The inspiration for this first jeans-only store came from Donald Fisher’s frustrations as a consumer: he was finding jeans hard to shop for, having to travel to several different stores to examine a variety of brands because no one location housed them all. The retailer took its name in homage to “the generation gap,” a term popular in the late 1960s describing the intellectual, ethical, and social gulf between young people and their parents’ generation.
was founded in 1969 by Donald and Doris Fisher as a single store staffed by a handful of employees. Yesterday, I heard this one: The GAP was started by a gay man and the name means Gay And Proud.Īlthough The Gap did begin in San Francisco, a city home to a large homosexual population and strongly associated with gay pride, its name has nothing to do with either of those coincident facts. Akin to the Troop Sport (“To Rule Over Oppressed People”) and Adidas (“All Day I Dream About Sex”) canards, the rumor about The Gap asserts that it drew its name from an initialization of the phrase “Gay And Proud”: Once again the search for hidden meanings in the mundane has resulted in an interesting rumor about the supposedly acronymic origins of the name of a popular attirer.
