In 1963, a man called Arthur Benjamin Sugarman walked into a disused factory on Church Road, Hove, and started making shirts. He'd changed his name to Ben Sherman by then. Within five years his label would be stitched into the collar of nearly every Lambretta-riding, parka-wearing mod in Britain. Within ten, it would be the unofficial uniform of the first skinhead movement. Within thirty, it would be back on stage with Oasis and Blur at the height of Britpop.
Not bad for a Brighton boy who'd spent most of his adult life in Hollywood selling shirts to Americans.
This is the story of how one button-down collar ended up defining British working-class youth culture for the best part of sixty years.
Brighton, not the East End
The founding myth gets told wrong a lot. Ben Sherman is often lumped in with the East End rag trade, probably because Fred Perry, John Smedley and most of the other mod-era British labels had London roots. Ben Sherman didn't.
Sugarman was born in Brighton in 1925 to a Jewish family. He left school young, did his war service, and in 1946 he emigrated to the United States. He spent seventeen years there, working his way through American shirt manufacturers in California, and it was during this stretch that he married a woman called Ruth Sherman and adopted her surname. By the time he came back to England in 1963, he wasn't really Sugarman any more. He was Ben Sherman, thirty-eight years old, married again (twice more eventually), and armed with something no one else in British menswear had: a working knowledge of the American Ivy League shirt.
He set up shop in a former vegetable packing factory in Hove, just along the coast from where he'd grown up. The first collection launched later that same year. It included the shirt that would change everything.
The collar that did the work
The button-down collar wasn't a Ben Sherman invention. Brooks Brothers in New York had been making them since 1896, inspired by the shirts English polo players wore with buttoned-down collar points so they wouldn't flap about during a match. The design had been an Ivy League staple on American campuses for decades.
What Sherman did was take the Brooks Brothers template and tune it for a British market that had never seen anything like it.
He used Oxford cloth. He cut the collar with a proper roll, not the flat, limp thing you get on cheap button-downs. Three-button placket on the sleeve cuff, which sounds like a small detail until you see what a plain one-button version looks like next to it. A box pleat down the back with a locker loop, a hanger loop at the yoke seam, and the little pleated detail at the back where the yoke joins the body. Every one of those quirks came from American sportswear, and every one of them got copied a thousand times once the mod scene picked the shirt up.
The fabrics did half the work. Sherman ran the classic Oxford in white, blue, pink and yellow, but the real calling cards were the checks. Gingham in a dozen colourways. Tattersall. Windowpane. The candy stripe. If you look at a photograph of a 1966 mod night at the Flamingo or the Marquee and zoom in on the crowd, about a third of the shirts visible are Ben Shermans. The patterns are how you can tell.
Why the mods wanted them
Mods were obsessives. The whole subculture ran on sharp lines, Italian tailoring, American jazz, modern jazz (the "mod" bit is short for modernist), and an almost religious attention to detail. They wore suits cut narrow, they rode Italian scooters because British motorbikes were for greasers, and they drank coffee because pubs were for old men. Every component of the look had to earn its place.
A Ben Sherman earned its place because it was authentically American without being naff. Wearing a button-down in 1965 Britain signalled you'd done your research. You knew about Ivy League style. You knew about Miles Davis's shirt collars. You probably knew the difference between a soul record pressed in Detroit and one pressed in Chicago. The shirt was a shorthand for all of that.
It also worked under a Crombie, under a Harrington, with a pair of Sta-Prest or a Levi's Prince of Wales check, and it photographed brilliantly. Mod style was a style you watched yourself in, because mod was partly about being looked at. The button-down collar framed the face. The checks popped on black-and-white film. The roll of the collar held its shape after eight hours of dancing at the Scene club.
By 1967 Ben Sherman was selling two million shirts a year. The Who wore them. Small Faces wore them. Paul Weller, about a decade later, would wear almost nothing else.
The skinhead crossover
The transition from mod to skinhead in the late 1960s is one of the more interesting turns in British subcultural history, partly because the skinhead movement that emerged wasn't the one most people think of today.
