Not to worry.

The name "Trad" (although snappy!) isn't anything really if you're talking about US Ivy League style. It's a Japanese term picked up on by some internet folk and bandied about on the Net. They like it because they want Ivy clothes to be all about some "Tradition" they've made up themselves over on AAAT all about having manners like a convent girl & wearing a button-down. Really dainty, prissy stuff to be honest with you with no basis in reality.

What the English call Trad (Traditional) Jazz is King Oliver & stuff like that. Not Modernist Miles Davis stuff, although what King Oliver was doing in his day was pretty cutting-edge stuff. It's only looking backwards that labels like "Trad" get stuck on things.

I'd keep on wearing Ivy, listening to Miles & reading R.B. & ignore the whole thing if I was you.

Traditional English clothes are the clothes that American traditional clothes are based on & don't really come into Jazz at all. They're too stuffy.

The whole AAAT "Trad" thing is a real red herring. The name causes nothing but confusion.

Phil's posts in this thread are good.  The content of the post that started the thread was posted here (both the illustration itself further an example of an actual garment itself that inspired such things or that such things inspired -- which ever view you take).  It's tricky, I believe, to extrapolate from AA illustrations without putting the whole thing (the publication, etc) into a larger historical context, but anyway....


http://www.askandyaboutclothes.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72183

Phil is definitely a Shoulder Man.  His wardrobe is the one I most covet at AAAT.

I'd like to know how the Andy Trad subculture functions on a extra-internet basis.  Out in world, are there Trad functions?  Trad nightclubs?  Certain bands that Trads go to see?  Certain places where they hang out (especially in NYC, where every subculture, no matter how obscure, seems to have an enclave)? 

Is there a place to show off your Tradliness to other Trads who will pick up on the codes embedded in one's dress? 

Is there a Trad hierarchy similar to the Mod concept of the "faces," wherein one Trad is superior in Tradliness to another Trad?  Trad trendsetters or Trad hanger's on? 

One fascinating thing about the Mod scene that I have read about is that it defined it's own style, that individuals could change the stylistic course for a large portion of the subculture.  There is an except in Barnes' book where the speaker describes wearing bowling shoes out on a whim one day after bowling and suddenly bowling shoes became part of the deal. 

Could this happen in Tradworld?  Could someone rock a single forward pleat and have it spread?  Isn't a sort of evolutionary flexibility essential to the perpetuation of a style?

It's been quite a trip, hasn't it?

An unpretentious style made ultra-pretentious within 3 years (2004-2007).

Surely a record?