Banana Republic

Banana Republic opened in 1978 in Mill Valley, California, founded by Mel and Patricia Ziegler, a reporter and illustrator who had both quit the San Francisco Chronicle and started the business with $1,500 and an American Express card.

The original shop sold restyled military surplus, British Burma jackets, photojournalist vests, gurkha shorts, and paratrooper briefcases pitched through hand-drawn catalogs filled with travelogue copy. Mel Ziegler later said that the brand “has long been to khaki what Levi’s was to denim,” a description that stuck through the next two decades.

Menswear was central from the start, built around the Zieglers’ own safari and travel aesthetic and aimed at a 25-to-44-year-old professional who wanted something between workwear and adventure gear. The early range covered cotton canvas bush jackets with four pockets and epaulets, chino trousers, natural-fiber shirting, and accessories tied to the travel theme.

Gap Inc. acquired the company in 1983, when Banana Republic had five California stores and $10 million in annual sales, and after the Zieglers left in 1988, the safari concept was phased out in favor of khaki, suiting, and office-ready separates.

That repositioned Banana Republic alongside J.Crew, Brooks Brothers, and Ralph Lauren as one of the American labels that defined the reasonably priced office wardrobe through the 1990s and 2000s. The brand made khaki its signature product, a position Levi’s held for denim.

Under Gap Inc., Banana Republic moved through a series of creative leads before settling into its current premium lifestyle positioning, with Mark Breitbard taking the CEO role in 2017 before being promoted to lead Gap Brand in 2020. The company brought in Zac Posen as executive vice president and creative director of Gap Inc. in 2024, making him the first fashion-industry creative lead at the portfolio level in over a decade.

Today Banana Republic dresses the affluent, professional menswear shopper through tailoring, cashmere knits, leather outerwear, and travel-inflected separates, sitting at the upper end of Gap Inc.’s four-brand portfolio. It occupies the accessible luxury space between the mall and the department store, a position it has held since its rebuild in the late 1980s.