Here’s our first foray into the 1988 catalogs, the last year they were issued. The catalog is full of signs of change at Banana Republic. The masthead now says Travel Clothing Co. rather than Travel & Safari Clothing Co. That change was made in the Holiday 1987 catalog (not yet scanned). There are lots of new clothes inside, and it feels like the emphasis is on new clothes for women.

How far they’ve come since the 1983 catalogs. Virtually every piece of clothing is a full color illustration, the old technique of a color wash under a black and white drawing almost fully lost. There are even a couple of pieces like the Somalia skirt below that have the figure’s head and limbs sketched in, perhaps the only way to make sense of something like a head scarf and also making a striking pose possible.

However, many of the old standards are still in evidence. This page is like a greatest hits from 1982–The Bush Vest, Bombay Shirt and Gurkha Shorts haven’t missed a catalog since BR was just one store in Mill Valley.

I do like the layout with the rough edged pages showing against a worn journal cover. This issue, The Traveller’s Eye, purports to have a lot of sketches from Patricia’s travel journals, and indeed there are numerous little sketches noting interesting aspects of some local costume discovered on their travels.

Also prominent are the advertisements for Trips, the upcoming travel magazine from BR and the Ziegler’s latest brainchild. More about that later, but it’s an ominous sign for fans of the classic Banana Republic catalog. The attempt to broaden BR by branching out into travel publishing will lead to the Ziegler’s departure in a few months and the catalog will be gone for good by the fall.

But not today! Today it’s still fresh and alive here in the Abandoned Republic and we are ready to go shopping. Enjoy!

This catalog was the first one I picked up when I started collecting Banana Republic stuff in 2011, and it’s the first one I scanned into the archive. Having just presented Spring ’85 and ’86, I thought I’d take another look at it before we move on to Spring ’88. (See where I’m going with this? I figure I can get through all 4 seasons of all four or five years of catalogs in 2012 and then this catalog archive will be complete. Scan, scan, scan….)

Anyway, I’m as much an anglophile as the next guy…you can’t be a BR fan without having some appreciation for the British Empire. Still,  I find the cover to be a bit dreary with it’s grey greens and (I imagine) damp sheep… It’s beautifully done, of course, and it’s perfectly suited to the subject of the Ziegler’s latest trip: Walking through the misty English countryside. The cover detail of the note from PZ to MZ, “I’m going my way, see you at the top.” tells the story nicely.

The “Fellwalking Journal” is about the joys of wandering the Lake District landscape, alone or as a couple,”taking up the sport of poets” like Wordsworth or Coleridge. Fellwalking is an English term for climbing hills and peaks. You can join the online Fellwalking Club for more info.

Contrasted with a dangerous-sounding journey to the Amazon or Soviet Russia, this is a downright cozy journey and one for which 90% of the catalog’s contents are perfectly suited.  This catalog sits right in the heart of the catalog era and is filled with all of the greatest hits.

To me this seems very much like Mel’s catalog, it’s so focused on the writer and poet.  The journal sketches are very good, and I’ve been told that by this time staff artists were doing most of the sketches for the travel journal as Patricia Ziegler’s duties for the company were intruding on her time for that. I can’t say for sure, there are a few sketches that seem to be in her style, and some that are clearly not.

Enjoy.

Maria, a fan of my Facebook page posted this picture yesterday to show off her 1980s Banana Republic jacket. It wasn’t one I immediately recognized. It’s not the Bush jacket, or the Correspondent’s jacket, and certainly isn’t a Safari jacket. But it had a BIG LABEL, so we know it’s an older piece. Obviously, it’s seen some serious action, possibly a tiger attack, but what is it?

This is one of the reasons I do this blog the way I do. I searched through the Men’s Jackets page and easily found what turns out to be the Authentic Field Jacket (modeled on a U.S. military jacket) , as pictured in the Winter 1984 catalog #17, which as far as I know is the last time it was offered. I do not have catalog 18 Spring 1984 to confirm that.  I then found it in my recently acquired (unscanned) catalogs #15 and 16, but not in catalog #12. So we can say for certain that this jacket was only offered by Banana Republic in 1983 and early 1984.

That means it’s one of those rare pieces that pre-dates the GAP purchase and that makes it very cool to me. This is one of the reasons I love doing this blog. There’s lots of vintage BR stuff out there and it’s really helpful to know what’s really unusual, and it’s nice to have a (hopefully) easy way to look something up and place it in time. Thanks for sharing, Maria!

Banana Republic began issuing catalog updates in 1985. Each season had at least one, sometimes two. They are un-numbered. So Spring 1986 was #27, then it’s update was issued, then #28 Summer. The point of the update was to nudge the customer to make a purchase if they hadn’t already, to take a second look at what BR was offering that season.

