The History of OG-107 Fatigue Pants: Pockets, Paperwork and the Laundry

THE HISTORY OF · CHAPTER 04

A colour number became a menswear name. Behind it are two very large pockets, several different uniforms and an Army laundry machine with ambitions.

OG-107 fatigue pants are easy trousers to like. Big pockets, a straightforward leg and green cotton that gets on with the rest of your wardrobe. They have enough going on to be interesting without making you dress as though you are reporting for duty.

The history gets a bit less straightforward. “OG-107” turns up on utility clothing, tropical combat clothing and even the background of insignia. A photograph taken in Vietnam does not automatically show jungle trousers. And the familiar story about men's fatigues leaves out a rather different timetable for women.

So, before we get to the 11.6oz cotton sateen fatigue pants in the HSS shop, let’s follow the paperwork. It takes us from denim work uniforms to patch pockets, helicopter maintenance and, unexpectedly, the wash.

OG-107 is a colour, not a model year

Start with the name. OG-107 means olive green, shade 107. It is a colour designation. It does not mean a 1907 design, the 107th version of a pair of trousers or a particularly demanding number of pockets.

In clothing discussions, the name has become useful shorthand for the plain green cotton utility uniform associated with the US Army in the 1950s and 1960s. The same shade also appeared on other Army clothing, so the colour number alone only takes us so far.

The Army’s Survey of U.S. Army Uniforms, Weapons and Accoutrements, compiled by David Cole, gives unusually precise dates. It dates the introduction of the olive green cotton utility uniform to 1952, with the jacket specification issued on 30 August and the trousers specification on 21 November 1952. Production began in 1953.

That is why “introduced in 1952” and “made from 1953” can both be sensible descriptions. The drawing board, the contract and the clothing store do not all move on the same afternoon.

The same survey describes a gradual replacement of the earlier herringbone twill uniform. Older clothing remained part of the changeover; the specification date was the beginning of a process.

Before olive green, there was blue denim

The OG-107 story has an older work-clothes chapter. According to the Army survey’s account of the Second World War uniform, the Army announced in May 1941 that it would phase out its blue denim fatigue uniform and replace it with olive drab herringbone twill, usually shortened to HBT.

Herringbone is the weave with the little reversing diagonal pattern. In the 1941 uniform, it was intended for both fatigue duties and field use. The division between “clothes for doing jobs” and “clothes for going into the field” was not a neat line.

The HBT uniform then changed during the war. A revised jacket appeared in November 1942, and the cloth moved to the darker olive drab shade 7 in March 1943. Those are useful reminders that “the old green uniform” was already a moving target before OG-107 came along.

There is a nice connection here with our history of jeans and history of chore coats. Military clothing and civilian workwear were dealing with plenty of the same unglamorous problems: covering people, giving them somewhere to put things and surviving another working day.

The Army’s denim uniform was not simply a pair of modern five-pocket jeans in uniform. Nor was the later cotton sateen utility uniform just HBT with a new name. Weave, colour and garment pattern are separate parts of the story. Treat them as one thing and the dates quickly stop making sense.

The sateen story: smooth cloth, hard work

Sateen had a civilian life long before it became associated with green Army trousers. Kate Heintz Watson’s 1907 textbook, Textiles and Clothing, describes cotton sateen as a soft, glossy cloth used for linings. Her readers were learning about dressmaking, fabric selection and household sewing. Nobody needed a field exercise to find a use for it.

What makes cotton sateen different?

Start with the threads. The warp runs lengthways through woven cloth; the weft runs across it. In a plain weave, each thread takes a regular over-one, under-one route. In the satin weave family, threads travel over several others before interlacing again. These longer stretches are called floats.

That arrangement puts more uninterrupted yarn on the surface, giving it a smoother appearance. Cotton sateen commonly has a weft-dominant face. It can have a gentle sheen without containing silk or looking like an evening gown. The yarns, density and finishing help determine whether the result feels like a soft lining or substantial workwear. Cotton Incorporated’s weave guide explains the underlying construction.

Herringbone makes its reversing diagonals part of the fabric’s appearance. Sateen’s longer surface floats give us a different texture to look at and handle. The old illustration above makes those longer surface threads easy to see, without asking anyone to memorise a loom diagram.

