During the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Summer Olympics last month, Team Haiti turned heads as it floated down the Seine clad in uniforms created by Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean. While the colorful ensembles earned high marks from head-to-toe , it was the male athletes’ powder-blue guayabera jackets that truly stole the show. There’s a case to be made that the multi-pocketed garment, previously associated with old men in straw hats across the former Spanish Empire, is now truly entering the mainstream, with American retailers from Brooks Brothers to Ralph Lauren stocking their own iterations.
Tweedy English shirtmaker Drake’s , best-known for its oxford-cloth button-downs, has even joined the fray. “We kept true to the formula: a loose fit, four-pocket front, a straight hemline. But we did away with the embroidery, swapped the camp collar for a spread one, and topped things off with our fish-eye mother of pearl buttons—an updated take on a high summer staple,” Drake’s creative director Michael Hill says of the label’s guayabera-inspired Cuban shirt.
Fayad & Co . founder Andre Fayad, whose Miami-based business does a brisk trade in bespoke guayaberas , likens the style ’s current position to where the Western shirt had been several seasons ago. “Look at where Western shirts are now,” he tells Robb Report.
“You didn’t see that before and now they’re everywhere.” But with the style’s raised profile comes questions of authenticity. In Faya.