In 1816 the Auburn Prison was founded in the homonymous city of the United States in the State of New York.
Conceived on the basis of the ideas of the time about the treatment of prisoners – known today as the Auburn System, a penal method that required prisoners to pay their debt to society through manual outdoor work – it was the first correctional institution that printed on prison uniforms the words “Property of”, obviously in this case these two words were followed by the name of the prison. This gimmick was designed to emphasize that inmates were no longer to be considered as individuals but as property of the state.

This type of system was abandoned but Auburn continued to be used as a maximum security prison for many years.

The jump out of the prisons of the “Property of” logo came thanks to American colleges, before becoming mainstream.
In the United States, sport at university level has always had an importance in some cases even greater than the professional one – just think of the enormous emphasis that is given to March Madness and then the Final Four in college basketball – so emphasizing the belonging to one or another college was of vital importance. Precisely for this reason all American universities, at the beginning of the 20th century, equipped their athletes with sweatshirts, and further on with letterman jackets (the classic American varsity school jackets) with the words “Property Of” + name of the university, just like Auburn’s prison uniforms.

This item immediately became the top item of university sportswear and soon all the students on the various campuses wore the sweatshirts of their home college. 

This was the first real step towards a mainstream diffusion of the “Property Of” logo.

In 1965, The Beatles in the film, HELP!, directed by American director Richard Lester, John Lennon wears a longsleeve with “Property of Her Majesty’s Prison – Nassau” with a character similar to those used by colleges. 

In the ’60s, in fact, young university students were the trendsetters and guided the tastes and fashion trends. As a result, college items briefly became very sought after and popular also thanks to television and cinema, creating this sort of intersection between sport, education and fashion.

Moving forward in time, we arrive until the 90s where vintage American clothing, and especially that related to collegiate sports, dominated the fashion scene thanks to a basic aesthetic and many bootleg products around the world.
One of the most famous and iconic is certainly the one worn by Mike Tyson while preparing his meeting with Buster Mathis Jr. in 1995: a blue sweatshirt with the print “Property of Allah”.

To understand the evolution and widespread success of “Property of” clothing, we borrow the words of Deirdre Clemente, fashion historian specializing in American culture and Associate Professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas: “The modern casual American wardrobe was born in the classrooms, dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses, and gyms of universities and colleges across the country. As young people gained increasing social and cultural clout during the early twentieth century, their tastes transformed mainstream fashion from collared and corseted to comfortable”.