When Quaker Marine Supply opens its second retail location this weekend on Bleecker Street near Broadway in Manhattan, the chore jackets and toggle coats on the racks will likely feel as familiar as they are novel. That’s the genius of this brand. The company has been around since 1949, when Joe Kadison, a Coast Guard veteran home from war, opened a shop in Philadelphia selling line, shackles, buoys and other hardware of the life aquatic. Now multiple generations – Boomers, Gen Xers, even Gen Zers with chowder obsessions – are finding their way to QMS, whether as “wharfcore,” “coastal grandma” style, or simply “the real thing.”
The brand started showing up in my feed a few years ago and I couldn’t resist its particular strain of seaworthy charms. These are clothes that look like they belong to someone who maintains a shiny wooden boat and never needs a weather app. And yet, they’re also chic and well-made enough to snazz up a going-out look in Los Angeles. The Bluffton straw hat I ordered has become my signature. Strangers comment on it everywhere. In Montevideo, Uruguay, a man crossed the street just to ask where I got it.
That kind of pull isn’t new. Starting in the 1960s, QMS’s long-billed canvas caps, the Swordfish and the Oysterman, became part of the uniform for people who spent serious time outdoors. Abercrombie & Fitch, then the outfitter to actual adventurers, carried them, and Ernest Hemingway wore his Oysterman while duck hunting in Idaho and fishing off Cuba and Key West. Lately, Ellen DeGeneres has been photographed in a QMS polo, and Severance star Adam Scott has talked the brand up on social media.
From Hemingway To Brooklyn Hipsters
Like a lot of heritage labels, Quaker Marine eventually faded, until Kevin McLaughlin—co-founder of the preppy retailer J. McLaughlin and a five-decade menswear veteran who knew Kadison personally—bought and relaunched it in 2018, and now runs it out of a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Managing director Ethan Lauer gives the brand its voice, particularly online, where a new generation is discovering a catalog as cozy as a Chilmark fireplace after the daytrippers leave…