Champion

Champion was founded in 1919 in Rochester, New York by Simon and William Feinbloom as a small US athletic-apparel manufacturer specifically focused on producing heavyweight cotton sweatshirts, hoodies, and athletic wear for the American collegiate sports community. The brand has been continuously credited with inventing the modern hooded sweatshirt — the iconic Champion hoodie was originally developed in the 1930s as a hood-added athletic-pullover for outdoor practice in cold weather — making Champion one of the founding companies of the entire modern hoodie-and-sweatshirt category. The Champion vocabulary settled around several specific products: the iconic Champion Reverse Weave heavyweight cotton sweatshirt (the brand's defining product since the 1930s — with the iconic side-panel reverse-weave construction that prevents vertical shrinkage), the Champion Pullover Hoodie (the defining 1930s-pattern hoodie), various athletic-derived tees and tanks, the long-running Champion Authentic collegiate-sports apparel programme, and a colour palette anchored to heather-grey (the iconic Champion color), washed-navy, oxblood, ecru, military-olive, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated college-aesthetic red-and-yellow combinations. Champion is owned by HanesBrands Inc. (NYSE: HBI), the publicly-listed American athletic-apparel conglomerate that has held the brand since 1989. The brand operates approximately 200 retail flagship stores globally — with particularly strong representation in the US, Japan, Europe, and the broader collegiate-and-athletic-streetwear specialty retailer network. The brand has done extensive collaborations including Champion × Beams Plus, Champion × Wood Wood, Champion × Carhartt WIP, Champion × Stüssy, Champion × Supreme, Champion × Bape, Champion × Norse Projects, Champion × Heron Preston, and dozens of others. The Reverse Weave hoodie remains one of the defining products of American athletic-apparel heritage.