Vintage McGregor Drizzler Harrington Jacket Golf 80s

Golf produced this jacket twice, on two continents. Baracuta launched the G9 in Britain in 1938 — the G for golf, the 9 for the casual nine holes — and in 1949 McGregor answered from New York with the Scottish Drizzler, cut short for a full swing and light enough to keep swinging in. David D. Doniger had founded McGregor in 1921 importing Scottish flat caps to a city where every man still wore a hat. By the early fifties the company was the market leader in American casual sportswear, with Sam Snead among the golfers on its roster.

Then the name got permanently confused. “Harrington” has nothing to do with golf at all — it comes from Rodney Harrington, a character on the 1960s soap Peyton Place who was rarely seen out of a G9. Retailers began calling everything in the silhouette a Harrington, McGregor’s jacket included, and the label never came unstuck.

The point collar and its buttoned throat latch are the McGregor signature, the detail that separates a Drizzler from its British cousin. James Dean wore a red one in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, which is roughly the moment the style stopped belonging to golfers.

Seventy years of imitation and the original still reads correctly.