It is very completely circular to be fair, and presents a classic epistemological question, but essentially without the students to wear it there would have been no mass Ivy style of menswear.

Most of the men buying Ivy menswear were students.

That's it.  Every damn American was a student, there were no unschooled American wearers of Ivy, especially Miles Davis and Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon.

Montgomery Clift, well he didn't go to college but his brother Brooks went to Harvard and his sister went to Bryn Mawr.

More Ivy than Hollywood.

Just the facts, Jack.  The facts of the marketing are all there in theivyleaguelook site and the catalogues and elsewhere on the web, we know it was advertised in the New Yorker etc.

The New Yorker was written, edited, and read by Harvard and Yale grads and their ilk, and the ad agencies that came up with the ads were filled with copywriters fresh out of the Ivy League.

Not opinion. 

So not only did the students create the look, but they bought it, wore it, and marketed it too.

The students created the marketing ultimately, as the actual ad-men who'd either been recently been college students or had kids in college or high school and were in touch, and as the subject of the imagery of the ads and the lifestyle (the preppy lifestyle supplied much other imagery in Ivy marketing natch), and as the most important mass consumers of the goods proportionally and numerically.  Baby boom, kids needing new clothes every six months etc.

There is no taking the students out of the equation.

of course J. Press advertised on a tiny scale to students and local professionals in their campus towns, but it was very small-scale

the heaviest marketing of Ivy tried to draw Everyman in and that's what we all thrill to see, that brief moment in time when it was truly popular across the socio-economic spectrum.

But there never was a time that the street, Madison Avenue included, contained more concentrated Ivy clothing than a Georgia Tech yearbook, and the menswear-wearing men who wore Ivy were outnumbered by the students who wore it.

During Ivy, all kids wore it unless they were way out on the farm, whereas a smaller number of men converted to it.

The Old Guard crusties from Boston and New York who had been wearing sacks forever continued wearing it entirely oblivious to marketing.  They hated the idea of being manipulated by advertising and resisted it even though they ran J. Walter Thompson.

the evidence of the students wearing it consistently from 1954-68 is in the record, a factual record.

Last edited by stanshall (2016-02-01 18:35:50)

"...with the button down collar, and the button down families...it just seems there ought to be more..."

... Worthy of mention is what the mainstream marketing of Ivy mainly was: It was all about students.