/\  yeah that guy Morris Widder advertised in the paper for years and in fact there's an article somewhere in which an old Ivy salesman in Cambridge at the end of the '60s I think lamented the decline of Ivy and mentioned that the students used to flog their coats to raise cash all the time, thereby necessitating purchases of new coats later ...

I posted a link to it before ...... Keezer in Cambridge was just a later version of rag merchants .....

by the way the buyers of used clothes in New Haven were there since at least the 1880s, selling the students' old clothes to the poor, and probably to some students as well.

there was a place on Crown Street north of Louis Lunch that had a mound of old tweeds, great stuff in there too by the way, you all would have liked to get your hands on it for sure, all the art students knew about it and that's why they had the old Ivy look going even when a lot of the undergrads had a more baggy Ivy, aka prep, style.

but seriously, I wish I could take you guys to the Yale Club, we could look through all the yearbooks from way back and you could see how it all unfolded ....

I have done it a time or two, mainly to see pics of myself heh heh!

Last edited by Bop (2015-05-30 05:45:36)

/\  I've thought about the trunk shows ... even if students themselves actually went to the shows (rather than their mothers) that would just confirm the fact that students were wearing Ivy and that the sellers knew what their market was made of, not that people outside the school loop were picking up on the style, which they did of course, but not through trunk shows at prep schools, country clubs or the Taft Hotel, where Brooks called on the Yalies for years.  One way of flogging the wares maybe.

People who picked up on the style outside of the school sphere acquired the stuff at Brooks itself in New York, Boston and Chicago, or at their local shops when they started carrying clothes by national manufacturers that were similar to those sold at Brooks and Press.  If people were completely unaware of campus styles somehow then they might have seen Ivy clothes on television, or in an ad in a magazine, or being worn on the street (by a college student?  the tautologies ....)

re the loyal customers, that implies they already knew about the clothes and the sellers ......

the traveling exhibitions at prep schools demonstrate that the sellers knew who their market was, or at least that students comprised a significant share of it, but the shows at prominent hotels are a bit harder to pin down.

In any event, these kinds of trunk shows were put on in rooms at the best hotels in town, where the local debutante balls and cotillions were held, and which would have been familiar to the local nobs, who were the ones sending their children off to prep school and private colleges in the Northeast.   

The trunk shows continue to this day and are still held at prep schools, as well as country clubs and churches, though usually not at big-city hotels anymore, and the people who sponsor them are the students' mothers' auxiliary clubs.

Last edited by stanshall (2015-05-30 17:05:50)

/\  but the students also bought and wore army-navy surplus khakis, lots of rugged hunting, fishing and camping gear, and sweatshirts and baseball caps throughout the twentieth century including the boom years, although it took a couple of decades before the jeans, fatigues, and workwear of Radical Chic really started to take over.

But Holden Caulfield did wear a red wool hunting cap.

I guess the challenge to anyone disputing what Im saying is find me examples of the look as almost near to completion as it in the tennis photos of the 1910/20s. They're nowhere and like Stan said it took a good few years from the 1870/80s to merge into that look through the sporting heritage of the colleges. I know there are images of the English football team members in button down shirts from 1900 and you can see some soft shoulder jackets from earlier. But nothing begins to look like Ivy, ie the button down shirts, the highwaisted tapered, highwater duck pants, and bucks/plimsolls as those guys Ive discussed. Yes Brooks had been in the game for nearly a 100 uears before but the look as it is..emerged during the early 1900s perfected by the 20s. Ive not seen much to suggest otherwise

Last edited by Bop (2015-05-31 01:00:43)

Less than 100 years later, and their sportswear would be considered by many to be too smart for an interview or wedding. In 100 years' time will the sportswear of today be considered too smart for even formal occasions?

Well everybody, I think we have now done this subject to death for the umpteenth time so I shall draw a veil over this thread.