Generra Men's Fashion Brand

Generra Clothing was one of the must-have brands of the late 1980s. Generra Sportswear Co. had originally been founded as a men's sportswear distributor and importer in Seattle in 1980. Note the starting trade: not a design studio and not a factory, but a distributor and importer of men's sportswear, based in Seattle. The company was sold to Texas-based Farah Manufacturing Co. in 1984 and bought back by its founders in 1989 - a five-year detour into a larger Texas manufacturer, ended by the founders taking their own company back at the end of the decade.

That buy-back date matters. The brand's must-have years and its independence coincide: the founders recovered Generra in 1989, at the height of its must-have era, and the product that made the name famous belongs to that same window. A researcher reading a Generra label should therefore hold three facts together - Seattle origin in 1980 as a distributor and importer, the Farah sale of 1984, and the founders' buy-back of 1989 - because the three form one sequence.

Hypercolor: The Product That Carried the Name

Hypercolor was a line of clothing, mainly T-shirts and shorts, that changed color with heat. They were manufactured by Generra Sportswear Company of Seattle and marketed in the United States as Generra Hypercolor or Generra Hypergrafix and elsewhere as Global Hypercolor. The product had three market names and two garment families: Hypercolor and Hypergrafix at home, Global Hypercolor abroad, on T-shirts and shorts above all. The color change itself came from chemistry, not from the cloth alone: the garments contained a thermochromic pigment made by Matsui Shikiso Chemical of Japan, that changed between two colors - one when cold, one when warm.

Read carefully, the Hypercolor story is a supply-chain story as much as a fashion one. A Seattle sportswear company, founded to distribute and import, put a Japanese chemical company's thermochromic pigment into basic warm-weather garments and sold the effect under different names in different markets. For a man researching vintage Generra today, the identification test is this: a genuine period piece is a T-shirt or shorts garment whose surface shifts between two colors with heat, from the years when Generra Sportswear Company of Seattle manufactured the line.

Bankruptcy, the Holding Company and Public Clothing

The brand's afterlife runs as a chain of rights. Public Clothing Company (PCC) acquired all rights to Generra. New York-based Public Clothing Co. has acquired the trademark from Seattle-based Generra Holding Co., a licensing operation founded after the brand's bankruptcy in 1994. The sequence is worth keeping straight: the operating brand went through a bankruptcy in 1994; a Seattle-based holding company, Generra Holding Co., was founded after that bankruptcy as a licensing operation; and the New York-based Public Clothing Company acquired the trademark from it, taking all rights to Generra. The name thus passed from making clothes to licensing a mark to holding a trademark - the common end-of-century path of a famous 1980s label.

Generra, under G in the Men's Fashion Brands directory: a Seattle men's sportswear distributor and importer founded in 1980, sold to Farah Manufacturing Co. in 1984, bought back by its founders in 1989, remembered as one of the must-have brands of the late 1980s and as the maker of Hypercolor - heat-changing T-shirts and shorts using Matsui Shikiso Chemical's thermochromic pigment - whose trademark passed after the 1994 bankruptcy through Generra Holding Co. to Public Clothing Company. No official brand site is listed for Generra.