Southern Accents: Wear Your Heritage

For many years, I’ve worn a number of various popular Southern brands. Being a Southerner myself, I always enjoyed the look and feelings these companies evoked by calling themselves “Southern,” and identifying with things that I’m passionate about and enjoy. Over time though, I started to notice an unmistakable trend.


These “Southern” brands all looked and felt the same, and it seemed (to me at least) that to them what it meant to be “Southern” was having the word “Southern” itself in their brand name, and inserting a design of bird dogs or beach life on a t-shirt. “Southern” seemed to be a catch-all phrase for the outdoors, fishing, hunting, the beach, good manners, bow ties, etc., but that’s where it ended.


As I continued to see this trend and tried to keep track in my head which brands had Labrador retrievers and which had short-haired pointers as their logos, I found myself wanting more. Where was the heritage? The tradition? Where was the acknowledgement of perhaps the South’s best quality; that “the old times there are not forgotten?” Had they been forgotten, after all?


After noticing this theme in the mainstream companies, I started to shift gears to try and find a brand (or brands) that acknowledged and remembered the past. It was hard, but I did find a few. Upon looking into them though, I noticed yet another pattern- these companies were all about remembering one single era in our history; The War of Northern Aggression.


Now, before I get anyone’s blood boiling on either side of the figurative aisle, I’ll go ahead and preface the rest of this article with an anecdote that I tell folks all the time about our brand- I love both bird dogs and Rebel Flags. My observations in the prior paragraphs are not criticisms or dislike for either, but rather what I simply saw as a massive gap in the messaging of the Southern clothing niche. Afterall, the South is more than bird dogs and hunting, and it's also more than just a single four year period. We have an all-encompassing culture, and a 400+ year history on this continent and beyond that all deserves remembering and recognition.


Our goal at Southern Accents is to bridge a gap. We want to close the void between brands that solely associate with culture, and those that only focus on heritage, but we also want to fill a void when it comes to messaging.


One of the few consistencies between the popular lifestyle brands and historical-centered brands is a desire to convey things like “authenticity,” “legacy,” or “heritage.” This in and of itself is very Southern, but we feel that what the brands are suggesting their customers cling to is sometimes either unclear or incomplete. The lifestyle brands want people to connect with a part of their family’s story that involves harvesting deer in the fall, sitting around the supper table, or flushing out a covey of Bob Whites. But how can they properly tell this story without a connection to the actual history, land, and people who came before them? When those things were necessary just to survive, and when family was all you had? Afterall, that's where those traditions come from. Conversely, the companies that connect us to a time when we were at war and took up arms to defend our families and our rights from 1861-1865, how can this be fully understood without the acknowledgement of those who came before them that instilled those values of personal and state freedom? To us, we feel that there is so much of the story left untold.


We want to be a voice against the tide, but also one that is unyieldingly positive. We have enough influential people out there who tell us what’s wrong with the world and why all is lost. We’d like to be a source of the opposite. We want to inspire, to start conversations, and to have influence within our society. We’ve lost so much ground over the past 160 years, but especially over the last 20-30 years, and if we’re going to restore what has been lost, it will take time, and it will take remembering who we are. Our hope is to play a small role in turning the tide, and getting back to the old paths.


At its core, our goal for Southern Accents is to be simply a normal Southern brand, but one that is not afraid of its own shadow. For too long, the South has been the proverbial whipping boy of America. A place blamed for all the ills, and never given any of the credit for helping to build our country. We’re out to change that, not by just reminding people of our Confederate heroes, but of all our heroes, from Jamestown on. We also want to acknowledge not just the individuals that make the South great, but also the other contributions that we have to be proud of. Music, food, literature, inventions, and so much more.

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We’re Southern Accents- A Southern brand with Accents from the past, and we’d love for you ​to come along for the ride with us and Wear Your Heritage.