In 1969, Donald Fisher was a 40-year-old real estate professional who had a big problem finding Levi’s that fit him properly. His solution became the Gap.

Fisher and his wife, Doris , opened the first location of the retail chain on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco, a s hort walk from the state university campus. For three months, the new store, named by Ms. Fisher in a nod to the generation gap , sold Levi’s , especially in difficult-to-find sizes, and records . The store soon dropped the vinyl. As Mr. Fisher told The San Francisco Chronicle, “The pants were selling the records, not the other way around.”

But even after the Jefferson Airplane longer-length vinyls disappeared from the shelves, a loose association with the counterculture continued to serve the chain for the next 25 years . As it grew into a corporate behemoth, the Gap’s carefully engineered link with a generation of rebellious young people helped make the company into a definitive clothing brand of the American century’s final quarter .

The wares sold by the Fishers were snatched up eagerly upon the store’s opening. Levi’s was one of the hottest brands in the country . Within the year, the Gap had opened a half-dozen other locations. Its nascent brand identity was visible in its advertising, which tried to speak the language of the tuned-in . Ads promised “Levi’s for cats and chicks” and bragged of “tasty plaids,” “ wild bells ” and “far-out jeans.”