Original skinheads, circa 1968 to 1972, were working-class kids heavily influenced by Jamaican rude boys who'd moved to the UK during the Windrush era. They listened to ska, reggae and soul. They went to the same clubs as the black kids they grew up with. The look was a stripped-down, hardened version of mod: cropped hair instead of the French crop, Doc Martens instead of loafers, braces, Sta-Prest, Harringtons and, almost universally, Ben Sherman button-downs in loud gingham or tattersall checks.
This matters because Ben Sherman became, for a while, one of the most recognisable working-class brands in Britain. Not a posh brand. Not an aspirational brand. The shirt you wore on a Saturday when you were going to the match and then to a ska night in a south London basement. Richard Allen's pulp novel Skinhead, published in 1970, namechecks it within the first ten pages.
The later political associations that got attached to the skinhead look in the late 1970s and 1980s are a separate story, and one the brand itself has always pushed back against. The original skinhead scene was multicultural, music-led and sartorially obsessive, and that's the version the shirt belonged to.
Two Tone, mod revival, Britpop
A well-designed shirt doesn't go out of fashion, it just waits.
When The Specials broke in 1979 wearing tonic suits and button-downs, Ben Sherman was right there. The whole Two Tone aesthetic, Madness included, was a conscious callback to the original skinhead and rude boy scenes, and the wardrobe came with it. Same shirt, new decade, new bass line.
The mod revival happened at almost exactly the same time. Paul Weller had The Jam wearing Ben Sherman throughout their run. By the time Weller went solo in the early 90s, the shirt had become so identified with him that it was basically part of his signature. You can draw a direct line from Weller to Oasis, who spent the mid-90s fishing through the same 1960s reference pool, and from there to the whole Britpop wardrobe. Liam Gallagher has been photographed in Ben Sherman more times than anyone could count.
What's striking about all of this is that the shirt didn't change. The details that Sherman locked in in 1963, the three-button cuff, the box pleat, the locker loop, the precise roll of the collar, are still the details on the shirts the brand sells today. Every revival found the thing already there and waiting.
Where the brand sits now
Ben Sherman the man died in 1987. He'd actually sold the business in 1975 and had been out of the day-to-day for years. Since then the brand has passed through several owners: Oxford Industries bought it in 2004 for $145 million, and Marquee Brands picked it up in 2015, which is where it sits today.
The label's done what a lot of heritage brands have had to do. It kept the archive pieces alive (the Oxford button-down in its classic colourways has never been out of the catalogue), expanded into polos, knitwear, outerwear and tailoring, and leaned into collaborations with musicians, designers and football clubs that make sense for the brand's DNA.
What it hasn't done is drift too far from the source material. The signature gingham check still runs through every collection. The polos reference the mod-era designs that Fred Perry was doing at the same time, but with the Sherman detailing. The tailoring references the mod-era suits.
A Ben Sherman shirt in 2026 isn't the same shirt as a Ben Sherman shirt in 1966. The fabric's changed, the fit is a bit different, the manufacturing's moved. But pick one up and look at the collar roll, the placket, the back pleat, the loop, and you're handling a piece of design that's been earning its keep since Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.
If you want to see the current range, have a look through our [Ben Sherman shirts collection]. The classic Oxford button-down is the one most people reach for first, but the gingham checks and the candy stripes are where the brand's history really lives.
Why it still matters
Most British clothing brands that were big in 1966 are either gone, reduced to t-shirt licences, or selling exclusively to the Japanese market where British heritage sells at a premium. Ben Sherman has managed to stay a functioning, widely available British menswear label for more than sixty years without ever completely losing the thread of what it was supposed to be.
Part of that is the collar. Part of it is the patterns. But mostly it's the fact that generation after generation of British working-class kids have picked the shirt up, put their own meaning on it, and passed it to the next lot. Mods, skinheads, ska kids, mod revivalists, Britpop lads, and the grime and UK garage scenes after them. Each one found something in a simple cotton shirt with a rolled collar that made sense of where they were and what they wanted to look like.
That's what a British icon actually looks like. Not a heritage brand trading on a dusty archive, but a piece of clothing that people who aren't remotely interested in heritage keep finding reasons to wear.