The updates featured the exact same items as in the main, but occasionally they did include or remove some pieces for the update. The page layout was generally identical to the first catalog, but some pages were shifted to help spur sales of certain items. More expensive items were usually near the front and back pages that got more attention, while inexpensive staples like the Olde English or Propoganda t-shirts were in the middle.

A new cover , theme and editorial content were created to give everything a fresh look, so it was hardly a cheap and easy re-run. The clothes were the same but there was at least a half hour of new reading to do. Since the travel journal content was delivered in the sidebars of pages all they had to do was swap out the material and the layout of the clothing remained in place. They did change the little graphic icons, the Soviet pages has all kind of eavesdropping KGB guys.

Spring Update 1986 went with the theme The History of Khaki, and it’s an informative and whimsical overview of Banana Republic’s essential bedrock element. The cover is uncredited, but I can’t imagine it’s not Rob Stein, the very talented staff artist. Seeing actual human figures with heads is actually a bit unusual for BR, isn’t it? It has a lot of cartooning in the write-ups and it does a great job of entertaining you while it indoctrinates you as a Banananista. You see, when you wear khakis you aren’t participating in fashion trend, you are part of an unbroken lineage that dates back to the height of the British Empire. These clothes civilized the known world, dammit!

So what’s actually changed? Let’s see….

Page 22 has moved to page 3. The Goatskin Flight Jacket, a high ticket item gets more prominent placement. In the Spring catalog this was a double page spread about the Soviet Union trip, but now one page will suffice for the Khaki introduction.

The extra page from the spread is not used for new clothing, but instead becomes an ad for the Bookstore business. Page 23 has moved to 22 and the only new item in the catalog is added: The British Officer’s Soapdish, a fantastic item of surplus for a travel catalog, has replaced the French Undershirt of the Spring catalog. The D-Day Duffel bag is stamped SOLD OUT, a not-so gentle reminder that this stuff won’t always be here, so get on the phone now! But fear not, I think you can still get this surplus soapdish from surplus dealers today. They must have made 50 million of them.

For comparison’s sake here’s 22-23 from the Spring Catalog…you know…someone once described this blog as a tad obsessive. Nah. This information will be really useful to someone, some day. Please let me know if that happens.

The only other changes I can find are that pages 2-3 and 46-47 have switched places and the Men’s Leather Hiking boot is sold out. Maybe the British Correspondent’s Bag ($110) needed more of a spotlight. Anyway, that’s the deal with the Updates. Summer 1985 had TWO of them. I need a scanning sherpa….

Enjoy!

The Spring 1986 Catalog #27 brings us another travel journal from Banana Republic founders Mel and Patricia Ziegler, but instead of a journey to the deepest, darkest jungle or some sun-baked savannah  they take us to the heart of pre-Glasnost Russia. What a surprise this must have been to find in your mailbox. The cover is such a far cry from the classic BR look: There are no zebras or jeeps or adventurous locales., though it does recall past catalogs with the iconic typewriter, the remnants of breakfast, discarded newspapers, and a cat. All good signs that the Zieglers were here.

The cover was a commissioned piece by Russian artist Anatoly Belkin, whom they met on their trip and whose work they had to smuggle out of the country. It has a folksy, very Russian vibe to it, and I think the whole piece has a lot of heart.

The journal inside is pretty remarkable, and perhaps more than other journals it reminds you that the Zieglers were journalists before they became safari entreprenuers. Mel was a writer and Patricia an illustrator for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s. Their account of their travels through Soviet Russia are filled with ominous KGB agents and Soviet minders dogging their every step despite their B-Movie escapes by switching trains at the last minute. They express their outrage at the treatment of Soviet Jews, artists and dissidents who they meet and speak with in careful whispers.   Finally, they mount an elaborate ruse to get out of the country without the authorities destroying their film, sketches and notes at the airport.

It’s a very unusual thing to encounter in a mass market clothing catalog, even for Banana Republic, and it’s undoubtedly a big part of why we loved BR and it’s catalogs.

The most surprising part of the story relates to Banana Republic clothes when they learn Fidel Castro had a few BR pieces on his wardrobe. So let’s browse through the Spring 1986 offerings and see what Fidel might have had his eye on…

Life’s little mysteries… This catalog era coat came up on eBay and I’ve never seen it before. A khaki jacket with a bit of a windbreaker vibe and with a hood built into the collar, same as the Hooded Bush Vest. If it was in the catalogs I haven’t come across it yet, but that’s not saying much because there’s a lot to digest. I hope once I get everything scanned in and cataloged it’ll be easier to find these things when they come up. In the meantime, if you know what this coat is and when it was produced, let me know….