Elliot Gant, the last...

...of the founders of the company that made Gant shirts, died at age 89.

From his obit in the Times:

Beginning in the late 1940s, Martin and Elliot Gantmacher popularized the button-down shirt as a de rigueur garment for Ivy League and Madison Avenue men. They were so taken with their success, in fact, that not long after their company was rebranded Gant in 1949, the brothers adopted the label as their surname.

The Gants did not invent the button-down; the venerable Brooks Brothers haberdashery had borrowed the style from British polo players decades earlier, and it had been romanticized here and there in popular culture.

It's hard to overstate what a big deal Gant was when I was growing up in the 1970s.