Catalina Sportswear (United States, founded 1907)
United States, California, Los Angeles, late 1940s, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art
In the enclosed shopping mall near our home is a Hollister store, which bills itself as “the coolest destination for genuine SoCal style clothes for guys and girls.” They sell surf-themed garments to residents of a landlocked state.
There is history here:
Novel conditions of living, reflecting climatic differences, created a compulsion to invent something new and different in the way of clothing. California manufacturers began to meet the need by designing new types of sportswear, which, being better adapted to local conditions than the standardized products offered by eastern manufacturers, promptly found a market. Certain of these products gradually began to move eastward, carrying the California label, and, here and there, small shops were opened in eastern cities for the sale of “California Sportswear.” In a a rather insidious mannfer, the world “California” became associated in the public mind with the word “sportswear.”
That’s Carey McWilliams in California: The Great Exception