Some of my fellow Verbindungsbrueder (I belong to a Catholic Couleur-Corporation) make a point of raiding BB every time they're in London.

We might want to remember that it started out as, and continued to be, very much a fratboy style. Those chappies in Take Ivy are more or less all members of America's hereditary aristocracy. It became democratized in that the more conservative segment of society as a whole started to mimic the eastern establishment's affectations during that period....the vast majority of the people doing the mimic-ing were, say, public school fratboys, catholic school fratboys, businessmen who had once been fratboys, members of the working class who would have liked to be fratboys, etc. I'm not super qualified on the subject of jazz fashion, but it seems to me that the jazzers got into it for a limited period of time, before moving on to dashikis and the like. All the time the fratboys running the very unhip government ( Mc George Bundy,  Elliott Richardson, Cyrus Vance, yahda yahda yahda) continued to be exemplars of Ivy. More or less until they died. You walk around in a brooks brothers suit (I suspect even on the other side of the atlantic) the image projected to 99% of people isn't jazz.

I think thats what makes the euro-brit approach so interesting to me......the wearing of uber-straight clothes in a subversive manner. But I think its important to remember that they're still uber-straight clothes. Ok, I'll stop the drunken rambling now. Hawks Win!

I probably didnt read all of that closely enough eris-seems youre referring to those peculiar fencing frats rather than the US variety.....but, to perhaps over-generalize, frats tend toward conservatism (in at least a cultural context) and degrees of conformity everywhere, contra the "animal house" esque havens of countercultural fun many chapters imagine themselves to be in the US. they probably have, in spirit at least, a great deal more in common with the bruderschaft (or whatever theyre called) than you think, besides the overt ultra-right politics (which isn't to say that plenty of that doesnt go on as well).

Last edited by shamrockmonkey (2010-04-27 01:58:22)

Good calls, Axelist and Eris, but this is only the tip of the iceberg: In the Boom Years Ivy was everywhere, especially when GIs were involved. My father (whose grandfather had a few pubs and cinemas that were visited by GIs regularly) and some of his friends knew quite a few American GIs and they where the main source for cigarettes, condoms and clothes in the 50s and 60s, especially for teenagers (who didn't get condoms from the barber).

My father got his first cigarettes from GIs, he even smoked his first spliff with a GI, and he got a pair of Levi's from a GI. There was a huge black market for these things. Clothes weren't particlarly Ivy, as Axelist says it was general Americana: jeans, T-Shirts, sweat shirts, but button down shirts, khakis, loafers etc. were all well known. There were copies of the American clothes availabe, but the originals were still popular via the black market - especially Levi's were much more coveted than the copies.

Even the sack suit was a popular silhouette, though I'm not sure it was called that way over here in the 50s/60s (at least my father doesn't remember that term). Many companies produced copies over here at the time. I think Tony posted an ad from the German company Witt.

Albert Mangelsdorff was a good call. Jazz, not only Dixie/ Trad stuff, but Modern Jazz/ Bebop, as well as blues/ R&B was very popular. Even Coltrane came to Germany. My father also went to a lot of concerts, he remembers John Lee Hooker, Champion Jack Dupree and Cannonball Adderley among others.

Very influential in popularising jazz and blues were Fritz Rau, Horst Lippmann and Joachim-Ernst Berendt...

As  Sarah Vaughan sang:

I could write a book...

Sorry, that I keep it short, though, I'm terribly busy at work....

Last edited by Hard Bop Hank (2010-04-27 08:52:09)

Last edited by Hard Bop Hank (2010-04-27 05:27:03)

Hank is a Goldmine.