The Guys Who Made Needlepoint an SEC Uniform Explain Why It’s So Frat-Coded

Everyone needs a way to keep their pants up, but a certain preppy subset of men—like boat-shoe-wearing frat bros and their ilk, as well as the country-club members they age into—has found a way to signal personal passions and organizational affiliations while doing so.

Enter the needlepoint belt, a colorful Waspy staple that might feature anything from a school mascot to a sailboat, a Grateful Dead dancing bear, an homage to a particular golf course, a pair of crossed hunting rifles, a cheeseburger, or thousands of other motifs. Once exclusively the domain of those who had a patient stitcher in their lives, often a girlfriend or doting grandmother, the heirlooms’ customization and creation can now be outsourced to companies like Smathers & Branson, a maker of needlepoint belts and accessories, founded in 2004 by a pair of Bowdoin College students who were both gifted belts by then girlfriends.

“I was just a 20-year-old kid given a neat little accessory with pink elephants and martinis on it—not my bag, but I wore it dutifully,” Austin Branson tells Vanity Fair of the birthday gift that would inspire his business. (That girlfriend, Maisie, is now his wife, and she still stitches as a hobby, occasionally creating samples for the company.)

“I had sailboats, kind of a coastal Maine scene,” Peter Carter (whose middle name, Smathers, gave the business the other half of its name) adds of his own original belt, which he was coincidentally gifted about six months later. (He is no longer in touch with his then girlfriend.) People would constantly stop the two on campus to marvel at the accessories. “When the two of us were together, it’d be like, ‘Those are really cool belts. Where can I get one?’”

Carter estimates some 30 to 40 hours of stitchwork per belt, not to mention the cost of materials and paying to have the intricately stitched canvas mounted on a high-quality leather belt, transforming it from handcraft to wearable accessory. In short, it wasn’t a casual project accessible to just anybody. Branson and Carter couldn’t just volunteer their partners to make them for their friends. But they could pay a group of artisans in Vietnam to do so, leading to the creation of Smathers & Branson in 2004.

The two frequented stitch shops and learned needlepoint, though neither, they admit, has ever finished a full belt or kept up with the practice, along with the ropes of launching their business. Branson, a government major with a minor in history, and Carter, an English major minoring in archaeology, initially pictured the belts as an ideal gift from universities to donors, an alternative to the chairs or class rings sometimes on offer. (One such chair was visible next to Branson on Zoom, who wore a polo shirt emblazoned with the Bowdoin lacrosse logo while speaking with VF.) Before they could obtain licenses from the schools, however, they had to prove their business model. They started off with more generic motifs, sailboats, golf clubs, and the like, and began selling in boutique stores and menswear specialty stores, dreaming up designs specific to particular golf courses or destinations as well.

About two years in, “there was so much interest from the Southern men’s stores, particularly, saying, ‘Look, I’m selling your belts well, but, you know, I could really sell a Clemson or a Georgia or University of Texas belt, very, very well,’” Carter recalls.

They built a book of business, proving that selling belts was a cinch, and went back to the schools for the licenses. Colleges, Greek organizations, pro sports franchises, bands, and more gave permission for the company to commit their emblems to needlepoint.

Now, Smathers & Branson offers not only belts, which can be customized with a multitude of emblems, but embroidered key tags, hats, leather drink koozies, and more. Though Bowdoin didn’t have a Greek system, the pair liken their college living situation to a frat house, and touted the belts’ appeal with golfers, campus dwellers, and more, with tales of men showing off their collections of belts.

Branson recalls “watching it [the belt trend] explode at the University of Georgia and Texas,” to name just two. “It’s just mind-blowing, the next level of enthusiasm and passion there is for the college experience everywhere.”

Though needlepoint belts remain an eye-catching niche accessory, their prevalence in the preppy-leaning sartorial taste of campus bros is unsurprising, Articles of Interest podcast host and creator Avery Trufelman tells VF. Trufelman produced a full season of her show around the idea of prep, the prevalence of which she attributes to it being a “sweet spot in the American dream.” In the U.S., there’s no formal class system, no monarchy. Dressing preppy, which evolved from the casual style of Princeton students who would play tennis and then—gasp!—stay in their tennis clothes rather than spiff up, is an accessible way to signal social rank, whether real or aspirational, and belonging.

Trufelman points to a certain IYKYK aspect of classic preppy brands, like J. Press, which never displays logos and instead may use a school’s colors in an article of clothing, for example, as a sort of dog whistle for other alums to pick up on. The Smathers & Branson co-founders, too, called out that their pieces display the wearer’s choice of emblems, rather than any company logo of their own, allowing them to be both a golf brand and a tailgating brand, for example.

Young women preparing for sorority recruitment are often advised to incorporate personal pieces into their looks to help them stand out; similarly, Trufelman points to items like the belts as a social bridge.

“That’s the fundamental thing about preppiness: It’s an institutional look. It’s about belonging,” she says. “Even if you don’t belong, it’s a way to look like you belong. It’s a way to look like you went to these schools. It’s a way to look like you go to these clubs.”

And, though Smathers & Branson belts aren’t necessarily made by a college girlfriend, they are handstitched and heirloom quality. Branson shows off a keytag with a stitched depiction of a golden retriever, his childhood dog, that he’s carried for 20 years. “This is a sample, I think, from one of the first batches that we did,” he says. “It has been really loved.”

The idea that a young man may be able to inherit his father’s needlepoint belt the same way he might wear a luxury watch passed down to him is part of the company’s success with the preppy set.

“The men’s space that we operate in doesn’t change [in the same way as] high-end women’s fashion,” Carter says. “Some of our best-selling patterns, like American flags or dogs, although we do change them from year to year, they don’t change that dramatically. I think that’s the same thing kind of within frat life, and then collegiate stuff, the game day clothes, they don’t change necessarily.”

“It’s a classic, traditional men’s look that evolves,” Branson adds. “The shape of a khaki pant changes, the fit the guys are wearing different years change, but the same basic look is consistent. While I don’t think of ourselves necessarily as, like, a Greek business necessarily, we fit into that as an element of what that customer, that demographic, has probably worn since the ‘60s.”