Some great discussions popping up because of you, Bulldog. Thanks for spurring good convos
Last edited by Bulldog (2019-02-15 19:06:43)
At Yale a decade or two ago, many of the older professors, if they did not actually wear Press (most didn't; some of these wore Brooks, but not most), wore clothes that had the same general aesthetic but on the more subdued side. The standard uniform for most (men) was a tweed or earth tone colored jacket or a blazer with wool or (usually darker than khaki or grey) twill trousers; some still wore bow ties; button-downed shirts everywhere; and repp ties quite common--each college had its own tie (available from the college itself; they were woven, not the later imitation of Vineyard Vines that the bookstore sold a few years later) and scarf from Press, and several clubs. The latter item was the only item from Press that a fairly wide variety of students wore, and they also sold lots of law school ties that were common. I personally started dressing to look like my professors, and the Press windows were the visual cue that most students associated with it without knowing anything of the history or labeling it in any way. The two professors I studied with the most both happened to be (almost exclusively for jackets and suits) Press customers, and it was on them that I first noticed a hook vent. I would say the look suggested a kind of remnant of an earlier campus, and older profs, but nothing remotely like its internet categorization and depiction and sociologization today. I would say that for the most part the internet steered me in wrong directions, but I gave it up eventually and haven't participated or read anything online about ivy for about a decade, which for the most part has been healthy.
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Last edited by Bulldog (2019-02-16 02:09:48)
I like button down collars myself.....and natural shoulders.
One of my favourite threads, loving the post war stuff
Last edited by Bulldog (2019-02-16 11:55:08)
Similarly, many people who have been through the ivy league give the fewest fucks about it, especially from any kind of social standpoint. It is like a toothbrush or a good dry cleaner. The only thing that matters about it can be had elsewhere, and better, rather like the modern brooks, except for the shirts.
Last edited by Bulldog (2019-02-16 12:04:41)
thanks.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo5550062.html
Last edited by Bulldog (2019-02-17 10:37:54)
I have often wondered if there were any remnants of loyalism that survived the War of 1812 in certain enclaves of New York especially. This would be quite distinct from what I would expect to be the much more widespread anglophilia in the moneyed classes of industrial America coming to terms with their own self-perception and doing so in relation to the old world and England in particular in the 19th/early 20th c. ( and in the schools and universities they built or rebuilt then). Much of the Brooks customer base, I would expect, well back into the 19th c., would be the latter, with Palm Beach and Newport as their early branches attesting to the gilded age aspect of all this.
Last edited by Bulldog (2019-02-17 11:40:26)
Another question: can you point to any evidence that American clothiers ever distinguished their clothes over and against English tailoring? In other words, pointed out the fact that what they were offering was *not* consistent with English norms of tailoring? Obviously this is precisely what was happening in many respects, but perhaps to do so would have been business suicide? I see nothing in the prewar advertising copy that emphasizes the clothing as distinctively American at all, even though obviously it was. My hunch is that a prep or ivy student of the interwar period would have liked very much to be able to walk into eton or oxbridge and have his tailoring fit in, or be entirely like, what was being worn there. What they actually wore was limited by the interpretation and offerings of the merchants. Distinctive Americanness was almost certainly not the goal, even though it was the result.
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