Books: Rowing Blazers by Jack Carlson
Cloth, Colour and the Coxswain
The blazer has a surprisingly traceable textile origin, though few who wear one know the story. Jack Carlson does — and his lavishly illustrated book Rowing Blazers, first published in 2014, is a definitive account of that origin story.
Rowing Blazers by Jack Carlson
The blazer, it turns out, begins not in a Savile Row workshop but on the riverbanks of Cambridge. It was there, in the early nineteenth century, that oarsmen began pulling on unlined wool flannel jackets to jog down to training or warm up in the boat before a race.
A selection of Rowing Club blazer badges, as featured in the pages of the book.
These were working garments in the most elemental sense: practical, unvented, patch-pocketed, and made up in the colours of their respective boat clubs or colleges. One particularly vivid example, the scarlet jacket of Lady Margaret Boat Club, was so striking it acquired a nickname: a blazer. The word stuck, and the garment went with it, travelling from the river into the collegiate quad, the club room, and eventually the wider world of dress.
Members of the Shanghai Rowing Club in their signature green and white striped blazers, as featured in the pages of 'Rowing Blazers'
Carlson, a former coxswain on the US national rowing team and a D.Phil archaeologist from Oxford, came to this material with the instincts of both a scholar and a practitioner. While researching the book, he accumulated a collection of vintage rowing blazers and studied them closely for their construction, hand-finished interiors, and unlined backs with beautifully finished seams. What he found was that the authentic blazer, as a textile object, had been somewhat forgotten. Modern versions had grown linings, gained vents borrowed from riding coats, and lost the careful handwork that gave the originals their character.
"Henley Regatta", captured by Slim Aarons in 1955, is featured in the book. The image depicts spectators in traditional boating blazers and straw boater hats at the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta on the River Thames.
Rowing Blazers sets the record straight through archival photography, vintage ephemera, and portraits of rowers at their boathouses and club rooms. From Oxford and Cambridge to the Netherlands, South Africa, New Zealand, and beyond, the images (many by photographer F.E. Castleberry) capture the extraordinary variety of striped, piped, badged, and trimmed wool flannel blazers still worn at regattas today. Each one is a textile document, encoding club colours, institutional history, and community belonging in its very structure.
U.S.R. Triton badge, sewn loyally onto a rowing blazer, as featured within the book.
What makes the book so compelling is that Carlson never lets the cloth drift out of view. Behind the crests and the ceremony, the fabric sets the pace — wool flannel in boldly dyed stripes, metal buttons on patch pockets, braid trim at the edges, each detail pulling its weight. These garments carry the same weight as the traditions they represent, stitched through with meaning.
For readers who want to explore the world of boating attire further, Selvedge Issue 131, Flow, takes an equally deep dive into the textile traditions of the water.
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Further Information:
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Image Credits:
Lead: De La Petrillo Foster of the Row New York Rowing Club, photographed by Samuel Hardeman for Rowing Blazers.
All further images as credited in captions.