I mean to look at the sweaters but my eyes get drawn to the Bucks and the Boots. Beauties, them.

That's passionate, I loved reading that. I feel like quoting the whole damn piece.

J. - I doff my cap.

^ It's a non-descript, generic, geriatric looking quality knit, actually.

Great thread! Thumbs up!

You raise trenchant points Jesmond, and I enjoyed reading your post.

You ask me direct questions which I'll try to answer truthfully and comprehensively.

"What does your own take on Ivy Style look like???"

Probably too 'proscriptive' for you, no doubt. The otherness of the clothes and their sheer beauty is what attracted me to them in the first place. I'm a Londoner in my forties and glimpses of the collegiate US styles of the middle 20th Century in films nagged me and kept me awake at night as a teenager: they still do. Many of us start form the same point but take things in different directions as we choose: the essential foundation of a personal style and everyone's right and prerogative.

One of the nice things about the writing here as an antidote to other places is the recognition of nuance and shifting boundaries in all this.

Key to my own appreciation of the style is what it doesn't or shouldn't include for me. Like many on here my adult life has been marked by the push and pull (maybe struggle is too strong a term) between the style on one hand and temporal considerations on the other. All I know is that since I could buy my own clothes the thing I knew I didn't want to buy is that which was all around me: the commonplace, the practical (in italics), the fashionable, the novel or the witty. I dismiss things not on the basis that they might not fit a manifesto, rather that they're just not beautiful enough, whatever tangle of connotations, contexts and precepts that might suggest. We all know what the template is. My own interpretation has been to try to acquire the most beautiful elements of the Ivy style and attempt to blot out everything else. What constitutes beauty is, of course, changeable over time for each one of us. I used to think Bean Boots were laughable. Now I think they're covetable.

I'm not a brand-obsessed fascist but for me personally the image of The Shadows picture sleeve in this context was as welcome as seeing a much-loved family pet being dragged along the road by the wheels of an articulated lorry. I'm sure older contributors will tell us that The Shadows were an essential lightning rod of some elements of Ivy for a sector of the British public, but not looking like this surely.

I realise the thread is entitled Beyond The Shetland and there is no doubt that a fisherman's sweater would have a part to play in a style that originated in the Atlantic North East of the US; Hank, Jet & Co. in Nan's finest is surely notable only as whimsy.

Last edited by Natural Sole Brother (2009-02-10 18:19:08)

Last edited by 1966 (2009-02-10 13:43:15)