs in the American menswear canon alongside Brooks Brothers and J. Press. None of them solved anything. In 2021, THE Wall Street Journal weighed in on whether pants are eternal or hopelessly right and, wisely, refused to issue a verdict. That’s the secret to a six-decade run: The Reds divide people. Some see WASP cosplay, others tradition, and most men, if they’re honest, just want to look that good in pink.
The family has the longest view. In 2020, the fourth generation took over the store: Lauren Murrayher brother Greg and their cousins Andrew and Matt Bridierthe latter two also run Castaway Clothing, the family’s previous spinoff. Lauren, the only one of the owners still living on the island and a granddaughter of Philip C. Murraythe man who gave color to the country, puts the whole enterprise in seven words. “Colour fades, but tradition never fades,” she tells the Observer. The store has added cotton jackets with a little stretch to the women’s line and slim fit suits for men, but she calls them “additions, not replacements,” a way to “maintain the integrity of our brand and its color history” without touching the canvas her grandfather chose.
So the reds endure, faded but never gone, like the riches that wear them. Lauren puts it more gently: the slow fade, she says, is “a keeper of all the memories made when one wore red.” Buy a pair this summer and you’ll look like a tourist until about 2031. The pants are durable. The question is if you are.