George Leland Hunter’s Decorative Textiles, published in 1918, puts sateen beside denim in a plate of actual fabric surfaces. There is a small historical wrinkle here: Hunter describes his particular sateen as a four-over, one-under twill with a satiny surface. Period trade names were not always as tidy as a modern weave chart. This is a civilian textile example, rather than a diagram of a later Army specification.

The Army tried it in the rain, then put it through its paces

The military sateen story also starts before the 1952 utility uniform. A November 1944 report from the Army’s Climatic Research Laboratory summarises tests of winter combat clothing with sateen outer garments against an otherwise similar HBT version.

In those tests, the researchers found no real difference in thermal protection between the two assemblies. In most of the artificial-rain tests, however, the sateen assembly gave better protection against moisture. These were particular winter clothing systems under controlled conditions. It does not make every pair of cotton sateen trousers waterproof, but it shows how closely the Army was already comparing the fabrics.

The move into fatigue clothing becomes especially interesting in a small newspaper report. On 22 March 1951, The Munday Times carried an Army announcement about a new cotton sateen developed by the Quartermaster Corps with the textile industry. It had been tested in laboratories, on the combat course at Fort Lee and by troops in the field.

The detail worth a second look is which side did best. The report says the reverse face of the material had the greatest resistance to abrasion, with reported wearing quality nearly twice that of HBT. That is a result reported for the cloth being tested, rather than a promise that any fabric sold as sateen will last twice as long.

The Quartermaster Corps planned to buy 15 million yards. Even then, the new fatigue clothing was to wait until existing HBT supplies had been used up. A promising test result still had to get past a warehouse full of perfectly serviceable uniforms.

The cloth that passed the specification and upset the sewing machines

Production brought another problem. The 1961 court decision in Topkis Brothers v. United States records contracts awarded in December 1951 for a million field jackets, using government-supplied 8.5oz cotton sateen in olive drab shade 7.

When the first cloth arrived in February 1952, it met the fabric specification but had such a hard, inflexible finish that it caused trouble on the sewing line. Edges failed to fold properly. Threads broke. Needles overheated. The repair department grew from two operators to as many as thirty or forty.

A softer sateen shipment and a substituted HBT shipment caused no sewing difficulties. The court concluded that the troublesome cloth was not reasonably suitable for mass production, despite meeting its specification.

This was a field-jacket contract, but it is a revealing part of the wider Army sateen story. “Cotton sateen” did not describe one fixed feel or one guaranteed result. Finishing could make the difference between a useful fabric and a very long afternoon at a sewing machine.

Our 11.6oz cotton sateen fatigue pants belong to the modern workwear interpretation of this history. Their weight and structured feel are features of this particular pair. The old records give us a better appreciation of the cloth, without turning a modern product description into a claim of military-specification identity.

Big pockets, but not the whole luggage system

The front patch pockets are the bit most people recognise. “Patch” is a fairly literal description: the pocket is formed by a separate piece of cloth sewn onto the outside of the trousers. On this familiar style, you can follow the pocket’s outline down the front of the leg.

They give the trousers much of their character. There is a broad area of visible cloth, a sloping opening for the hand and no large bellows pocket hanging from each thigh. It is a useful, uncluttered arrangement for modern life, even if your most demanding cargo is a phone and a scrunched-up shopping list.

Military photographs add something that a neatly laid-out pair of trousers cannot: all the other kit.

This Natick photograph, dated 10 November 1970, is catalogued as Load carrying equipment on G. I. The trousers sit underneath a belt, pouches and a substantial pack. They were one part of a carrying arrangement, not the entire arrangement.

The Army survey’s account of M-1956 load-carrying equipment lists a belt and suspenders alongside ammunition cases, a canteen cover, first-aid pouch and a field pack. Those trousers had plenty of help carrying the load. The photograph above is catalogued more broadly, without identifying a particular equipment system.

A work uniform had plenty of ordinary work to do

The quieter photographs are often the most revealing. Take the out-processing centre at Phu Bai, photographed in February 1972. The job is paperwork. A typist helps members of the 101st Airborne Division while forms and folders take up most of the desk.

The standing figure gives us a view of the broad front patch pocket; the desk gives us the reason for being there. There was a lot of ordinary work to be done in these clothes.

Another Army photograph records crew chief James M. Ralph working on the tail rotor assembly of a UH-1D helicopter in March 1966. The original caption describes cleaning the rear rotor drive shaft and checking seals during daily maintenance. Here, clothing belongs to a job involving machinery, repeated checks and hands-on work.

