I'll back it. I thought it was an unspoken rule. Maybe just among certain people?

Maybe just among Steves?

You're not a daw though, blinded by lust for sleeve heart. You can choose what you peck at. Leave the heart. Theres some spleen on his leg. He can do without a Spleen.

That few good guys stay long without their own very personal motive is Internet law & fact.

No point lamenting it... In fact to do so just shows that you don't 'get' the Net. -  It has a turnover.

Today's crop of posters will look like a golden age soon enough. All it will take will be the next wave to visit our beach...   

Where does the "Ivy Look" fit in with all this?

It's certainly the product of mass culture!

What else is ready to wear? It is mass production!

Brooks Brothers and all the other makers and merchants also wanted to sell to the masses, of course.

However, they wanted to keep their standards, so the clothes were not cheap.

It's also connected to a regional culture (before it went national during its Boom): especially in New York and in New England (and later the Mid-Atlantic area and the big cities in the North)...

And before the Boom, of course, it was also connected to some degree to a social subgroup: the old money and the young professionals... and the people who went to the Ivy League colleges and the prep schools in this region, and that's where the names come from...

It's also connected to certain professional subcultures: the people in the advertising industry in Madison avenue since the early 1940s, a little later the bankers and brokers of Wall Street... It was the ad men who used the name Ivy Look to exploit the aspirations of the masses...

When it became "hip" in the Jazz scene (and hip is certainly not the same as "popular in the mainstream"), it also became connected to a subculture of musicians... An important pint is, that it was not hip with all musicians: Look at photos of R&B or C&W musicians and you might only find a few pictures with elements of the Ivy Look. The soul singers usually wore slick stage wear, often influenced by Continental fashions and the hillbilly singers usually wore Western stuff, cowboy hats and boots and traditional southern things... 


Mainstream culture, however, is also an important aspect of the Ivy Look, because with the GI Bill and with the Boom in the early or mid 1950s it certainly became mainstream culture for about two decades and during these years it also became part of the mainstream culture world wide...

Was it all about the Hollywood movies, the international success?


"Counter culture", to get back on topic, is usually associated with the end of the Ivy Boom and the decline of dress codes in general, the hippy fashions and the peacock stuff etc... There is a post on ArseCandy from a student in the sixties who said that they went to college dressed exactly like their parents and when they left college they looked like members of an outlaw motorcycle gang...

After the boom, Ivy would be connected with "subcultures" again, it seems:

From the mormons who probably wore it because it was a plain conservative look, the asexual puritan aspect, to certain homosexuals who like it as a very hard, straight butch look or as  the "All American boy look", a not so asexual aspect....

From the older Ivy guys in Boston or Nantucket who never wore anything else and who takes these clothes for granted, to a UK youth who thinks it's the latest fashion and fancies himself as extremely sharp in a button down and loafers....


So where's the Ivy Look? Mainstream or subculture? It's all of this...

Ivy in the UK, I think, has to do with all of these aspects. The youth cult connections are only a minor aspect.

Last edited by Hard Bop Hank (2012-02-04 08:37:24)

Well, now, thanks to the superlative Hank, it seems we might just be getting somewhere.

I just wanted to get this back on track...

I don't come here to "fight"...



it's talk Ivy, not fight Ivy!

Was 'Esquire' cultural or counter-cultural?  'Playboy'?  I mean: the purported lifestyle that went with it: fast cars, loose women, hard drink, foreign travel (business or pleasure?): the JFK/007 schtick.  Note: I hate Hugh Hefner.  But, as a selling point, almost as good as Ralph Lauren, no?  I suppose the odd paisley/Reyn Spooner shirt might have been worn by the pool, to complement the dolly birds string bikini.  Now, didn't John Simons get around to wanting, at the Ivy Shop, to offer a 'lifestyle'?  And anyone who went to Russell Street soon became aware - unless they were a complete clodhopper - that this was a different world to that a hundred yards away in that frigging piazza.  Gibson Gardens - or Hubert - if they were here - might speak of magic.