PHILADELPHIA — Jay Pross stuffed a couple T-shirts into an envelope, scribbled a handwritten note, and mailed the package two years ago to South Philadelphia after the Eagles hired Nick Sirianni as their head coach. Pross considers his clothing store — Mayfair’s Art History — to be “Philly’s brand” so he’s always sending shirts to the city’s new arrivals.
“It’s like welcoming your neighbor to the neighborhood,” Pross said.
A few months later, Sirianni wore Pross’ design — a black shirt featuring former Eagles linebacker Jeremiah Trotter — to practice and was asked about it by reporters. The coach, who seems to have a closet full of splashy shirts from local designers, said he loves receiving new ones in the mail. Keep sending them, Sirianni said as he looked into the camera.
“When he said that, I took that as if he was just talking to me personally,” Pross said.
Sirianni, who is just one win from guiding the Eagles to the Super Bowl, has sported various Art History T-shirts to practice and news conferences over the last two seasons. He was even spotted earlier this month wearing one during the team’s postseason bye week.
Pross has never met the coach nor does he pay him to wear his gear. The Eagles coach just likes his designs. And that was the last thing Pross was thinking about two years ago.
“I definitely wasn’t thinking about that,” Pross said.
Pross started Art History in 2008 in the basement of his mother’s house at Fanshawe and Battersby Streets before renting a storefront near Frankford and Princeton Avenue in 2010. The store was a dream ever since he designed a shirt in 2003 for a friend’s funeral. He willed the dream into reality and Art History became a popular streetwear brand with a strong online presence.
Pross grew up in Mayfair, went to St. Timothy’s and Roman Catholic, and worked at a sneaker store in the Roosevelt Mall. Now he owned his own business in the heart of his neighborhood. So it’s easy to imagine how he felt watching firefighters in March of 2021 try to extinguish the flames that ripped through his Frankford Avenue store.
“We lost everything,” he said. “We didn’t have insurance. It was a total loss. It felt like the death of a family member.”
Pross, while studying fashion design at the Art Institute, landed a job with a streetwear brand that designed clothes for music artists. Pross rang the doorbell at Miskeen, filled out an application, then returned home and thought of better answers. He returned the next day with a three-page essay.
“I was like ‘Yo, I really want this job,’’ Pross said. “They said ‘No one has ever done this to work here.’ ”
He handpainted a shirt that was featured in a Beyonce video and a hoodie that Soulja Boy wore in the video for his Billboard chart-topper Crank That.
Pross suddenly had some momentum which he kept rolling a few months later when Soulja Boy enlisted him again to design a T-shirt he could wear on the November 2007 cover of The Source, hip-hop’s leading magazine. That was enough motivation for Pross to create his own brand, which he called Art History.
“That’s how we were born,” he said.
The store was ready to celebrate its 11th birthday in March of 2021 with special T-shirts set to be released. Instead, Pross spent the early hours of a Friday morning watching his Mayfair store burn down. It was so cold that the water froze after the firefighters soaked the building.
“It was pretty devastating,” Pross said. “But we went back to work the next day. I just worked my butt off.”
He returned to the basement, this time to the house he owned in Academy Gardens and designed a new shirt. The design — aptly titled “Can’t Kill a Dream” — quickly sold out online. Pross’ store burned down but his dream was still burning.
“Our people really showed up for us,” Pross said. “When that happened, it kind of snowballed into crazy momentum.”
Bobby Henon, the former city councilmember, heard of Pross’ story and connected him with a business coach. They met weekly on Zoom; Pross listened to the coach’s directions, and they created a business plan.
Losing his store, Pross said, made him realize that he was running Art History like a “mom and pop” instead of carrying himself like a CEO. His dream could be even bigger. The Frankford Avenue store re-opened in November 2021, eight months after Pross received a stunning phone call at 5:15 a.m. that his store was on fire.
Sirianni is not the first Eagle to wear Pross’ designs — Alshon Jeffery sported an Art History shirt after an Eagles win during the 2017 Super Bowl season and Pross collaborated later that year with Nelson Agholor to release a shirt before the NFC championship game.
“I was crossing the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge and people started blowing my phone up,” Pross said of driving home from a friend’s house after the Eagles beat the Cowboys that season. “Everyone was saying ‘Yo, Alshon Jeffery is in the locker room wearing one of your shirts.’ It went viral and everyone was like ‘Where can I get that shirt?’ It was huge for us.”
Those moments spiked business as Pross saw an increase in sales simply because the Eagles players liked what was inside their welcome packages. Sirianni has had a similar effect and Pross even sees bootleg shirts appear online after the coach is photographed wearing one of his designs. Pross, just like the coach told him to do, keeps sending shirts to Sirianni.
“It gives you this certain kind of high,” Pross said. “I don’t drink or do drugs, but you get a high off of this. Even to this day, just to see a Sirianni or someone, for that moment when someone sends me a message or I see it, it just gives me that little release of happiness.”
An Eagles staffer wearing his shirt isn’t new but this year feels different because Pross knows how close he came to losing his dream. He told people after the fire that he would be OK and then went home at night and started to doubt himself, wondering if his dream was finished.
But the support kept coming — “Everyone was writing, if anyone can bounce back, it’s going to be you,” Pross said — and he found a way to keep going. And now he has the support of the coach who is two wins away from a championship.
“I’ve realized the ups and downs of life,” Pross said. “You have to embrace every moment, regardless if it’s the ups or the downs.”
