The sweatshirt, born in the 1920s in the USA, was initially conceived as practical athletic wear by Benjamin Russell Jr., a football player discontented with itchy wool jerseys. Its comfortable cotton fleece soon attracted non-athletes, escalating its popularity in American colleges.

This sweatshirt, in a mid-weight 10oz. Loopwheel knitted cotton is a brushed loopback French Terry, making it warmer and softer than its un-brushed counterpart. Loopwheel machines on which this tubular constructed fabric is made, are renowned for their slow knitting pace, producing only a single meter of fabric per hour. However, this low thread tension technique is what sets them apart from contemporary manufacturing methods and creates an exceptional and distinctive fabric. The resulting material is reminiscent of hand-woven textiles and possesses a unique stretchy quality and washed look of old American sweatshirts that can only be reproduced on a loopwheel knitting machine. This loopwheel sweat is knitted in Wakayama, Japan, using extremely rare machines, known in Japan as Tsuriami-ki and even rarer skill and technique, exclusively for The Real McCoy’s.

Unlike mass-produced sweatshirts, The Real McCoy’s use different yarns across the layers of the sweat to achieve the optimal finish, density and comfort and like the best vintage sweatshirts, the gusset details featured here have been sewn in, whilst this is a time-consuming process, this adds a layer of reinforcement and prevents the neck from stretching as well as acting similarly to a sweatband.