The Pants That Fade on Purpose: A Brief History of Nantucket Reds

Every June, the Hy-Line ferry from Hyannis unloads onto Nantucket’s Straight Wharf carrying coolers, garment bags and a statistically improbable number of men dressed like undercooked salmon. Their trousers occupy a color spectrum somewhere between faded watermelon and a spectacularly healing sunburn. The initiated call them Nantucket Reds, and they’ll insist the whole point is that they look better the more they fall apart. It’s an unusual sales proposition. Most clothing promises to hold up over time. Nantucket Reds are the only American trousers whose warranty runs in reverse: guaranteed to fade.

The genius belongs to Philip C. Murray, second-generation owner of Murray’s Toggery Shop, the Main Street institution his father bought in 1945. The building’s retail pedigree predates the family—R.H. Macy ran a dry goods store on the site in 1843 before decamping to found a certain Herald Square department store—but it was Philip C. who, in the early 1960s, introduced a cotton canvas pant inspired by the red sails he’d seen off the coast of Brittany. Breton fishermen had tanned their sailcloth with tree bark to fight mildew; sun and salt bleached the result from brick to blush. Murray bottled the decay and sold it as a feature.

The pants might have stayed an island eccentricity if John F. Kennedy hadn’t been filmed golfing in conspicuously red slacks in the summer of 1963, an endorsement no media buy could purchase. By 1980, demand forced a trademark, and Lisa Birnbach’s Official Preppy Handbook finished the canonization that same year, declaring Reds de rigueur at country and yacht club affairs and anointing Murray’s the island’s official outfitter. The trousers had completed one of fashion’s stranger arcs: Breton workwear, laundered through a New England haberdashery, reborn as the leisure class’s loudest soft signal. Menswear taxonomists filed Reds in the category known as “go-to-hell pants,” garments so cheerfully conspicuous they suggest the wearer has either immense confidence or enough family money to mistake one for the other.

Therein lies the bit nobody says at the yacht club: Reds are a meritocracy of laundry. A fresh pair, tomato-bright and stiff as a topsail, marks you as new money (or, worse, a renter). The pale, threadbare pair—pink as the inside of a quahog shell, soft as a beach towel—testifies to decades of summers, which is to say decades of access. You cannot buy the fade. You can only buy the entry fee and wait. In an era when half of fashion ships pre-distressed, Murray’s still makes you earn the wear yourself, one regatta at a time.

The current popularity is its own plot twist. Murray’s has become an unlikely darling of the new prep revival, collaborating with Tuckernuck on women’s knitwear and, most recently, with Palm Beach slipper house Stubbs & Wootton, which pressed the sailcloth into smoking slippers priced at nearly a grand—something that would have baffled a Breton fisherman into early retirement. Rowing Blazers has worked with Murray’s too, and its founder, Jack Carlson, has argued that the shop, a haberdasher that invented its own fabric and color, belongs in the American menswear canon beside Brooks Brothers and J. Press. None of it has settled anything. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal weighed whether the pants are timeless or hopelessly cheesy and, wisely, declined to issue a ruling. 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 wish they looked that good in pink.

The family takes the longer view. In 2020, the fourth generation took over the shop: Lauren Murray, her brother Greg and their cousins Andrew and Matt Bridier, the latter two also running Castaway Clothing, the family’s prep-leaning spinoff. Lauren, the only one of the owners still living on the island and a granddaughter of Philip C. Murray, the man who gave the place its color, puts the whole enterprise in seven words. “The color fades, but the tradition never does,” she tells Observer. The shop has added cotton twill with a little stretch for the women’s line and straight and slim fits for men, but she calls those “additions rather than replacements,” a way to “maintain the integrity of our brand and its color story” without touching the canvas her grandfather chose.

So the Reds endure, faded but never gone, like the fortunes that wear them. Lauren puts it more tenderly: the slow fade, she says, is “a keeper of all of the memories made while one was wearing their pair of Reds.” Buy a pair this summer, and you’ll look like a tourist until roughly 2031. The pants are patient. The question is whether you are.