A Letter of Introduction

As an undergraduate at Princeton I fell in with a crowd of guys from New York and New England who dressed a certain way. The shoulders of their jackets were soft and softly constructed, their trousers were narrow-fitting and trim, without pleats. They wore jackets of Scotch tweed and flannel suits in winter, blue blazers and gabardines in summer; all of it they’d had tailored by New Haven tailors like Chipp or Langrock’s. I came to recognize that the style these young men had adopted was not only in timeless good taste; it was  the uniform of a post-war “aristocracy:” America’s leaders in business, government, and society. Fifty-seven years later, American men of influence and distinction are still dressing in classic, natural-shoulder clothes.

 And so when I later joined my family firm we began to produce a collection of sport jackets in this new, so-called “Ivy League” style. I called the line Norman Hilton Country Jackets and took the motto “Doing One Thing Well.”  When, in the early ‘50’s we began to produce suits we kept the motto because we were always single-mindedly dedicated to the ideal of that natural-shoulder, unpadded, soft construction that followed and accentuated natural body lines. We always tried to avoid any unnatural or artificial line or ingredient in the styling and manufacture of our clothes.