Vintage Jerzees Girls Track & Field Winged Foot Sweatshirt Made in USA - Yellow

Measured flat: chest 42 (21 pit to pit), waist 34, length 24, sleeve 21.5, shoulder 20. Note the eight inches between chest and waist - most sweatshirts hang straight, and this one draws in at the hem, so it reads as shaped rather than boxy.

Modern size: Fits like a modern Women's L or Men's M.

Condition is good: faded and soft. The colour has gone gentle rather than patchy and the cloth has given up all its stiffness.

GIRLS is printed right on the front. American girls' school athletics expanded enormously after Title IX passed in 1972 - the law that barred sex discrimination in federally funded education, and with it the quiet assumption that school sport was for boys. A girls' team with its own kit, its own colours and its own name across the chest, a decade later, is what that change looked like from the inside. Somebody wanted it on the front rather than the back.

Jerzees puts a floor under it: 1984. Russell Corporation started in a small Alabama town in 1902 and launched Jerzees in 1984, taking the quality of its Russell Athletic performance kit into a casual line. The label did not exist before that year, so neither did this sweatshirt. Made in USA sets the other end of it loosely, before American production went offshore.

The winged foot is track and field's emblem, and it is older than the sport. It is the talaria - the winged sandals of Hermes, Mercury to the Romans, the god who carried good news and carried it fast. It has meant one thing for a century: speed.

One of one. Sold as found.

No returns - as is.