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"Planning on flexing your sartorial muscles in the blog arena? You\u2019ll need to come packing. And no, we\u2019re not referring to your pocket square game. Every week on The Eye, we\u2019ll cover a basic term you need to know right now... before you get laughed off the internet.\n\nFacebookPinterestvarsity-jacket-635.png \n\nNo matter how hard you want to fight it, summer has come to a close and that means the days of layering, snow, and people complaining about how much they miss the warm weather are upon us. But most importantly, it means that school is back in session and that has us thinking about the unforgettable jacket birthed out of academia in the first place: the varsity.\n\nWhile you may not be an Ivy Leaguer, for the moment we\u2019re all enrolled in Harvard and we\u2019re going way back to 1865 - so you better have your horse and buggy ready. It was then, on Harvard\u2019s Cambridge, Massachusetts campus that the varsity jacket was first invented even though it looked quite a bit different back in those days. The original varsity actually wasn\u2019t a jacket at all, but a thick knit sweater that players wore as uniforms. One day the Harvard Baseball team decided to take their uniforms and sew giant &amp;quot;H&amp;quot;\u2019s onto the center of them, thus creating the &amp;quot;letterman jacket.&amp;quot;\n\nWith the letter came some rules though; if you were a good enough player, you were allowed to keep your jersey and the letter but if you rode pine all year and never saw the field, you were forced to return your jersey at the end of the season, thus adding to the competitive allure of the letters. A decade later Harvard\u2019s football team adopted the lettered jerseys and slowly, but surely, other schools and squads across the nation started pulling out their own version of the varsity sweater. Of course each team did things a little different like changing the size or font of the letter, moving around its placement, and ultimately shifting the style little by little so that by the early twentieth century the letter had arrived at it\u2019s permanent place on the side of the sweater.\n\nFacebookPinterestcam-newton-01-635.jpeg \n\nBy this point the sweaters were still primarily cardigans. As the style rose in popularity, athletes starting searching for something a bit more substantial and in the thirties the varsity jacket was introduced. A wool body, contrasting leather sleeves, and, of course, adorned with a prominent and proud letter on the side, the varsity jacket became a symbol of authority at one\u2019s respective school. The tradition stated that first a player would have to prove his prowess on the field and in turn would receive a letter. The player would then buy a varsity jacket to sew it onto so all could see just how good he was.\n\nOver the years the stigma around the varsity letter away began to wear away, leaving a handful of jocks feeling a bit under-appreciated (no sympathy there), opening up the varsity jacket to be embraced by the masses. Yes, even those that have put in more time on that couch than the playing field could acquire one. Drop that pesky, polarizing letter and you\u2019ve got one of the season\u2019s most striking jackets, available from a wide range of brands, each of which has their own take on the classic. In fact, the varsity has always allowed for quite a bit of room in terms of customization and that can be seen today with designers playing with materials and colors to create a jacket for just about anyone. From Gant Rugger\u2019s neo-classic, bright red, Homerun Jacket to Comme Des Garcons darker design for the more avant garde set, the varsity is slowly becoming the everyman\u2019s fall piece. So whether you plan on spending the next few months getting in the game or just watching from the sidelines, there\u2019s a varsity jacket out there to make you look like a world champ.\n\nJake Gallagher writes the blog Wax-Wane. He lives in Manhattan."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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