The band name was a fluke. Looking to cash in on the burgeoning surf culture in the United States, the record executive who first brought Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine together on the obscure Candix Records label in Southern California wanted to call the assembled musicians “The Surfers.’’
But another group, as it happened, had already claimed the name. And then there was an additional problem: only one of the band members, Dennis Wilson, actively surfed.
And so, as Brian Wilson — the architect of the band’s sound and image, whose death, at 82, was announced by his family on Wednesday — tweeted back in 2018, the promoter Russ Regan “changed our name to the Beach Boys.” He added that the group members themselves found out only after they saw their first records pressed.
Originally, the band had another name. It was one that speaks not only to the aural backdrop the Beach Boys provided for generations but also to their enduring influence on global style. As teenagers in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the band had styled itself the Pendletones. It was a homage to what was then, and in some ways still is, an unofficial uniform of Southern California surfers: swim trunks or notch pocket khakis or white jeans, and a blazing white, ringspun cotton T-shirt worn under a sturdy woolen overshirt.
The shirts the Pendletones wore were produced by the family-owned company, Pendleton Woolen Mills of Portland, Ore., and had been in production since 1924. The shirts were embraced by surfers for their over-the-top durability and the easy way they bridged the intersection between work and leisure wear. The blue and gray block plaid, which Pendleton would later rename as the “Original Surf Plaid,’’ was worn by every member of the Beach Boys on the cover of their debut album, “Surfin’ Safari.” It was a look that, novel then, has since been quoted in some form by men’s wear designers from Hedi Slimane to Eli Russell Linnetz and Ralph Lauren.
“The Beach Boys made it all seem so effortless,” said Todd Snyder, the Iowa-born men’s wear designer who has successfully essayed on American style idioms since founding his label in 2001 (so much so that his business was acquired by the fashion giant American Eagle and posted revenues, according to The Wall Street Journal, of $100 million in 2023.)
“They were always iconic, always cool in a way the Japanese and the Europeans eventually picked up on,” Mr. Snyder said.
For that matter, designers in search of inspiration might seek out images of them dressed in Pendletons, worn blazer-style atop white button-downs with skinny ties, for a 1962 performance at U.C.L.A.’s Dykstra Hall. It was just a week after that image was captured that the band shed the ties, white socks and black loafers to become the Beach Boys, memorialized in barefoot images shot in Malibu by the photographer Ken Veeder.
Even the forelock that Mr. Wilson perfected in those early years (and that his hunkier brother, Dennis, styled across his forehead like a surf-god comb over) seems prophetic. It is the clear progenitor of the swoop recently favored by what seemed to be every male adolescent on the planet.
Like all seemingly simple acts of creation, the Beach Boys’ look required time and deliberation. In the decades since that first album was released, the group went on to sell over 100 million records worldwide, have 36 songs on the U.S. Top 40, have four No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on the first vote in 1988. What is more difficult to quantify, yet obvious, is the imprint they left on the world of what easy Southern California living looked like.
“Practically everything they represented in style became part of the culture,” said Sebastian Dollinger, creative director of the revived American heritage men’s wear label Robert Talbott.
“It wasn’t just Brian’s original surfer style — although that was a big part of it,” Mr. Dollinger said. “It was the way they brought playfulness to all their looks in every era.”
Playfulness, however, should not be mistaken for offhandedness, according to Nick Duzan, the writer of BAMF Style, an exhaustively researched blog devoted to men’s wear and its minutiae.
“Related not lazy, casual but not tacky,” Mr. Duzan said, adding that Brian Wilson’s style came across cool, without seeming as premeditated as that of style paragons like Steve McQueen.
“Like the music,” he said. “It seems deceptively simple at first.”
As with his disarmingly straightforward pop hits, the complex dimensions that went into Brian Wilson’s image are so subtle they seem to have been there all along.
Guy Trebay is a reporter for the Style section of The Times, writing about the intersections of style, culture, art and fashion.
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