The Green Jacket has been golf’s ultimate symbol since 1949, but the story behind it runs far from Augusta and deeper into a chain of American factories that still make the game’s most recognizable prize. Since 1967, Hamilton Tailoring Company in Cincinnati has produced the jacket exclusively, stitching together a garment that champions receive first in a temporary size and later as a custom-made version.
The jacket’s details are precise. It is cut from tropical-weight wool in the trademarked Masters Green shade, made with brass buttons from Waterbury Button Co. in Connecticut and a breast-pocket patch stitched by A&B Emblem Co. in North Carolina. It takes roughly a month and about two and a half yards of fabric to make one, and the cost is about $250, a figure that helps explain why the jacket’s value has never been about its materials.
That value is measured in access and ritual. Only Augusta National Golf Club members and Masters Tournament champions may wear the Green Jacket, and members must keep theirs on the premises at all times. The first champion to receive one was Sam Snead in 1949, after previous winners were retroactively awarded jackets. Before that, Augusta’s earliest versions came from Brooks Uniform Company in New York in 1937, when the club bought the original jackets for members and later found them too thick and uncomfortable for Georgia heat.
The club has never made the jacket an ordinary piece of apparel, and it has been careful about what it says out loud. No one outside Augusta National’s senior leadership knows the full story of the blazer’s manufacturing history, specifications or costs, and the club has historically been reluctant to confirm those details on the record. That silence has only sharpened the jacket’s myth: for 76 years, it has remained golf’s most iconic prize and one of sports’ most recognizable trophies.
The contrast is part of what makes the Green Jacket endure. It is both fragile and formal, a carefully engineered piece of cloth that carries the weight of membership, history and winning. When Augusta hands it over, first temporarily and then by custom order, the club is not just fitting a champion. It is placing that player inside one of sport’s strictest traditions.
