Rowing Blazers: A Chat with Jack Carlson on Heritage & Brand Identity

Jack Carlson

Designer/Rowing Blazers, Author, Archaeologist

What's your G.O.A.T?

I assume we’re talking about people and not sneakers! It’s hard to pick one icon, one inspiration. And it’s even harder when I consider how I’ve been inspired by different people in different ways: I have sporting heroes, people who are inspirations in terms of style, in terms of life. To make it easier, I’m just going to list some of my style icons: Princess Diana. Arthur Ashe. Timothée Chalamet. Jorge Campos. Tintin. Dickie Greenleaf and Tom Ripley. Frank Ocean. David Hockney. Babar. André 3000. Françoise Hardy. Bertie Wooster. Gunter Sachs.

What's the weirdest thing in your bag?

I don’t know that there’s anything especially weird in my backpack, but I do just sort of collect things. There are pens from the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz and the Intercon in Hong Kong. Notepads and envelopes from the New York Athletic Club and Villa d’Este. Matchbooks from 21 and Harry’s Bar in Paris. These things just kind of accumulate in my bag, but they’re happy little memories of my travels.

Last time you were surprised by anything?

The biggest surprise for me lately is the popularity of the sheep sweaters we released with Warm & Wonderful. I knew they would be popular; I never imagined on this scale. The Warm & Wonderful sheep sweater was made famous when Princess Diana wore it on several public occasions in the 1980s. It’s been copied many times, but I wanted to bring back the real thing. I tracked down Joanna Osborne and Sally Muir, who founded Warm & Wonderful and designed the original in 1979, and worked with them to bring it back for the first time since the early ‘90s. Something about this sweater is just resonating right now, so we sold out almost instantly. They’re now available for pre-order, with sweaters being made and sent out in the order that pre-orders are received.

The Right Call, from Boat to Brand

I grew up in Boston, though my family also lived in London when I was little. It was the early ‘90s, and London was a magical place. Men still wore bowler hats, strollers and boutonnières to work in the city (yes, really), and (real) British punks with mohawks and leather jackets were everywhere. My parents had a rusty old Range Rover, but we went around on double-decker buses most days. Our neighborhood was a kind of posh but artsy place where a lot of Britain’s ‘80s pop-stars had moved (we saw Boy George and George Michael in the grocery store all the time). I wore a navy blazer with white grosgrain trim, gray flannel shorts, and a navy and white cricket cap with a bullseye pattern on the top to school everyday, and on the weekends I wore rugby shirts and replica soccer jerseys. 

My time in the UK had a lasting effect on my sense of style. We moved to Boston when I was eight or nine, and all my friends went out for rowing. My school was on the banks of the Charles River, and it was the thing to do. With some of my teachers, they convinced me I’d be a good coxswain (the guy who steers the boat and makes the calls), so I figured I’d give it a try. I didn’t know I’d stay in the sport for another twenty years or so! 

It’s a cliché, but rowing really is “the ultimate team sport.” It taught me much more than any class I’ve ever taken. In some ways, I’m very academic. But rowing is real; it’s hands-on. And while you might strive for perfection, it’s impossible to achieve—you can always be better. The coxswain is an unusual position in sport. It’s like a jockey, or a Formula 1 driver. But instead of a horse or an engine, you have your teammates. It taught me a lot about understanding people, about relationships and motivation. They say the coxswain never gets credit for winning a race, but is the first to be blamed for losing a race. That’s probably about right.

I studied Chinese, Classics and archaeology at Georgetown, and spent summers working on an archaeological excavation in northern Tuscany. I received a scholarship from Georgetown to attend Oxford for a two-year master’s degree program in archaeology, but ended up staying for five years, doing both a master’s and a DPhil (a PhD in Oxford parlance). I studied the visual trappings of status and power, which relates to fashion and clothing, I suppose. 

Oxford afforded me the opportunity to keep training, and the summer after my second year there, I made my first national team. The summer after my fourth year, I won Henley (nine years after first racing there!). My side project was writing a book about the blazer tradition in the sport of rowing, which I’d dreamed up years earlier. I worked on it as a passion project for the rowing community, but I was surprised it attracted so much interest from the menswear community. Ralph Lauren picked it up, and hosted a series of book events for it. 

That planted the seeds of starting my own brand. Something that was rooted in heritage, in classic British and American style, but didn’t put on airs. Starting, of course, with the blazer. I moved back to the US after handing in my thesis at Christmastime, and taught and coached at a boarding school in Massachusetts for the spring semester. I was asked to rejoin the national team that summer, so my Dead Poets Society career was short-lived. I raced at one final world championships in 2015, taking a bronze with my teammates in what was probably the highlight of my career. I had already started working on the brand as a side project, but moved to New York in 2016 to devote myself to it full-time, and launched the brand in 2017.

I try to avoid the word “preppy,” because it comes with so much baggage and means so many different things to so many different people. I think of Rowing Blazers as a design studio for the classics, dedicated to irreverence, authenticity, irony, inclusiveness, nostalgia, craftsmanship and tradition. I have very eclectic tastes—old, new, high, low, etc.—so I draw inspiration and influence from far-flung corners. The best way to see this is to look at my public Instagram moodboard, @rbmoodboard.

When I developed the brand, and when I design new products, of course you always hope people are going to get it. But you kind of never know. So it’s been very humbling to see the things we’re making, the collaborations we’re doing, and the brand as a whole being resonate with so many different people. What’s harder? Being blindsided. There are so many aspects to creating and running a business like this. You can do everything in your power to have all of them figured out—and you’ll still be blindsided, with both challenges and opportunities. Knowing how to adapt, something I learned from rowing and from being a coxswain, is probably the most valuable skill I have in this role. I also think I have a very eclectic sense of taste and style, and that’s served me well. 

My favorite pieces? It’s very hard to pick just one thing, and my “favorites” change all the time. At the moment I’ll say the fleeces we’ve just come out with—inspired by vintage jockey silks but rendered in a beautiful, deep-pile Sherpa fleece—are up there!