Every June, the Hy-Line ferry from Hyannis unloads at Nantucket’s Straight Wharf carrying coolers, bags of clothes and a statistically improbable number of men dressed like undercooked salmon. Their pants occupy a color spectrum that falls somewhere between pale watermelon and amazingly healing sunburn. Beginners call them Nantucket Reds, and will insist that the whole point is that they look better the more they’re broken down. It’s an unusual sales pitch. Most clothes promise to hold up over time. Nantucket Reds are the only American pants whose guarantee runs in reverse: the fade guarantee.
The genius belongs to Philip C. Murray, second generation owner of Murray ski shopa Main Street institution his father bought in 1945. The building’s retail origins go back to before the family — R.H. Macy ran a dry goods store on the site in 1843 before departing to establish a department store in Herald Square — but it was Philip C. who, in the early 1960s, introduced gingham pants inspired by the red sails he saw off the coast of Brittany. Breton fishermen tanned their sailcloths 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 remained an eccentricity on the island had John F. Kennedy not been photographed playing golf wearing conspicuously red pants in the summer of 1963, an endorsement that couldn’t be bought by the media. By 1980, demand forced the creation of a brand, and Lisa Birnbach’s Official Preppy Guide He completed the beatification in the same year, declaring the Reds de rigueur in Country Affairs, Yacht Club and Moray Survey the official outfitter of the island. Pants completed one of fashion’s strangest arcs: Breton workwear, washed over by New England haberdashery, was reborn as a soft nod to the leisure class. Menswear classifiers introduced red in the category known as “go-to-hell pants,” garments so obvious that they suggest the wearer either has enormous confidence or enough family money to mistake one for the other.
And here’s the point no one at the Yacht Club says: The Reds are a laundry slicker. A fresh pair, shiny as a tomato and stiff as a topsail, indicates that you are new money (or worse, rented). The pale, shabby pair — pink as the inside of a quahog shell, soft as a beach towel — bears witness to decades of summer, that is, decades of arrival. You can’t buy the fade. You can just buy the entry fee and wait. In an era when half the fashion ships are pre-rigged, Murray’s still makes you win clothes for yourself, one regatta at a time.
The current popularity is a plot twist of its own. Murray’s has become an unexpected darling of the New Prep revival, collaborating with Tuckernuck on women’s knitwear, and more recently with Palm Beach slipper house Stubbs & Wootton, which has pressed sailcloth into smoking slippers priced at nearly a thousand dollars—something that would have baffled a Breton fisherman if he took early retirement. Rowing Blazers also worked with Murray’s, and its founder, Jack Carlson, has argued that the store, a haberdashery that invented its own fabric and colors, belongs in the canon of American menswear alongside Brooks Brothers and J. Press. None of it resolved anything. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal I weighed whether the pants were timeless or hopelessly cheesy He wisely withheld judgment. This is the secret of six decades: Reds divide people. Some see WASP cosplay, others see tradition, and most men, if they’re honest, just wish they could look that good in pink.
Family takes a longer view. In 2020, the fourth generation took over the store: Lauren Murray, her brother Greg and cousins Andrew and Matt Breder, the latter two also run Castaway Clothing, the family subsidiary. Loren, the only owner still living on the island and the granddaughter of Philip C. Murray, the man who gave the place its color, sums up the entire project in seven words. “Color fades, but tradition never fades,” she told the Observer. The store has added twill with a slight extension to the women’s line and straight, slim cuts for men, but she calls these “additions, not substitutions,” a way to “maintain the integrity of our brand and color story” without touching the fabric her grandfather chose.
And so the Reds remained, fading but never gone, like the riches that clothe them. Lauren says it’s more subtle: The slow fade, she says, is “a keeper of all the memories made while someone was wearing a pair of red.” Buy a pair this summer, and you’ll look like a tourist until about 2031. Pants are patient. The question is, are you?