Maintenance and administration are easy to overlook in a clothing history. These photographs put them back in view, with a typewriter at one end and a helicopter at the other.

Utility fatigues and jungle trousers are different things

This is where that colour number earns its keep. The Army also used olive green shade 107 for tropical combat clothing. Shared colour, different clothing system.

The Army survey dates the classification of the tropical combat uniform to 1963. It describes cotton poplin rather than the cotton sateen associated with the utility uniform. Later versions also used cotton ripstop. The matching tropical trousers had front pockets, rear flap pockets and bellows cargo pockets on the legs.

Those thigh pockets are a more useful starting point than simply asking whether the trousers are green. A green uniform photographed in Vietnam might be utility clothing or tropical combat clothing. Location alone cannot settle it.

Shirts add another layer of confusion. The utility shirt was revised during the 1960s, including changes to its pocket flaps, cuffs and button spacing. A detail on a shirt is not automatically a reliable way to identify the trousers worn below it. Soldiers, like the rest of us, could appear in photographs without arranging themselves for future clothing enthusiasts.

Women’s fatigues followed a different timetable

There is a trap in saying “the Army switched to OG-107 in 1952” and leaving it there. It makes the change sound universal.

The women’s-uniform section of the Army survey tells a different story. It records women’s HBT fatigues in use from 1943 to 1968. When women’s khaki service clothing was declared obsolete in 1954, HBT became the year-round fatigue uniform.

In Vietnam, nurses and members of the Women’s Army Corps found the HBT uniform too warm. A lighter olive green cotton poplin shirt and slacks began appearing there in 1966, with general issue beginning in 1969.

That is a separate development path, with its own practical problem to solve. It should not be squeezed into the men’s cotton-sateen timeline simply because the photographs contain green shirts and trousers.

The Natick collection preserves this women’s fatigue-uniform study from September 1977. The longer shirt and low-set pockets are easy to see. The catalogue does not identify the fabric, so the picture illustrates the later design rather than proving that it is the earlier poplin uniform.

The survey dates the move towards the same-pattern battle dress uniform for men and women to the early 1980s. Before then, a single phrase such as “Army fatigues” can hide some quite different experiences.

The next chapter involved rather a lot of washing

Vintage clothing discussions tend to stop at the fabric. The Army had to think about what happened after thousands of people had worn it.

Its historical summary for fiscal year 1974 places “Laundry and Dry Cleaning” directly before “Clothing and Personal Equipment”. A very sensible editorial decision, as it turns out.

The report describes a new laundry at Fort Lewis designed to process more than eight million pieces a year. It also records plans for installing a machine called the hydraveyor, designed to wash, bleach, rinse, extract and dry polyester and cotton clothing at a rate of 400 garments an hour, while greatly reducing hand pressing.

That is not a typo. Four hundred an hour. Your chair with the clean washing on it was never going to compete.

The following year’s Army report says a hydraveyor was undergoing tests at Fort Jackson. It forecast that two employees could do work which had required thirteen using conventional machines. The report was describing an expected saving, with testing still under way.

Alongside that laundry programme, the 1974 report records the adoption of durable-press fatigue clothing to replace the standard cotton sateen uniform. Procurement was still waiting for the services to agree on a standard version. Cole’s later survey dates the OG-507 polyester-and-cotton utility uniform specifications to 25 August 1975.

The documents show clothing and clothing care being reconsidered at the same time. A fabric choice could affect pressing, labour and an enormous laundry bill, as well as how a trouser leg looked.

The survey records the later durable-press uniform remaining in use until replacement by the Battle Dress Uniform in the mid-1980s. So a pair of plain green military trousers from the 1970s or 1980s deserves a look at its label and material, not an automatic “OG-107” verdict.

Why fatigue pants still make sense in an ordinary wardrobe

You do not need to reproduce a uniform to enjoy the useful bits. The large front pockets and straight leg work just as well with a plain T-shirt, a knitted jumper or a chore coat. Olive is an easy partner for cream, navy and brown.

The appealing part of this design is how little explaining it needs. There are visible construction details to enjoy, but the trousers can still be the quiet part of an outfit. They offer another direction if your usual starting point is a pair of selvedge jeans.

The longer you look at these clothes, the less their history resembles a single heroic invention. There are dated specifications, gradual replacements, different jobs, different wearers and a great deal of washing. Which feels quite fitting for a pair of trousers built around getting things done.