Duck Head

Duck Head is a brand name for clothing and shoes in the United States. First registered as a trademark in the late 19th century, the name has been used by several different manufacturers and retailers of apparel, primarily in the southern United States. Duck Head apparel had a period of great popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Duck Head brand was founded in 1865 in Nashville, Tennessee by George and Joe O'Bryan, two brothers who were buying surplus U.S. Army tent material. The material was a heavy canvas known as "duck", and the brothers began making work pants and shirts out of the strong material. Their company became known as the O’Bryan Brothers Manufacturing Company. The brothers sought to register the name "Duck" as a trademark in 1892, but the U.S. Trademark Registration Office rejected their application because the term was in general use. They registered the trademark "Duck Head" instead. The company operated into the late 20th century, producing work clothing such as overalls and denim jackets under the Duck Head brand.

In 1978, David Baseheart, the O'Bryan Company's sales director, developed an idea that quickly converted Duck Head into a fashionable brand. Baseheart fashioned a shipment of cotton khaki fabric into dress pants, applied the mallard logo to a bright yellow tag on the back of the pants, and went on the road to sell them, visiting first the University of Mississippi campus bookstore where he sold his first batch of the new Duck Head khakis. The pants sold out quickly, and a new southern U.S. trend was born. Soon, and throughout the 1980s, Duck Head khakis were standard in Southern fashion, leading a writer for Forbes magazine to observe some years later: "For a preppy southern college guy in the 1980s, Duck Head Apparel khakis were as indispensable as a pair of worn Topsiders and a pink Polo shirt."

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