/\ there's more to the Ivy look than one shirt, talk about simplistic explanations ....

for example, Brooks didn't sell Weejun penny loafers, yet they still became part of the students' style ....

so we know Brooks was not wholly responsible for presenting students with a holistic look that contained every element in place already

Brooks was offering the buttondown shirt for years before the style had coalesced, they were just making the goods available alongside their other collar styles, not singling out students in particular as likely buyers of this one style

Gravitating to the buttondown collar was something the students did, Brooks would have been just as happy to sell rounded club collars to them

that shop specifically reached out to students though, as the students could be counted on to buy a set of clothes seasonally year after year and tended to remain customers for life

Last edited by stanshall (2016-01-27 08:06:24)

we know all this long time Jimbo, of course the students bought clothes made by manufacturers and sold by clothiers, but the students created the style by putting together the pieces, because only they had the freedom to wear an assortment of odd items of sportswear, while working men wore suits and uniforms and didn't turn up at the office in white bucks and Shetland sweaters and tweed sport coats with odd flannels and canvas sneakers and plaid buttondown shirts.

J. Press started in 1905, well before Ivy, and the shop was selling (and its tailors were custom-making) whatever the students were buying then, and all American clothiers copied Brooks, Brooks and Press sold old and new styles side-by-side for decades all the way through the boom years, it was the students who chose from among the offerings and their most popular choices became the Ivy style.

Before the students created Ivy by putting together the pieces, the students were ordering suits, trousers, shirts, coats from Brooks and Press and Rosenberg and other tailors on a custom basis.  They were used to making their own clothing choices and as long as their credit was good the tailors and clothiers catered to them and met their demands.  This balance of power did not change even though the way the students acquired their clothing did.  Then as now the buyer is mainly responsible for the trend, without adopters to choose it, the product even if it's great, sits on the shelf.

Brooks did not invent the concept of odd sport coats and flannel trousers as campus style, English students did and their counterparts at Princeton and Yale, especially the rowers, adopted it ....

It very clearly comes straight from the world of sport, and while Brooks sold the items individually, it was up to the wearers to assemble them into a codified style

The Look evolved over time, it did not spring fully formed from the forehead of anybody at conservative old Brooks
Brothers

The information that Brooks shirts were the right ones for "prep," is transmitted almost like a secret from student to student in the elucidating F. Scott Fitzgerald campus novel This Side of Paradise.

Brooks Brothers and J. Press, for all their hauteur, served affluent students who were used to getting their own way and were the social superiors of every person working in those shops, nobody dictated anything to the students, they were exercising choices that sharply pointed out the class differences between themselves and less-privileged working people who couldn't afford polo coats and didn't play tennis or sail.

Anyway, Brooks and J. Press didn't sell Sperry, yet Top-Siders and CVOs became part of Ivy, lots of Bean too, e.g., camp and blucher moccasins, etc....

How did those items become part of the Ivy canon?

Because students knew about them from their summer and other vacations, not because of a marketer with an incredibly prescient sense of what was going to be big on campus for twenty years ....

What made Clarks Ivy was that the Co-Op sold them and the students bought them and wore them on campus, the desert boots like the flat-front chinos, came out of World War II, not from Brooks or Press ....

It took a lot of disparate sources to make the style, no one maker devised it from whole cloth, but each maker scrambled to keep up with and predict what the students wanted, but the ultimate power and decision was with the mass of students, not the seller

Last edited by stanshall (2016-01-28 10:27:38)

/\  thanks fellas  ... I'm just another point of view ...

Drowning in fancy junk mail from schools .....

^

Not really. Same old same old. And you're wrong as usual.

Hush now...

Oh. I thought Stan's input here was great.
Bit of an unpromising thread initially.
I like to think I did this together with Mr. Woofboxer... He did summon me up in his OP...

Jolly good thread I thought.

Needn't be over though..

The definitions game never ends. Not all items worn on campus were regarded as 'Ivy' by the menswear industry - And, of course, vice versa.
Menswear - The clothes of men - Made much more money than the clothes of a limited number of students when it comes to this style of ours.
Men just have more money.

So you have the style of the Ivy colleges and then you have The Ivy League Look in a broader sense when it comes to menswear.

Will THE GREAT TAB HUNTER TAB COLLAR DEBATE fly elsewhere  ?
Were they 'Ivy' or were they not ?
This forum has ruled on that one for itself it would seem.

Me ?
I never express a personal opinion.
I'm not soft.

I dont think the interest in ivy for a lot of posters started later than the mid 50s..but if you look back to the 1900s youll realise that students college wear was not 'menswear'..it was too casual to be the menswear of the fathers of young sons and their ivy sportwear. Jim doesnt acknowledge this because 1. I dont think he knew it, and 2, it doesnt fit his little made up world so no need to care to admit it.

Not till the 1920s and the Jazz age do you really see Ivy styles move into mainstream menswear as many celebs started to snap up the tennis club/college going look, and you had a generational shift away from the stiffness of the clothes preceeding

Like I said before none of this is subjective its all documented.

Last edited by Bop (2016-02-01 10:30:08)