Au Coton pastels

Fashion Synopsis

Founded in 1980, this Canadian company with the French name was sooooo eighties. Those label-happy days brought big, oversized pastel colored sweatshirts with ‘Au-Coton’ stamped boldly front and center.

The company offered a variety of cotton knit garments, from leggings to t-shirts to tank tops to the ever-popular sweatshirt. Today, Au Coton’s retail stores only exist in Canada, but thanks to mail order, those pastel colors and French Canadian logos can still be splashed across the duds of anyone, anywhere.

Even through decades of social change and fashion metamorphosis, the tradition-bound letterman style remained largely the same. Sweaters mostly gave way to more rugged, tough-guy-looking jackets with wool torsos and leather sleeves, but the honor remained the same. High school boys still passed their sweat-earned bounty on to their girlfriends, but thanks to gender-equity laws in school sports, many of those girls were earning letters of their own, thank you very much.