The Mister Freedom® WATERTOWN Shirt gets its pattern DNA from our 2015 TAHITI Shirt, an original garment fully documented here, anecdotally dear to me as it has roots in my expat family history.
The streamline design was a take on classic 1950s-60s vintage French casual sportswear shirts: straight shirttail tuck-out style, period-typical “shark fin” collar (“col requin” in French, sometimes referred-to as “Capri” collar), side seam slits, in a long-sleeve pattern. Our Tahiti shirts were cut from printed bark-cloth type cotton fabrics featuring a splendid vintage monstera motif, in both Moana blue and Ura red color options, inspired by a set of original pareos my dad was issued during a stint at the Club Med in 1957.
The WATERTOWN Shirt is basically a short-sleeve version of our TAHITI Shirt, but also a completely different fabric treatment and concept.
For our Area 7161 story, we twisted the design and opted for a fancy cotton/linen indigo chambray fabric, an old MF® favorite previously featured on the Naval Chinos Type No.266ic, the Breezer Type II, and the Riviera Continental Sportcoat & Trousers set.
This premium indigo selvedge 6.5 Oz. chambray is a slubby, tightly-woven blend of 85% cotton and 15% linen, plain weave dark indigo warp with unbleached weft yarns, a dry and crisp fabric flashing a white/red stripe selvedge ID, exclusively milled in Japan for mfsc. It is much darker than typical workwear chambrays (or vintage-style USN workshirts), with a deep indigo hue and reddish sheen. This chambray fabric is guaranteed to age gracefully with normal wash/wear routine, developing overtime a beautiful indigo patina exposing the woven texture and ring.
For the Watertown, we decided to visually spice things up by using an orange/yellow contrast stitch construction, a nod to our Californian Blue Jeans and their classic denim two-tone stitching. A purely cosmetic design choice today — time-consuming and costly manufacturing wise —, the origin of mixing similarly-colored threads in garment construction dates back to 1940s-50s crunch time in factories, when everything on hand was used to meet production deadlines.
The fabric selvedge is displayed in both the front panels button placket and the chest pocket fold.
The sleeves are a period 1950s-style length, cut shorter than contemporary short-sleeve shirts. The amber-colored corrozo wood buttons compliment the orange/yellow chainstitch accents.
For those who wonder, our shirt gets its moniker from the classified Top-Secret and highly-restricted legendary AREA 51, a remote air strip on natural salt flats located in Groom Lake, Nevada, initially utilized during WW2 as gunnery range by USAAF pilots. Later codenamed Watertown in internal convo — also referred to as “Paradise Ranch” or “The Ranch” amongst other dreamy nicknames — , the area was secretly reactivated in 1955 as a R&D facility for covert projects. In this hard-to-access isolated high desert location, the CIA, USAF pilots (referred to as “drivers”, for anonymity), Lockheed “Skunk Works” engineers, mechanics, …, helped develop and test U-2 spy planes. More on our Mister Freedom® stylistic twist on this historical background here.
More simply, the MF® Watertown Shirt is a cool 1950s-style casual short-sleeve shirt, loaded with subtle details, blending period sportswear with workwear, diverting chambray fabric from its routine utilitarian garment role.
The MF® WATERTOWN Shirt is designed in California, USA, by Mister Freedom®, and produced in Japan in collaboration with Sugar Cane Co.
