Every June, the Hyannis ferry from Hyannis docks at Nantucket’s Straight Wharf carrying coolers, bags of clothes and a statistically impossible number of men dressed as raw salmon. Their pants are a variety of colors somewhere between a dull watermelon and a tangy tan. The initiates called them the Nantucket Reds, and they’ll make the whole point that they look even better when they’re apart. It’s an unusual selling proposition. Many clothes promise to hold up over time. Nantucket Reds are America’s only pants with a reverse warranty: guaranteed to fade.
The brainchild belongs to Philip C. Murray, second-generation owner of Murray’s Toggery Shop, a Main Street establishment his father bought in 1945. The building’s retail lineage predates the family—RH Macy had a dry goods store in the building in 1843 before tearing it down to make room for a Herald Square store C. a canvas panty inspired by the red sails he saw off the coast of Brittany. Breton fishermen tanned their sailcloth with tree bark to fight carbon; sun and salt turn the effect from brick to green. Murray bottled the rot and sold it as a feature.
Pants wouldn’t have been part of the island if John F. Kennedy hadn’t been photographed playing golf in bright red pants in the summer of 1963, a confirmation the media couldn’t buy. In 1980, demand forced the trademark, and Lisa Birnbach’s Official Preppy Handbook finished making the lamp that same year, declaring Reds de rigueur in country club and yacht affairs and anointing Murray’s the island’s official attire. The trousers had completed one of fashion’s most obscure arcs: Breton workwear, washed in New England haberdashery, was reborn as the softest and loudest signal of the leisure class. Men’s clothing tax experts put Reds in a category known as “hell pants,” clothes that gleefully stand out and suggest the wearer has a lot of confidence or enough family money to screw someone over.
It lies there a bit that no one says in the yacht club: Red is a good laundry service. A fresh pair, bright tomato and firm as a canvas, sets you up as new money (or, worse, a renter). A pale, stringy pair—pink as the inside of a quahog shell, soft as a beach towel—provides decades of summer, which means decades of accessorizing. You can’t buy a fade. You can only buy an entrance fee and wait. At a time when half the fashion fleet is depressed at the front, Murray’s still makes you wearable, one regatta at a time.
The current popularity is a reversal of its structure. Murray’s has become an unlikely darling of the new prep revival, partnering with Tuckernuck in women’s knitwear and, more recently, with Palm Beach slipper house Stubbs & Wootton, which has pressed canvas into smoking slippers with almost as much value—something that would have baffled the original Breton fisherman. Rowing Blazers worked with the Murrays, and its founder, Jack Carlson, argued that the store, a haberdasher who invented its fabric and color, was part of American menswear alongside Brooks Brothers and J. Press. Nothing solved anything. In 2021, the The Wall Street Journal judged whether the pants were out of date or hopelessly cheesy and, wisely, refused to pass judgment. That is the secret of the six-decade run: the Reds divide people. Some see WASP cosplay, others culture, and most men, if they’re honest, just want to look good in pink.
The family takes a long view. In 2020, the fourth generation took over the store: Lauren Murray, her brother Greg and their cousins Andrew and Matt Bridier, the latter two also running Castaway Clothing, a spinoff of the family outfit. Lauren, the only one of the owners still living on the island and the granddaughter of Philip C. Murray, the man who gave the place its color, sums up the whole business in seven words. “Color fades, but tradition never fades,” he told the Observer. The store has added a slightly stretchy cotton twill to the women’s line and a straight and slim fit to the men’s, but calls those “additions rather than replacements,” a way to “maintain the integrity of our product and its color story” without touching the canvas his grandfather chose.
So the Reds persevered, finished but did not go away, like luck had worn them. Lauren puts it very kindly: a little blur, she says, “the keeper of all the memories made while someone else was wearing their Reds.” Buy a pair this summer, and you’ll look like a tourist until the year 2031. Patience pants. The question is whether it is.
