Men's Van Heusen Fashion Brand

Van Heusen is the V letter's dress-shirt brand: dress shirts, pants and ties are its products, and a shirtmaker's history is what this page tells. The brand is partly named after Dutch immigrant John Manning Van Heusen, who in 1910 invented a new process that fused cloth on a curve. That single invention - cloth fused on a curve, the technical heart of a shirt collar - is the contribution the name on the label commemorates, and it comes first in the brand's history.

The company behind the label has the longer story: two immigrant shirt businesses that eventually joined. The history of Phillips-Van Heusen (PVH) goes back in part to Dramin Jones, a Prussian immigrant who founded the shirt manufacturing company D. Jones & Sons around 1857. Separately, in 1881, Moses Phillips and his wife Endel began sewing shirts by hand and selling them from pushcarts to local anthracite coal-miners in Pottsville, Pennsylvania - a business that grew into a shirt business in New York City.

Phillips-Jones, the Van Heusen Line and the PVH Name

D. Jones & Sons merged with M. Phillips & Sons in 1907 under the name Phillips-Jones, after Dramin Jones's death in 1903. Later Isaac Phillips met John Van Heusen, resulting both in their most popular line of shirts - Van Heusen - and in the subsequent acquisition of Van Heusen by Phillips-Jones and its renaming to Phillips-Van Heusen in 1957. In 2011, Phillips-Van Heusen was renamed to PVH. Three name changes across a century, because for a shirt brand the corporate name is part of the garment's own label history.

Today, Van Heusen is a part of PVH Corporation. PVH Corp., formerly known as the Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, is an American clothing company which owns brands such as Van Heusen and many other popular brand names. This page links to the directory's PVH company profile, so a reader researching the shirt label can move directly to the parent company.

What the Van Heusen Record Tells a Buyer

For a researcher, the useful sequence in this record is the order of events: a collar process in 1910, two nineteenth-century shirt businesses, a 1907 merger, a popular shirt line that became important enough to rename the whole company in 1957, and a short modern name, PVH, in 2011. A vintage Van Heusen shirt sits somewhere along that line, and the label wording - Phillips-Jones, Phillips-Van Heusen or PVH - is the dating evidence this chronology lets you use.

The men's range itself is dress shirts first, with pants and ties completing the office wardrobe the label is filed under in this directory. The brand's official site is linked in References below, and the profile's links lead to men's clothing stores, wholesalers, menswear buyers and men's fashion news, so the shirt history stays connected to the trade pages around it.

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