Why Fifty States

There are easier ways to make a polo. We did not want easier. We wanted one polo that meant something — and then we wanted fifty.

The country is a fifty-state thing, and a fifty-state thing is hard to wear all at once. A flag is a flag, a coat of arms is a coat of arms, but a state — a state is specific. North Carolina is not Virginia. Vermont is not Massachusetts. The bird that calls on the back nine in Ohio is not the bird that calls on the back nine in Oregon.

And yet most of us know our state in a way we don't know our country. We know its dogwoods, its lakes, its long August afternoons. We know the route home from the airport. We know the bird at the feeder and the flower in the front yard. We don't walk the United States. We walk a state.

That is the conceit of the State Editions. Fifty polos, fifty crests, fifty quiet acts of belonging. Each one carries the state's official bird and its official flower — designations made by legislatures, often a century ago, that the rest of us mostly forget. We have not forgotten them. We have stitched them.

We pick the state, and the state earns its colors. Georgia's brown thrasher and Cherokee rose come dressed in pine straw and dogwood ivory. Vermont's hermit thrush and red clover, in green mountain and lichen grey. Texas's mockingbird and bluebonnet, in twilight indigo and cotton white. The palette is taken from the state itself — from its woods, from its fields, from the way the light falls on the back nine in June.

We thought, briefly, about doing a more universal brand — a single mark, no state distinction, easier to scale. But there is a kind of clothing that wants to be worn because of what it costs. There is a kind that wants to be worn because of what it means. We are trying to make the second kind.

The first State Edition will go out this season. The fifth, by autumn. The fiftieth, when it is right and not before. There is no hurry. There are fifty states, after all, and the country has been here a while.

"Of every state, of every round."