TRS has come and gone -like the flash of Ivy lightning he tends to be.  And it's his fault I'm asking these questions!  Slacks I get, the specific '62 bit not quite.

Dear AFS - I know not of what you speak... Was this an Esquire feature or photo shoot I was referring to? 1962 was a great Ivy year of course.

Actually, that's very interesting.  What was the 'greatest Ivy year', and why?  My word, this is when we need Jimbo the most: a man who almost always had the answers - or would attempt to find out.

We read about slacks as worn by the opposite sex during wartime as proof positive of promiscuity, much smoking of Lucky Strike cigarettes, attempts to look like Veronica Lake or Carole Landis.  But with the chaps what gave/gives?  Plain fronted as well as loose-fitting?

TRS, I do study his look a bit in photographs.  There's one where he's wearing a grey and white, rather wide striped shirt, very similar to a Brooks I once had.  I think his look can be, well, mildly eccentric - but see nothing wrong with that: quite the opposite.  I've been trying to pin down some shoes he's wearing and it did cross my mind that his feet might now be a bit tender (not unlike my own).  I love the specs, the slightly owlish look, the rain on the shoulders of the Burberrys' mac (yes?).

Just reading James Ellory's 'The Big Nowhere', set (thus far) around LA, early January 1950.  Descriptions of male clothing abound.  An especially well-dressed cop is able to dress well because he's on the take.  Other characters, pretty affluent, change from their suits into sport shirts and khakis.  Yet another character is all camelhair and cashmere.  Not a hint of the clothing we know so well from Hollywood of that period (and shortly before) where a lot of the male characters seem to dress in suits that are a size too big for them. 
Re JS and bending/breaking the 'Ivy rules'.  I guess, in the end, that's what counts, providing one has the confidence to carry it off.  I like the idea of a loafer being almost like a house slipper.  I'm trying to move back into a softer look, leaving behind the heftier shoes for loafers and Astorflex; maybe some new bucks.  Now, JS has always, it seems to me, struck more than a single balance in his look - and can find no imitators.  A consistent 'Beat Mod' in some of his incarnations; not all, not by any means.  In fact, subtract the 'Mod' bit and substitute 'Modernist' in that Village/Jackson Pollock/Lenny Bruce kind of way (maybe? as JFM would have said).  Or can you really pin it down?  I wonder.

Re: Slacks and The Look Of '62
“Lovely,  Lovely.  Not quite eighty five per cent then (a JFM figure, I do believe), but getting fairly close??

Jimmy used to talk hyperbole a lot. However, when you talked to him on the telephone he was very calm and collected.

As far as I remember he even said that Ivy was 80% of the market in 1959 already. No idea where he got these figures from…

60-63 sounds good - in fact, better than good.  But I suppose it depended upon who you were and where you were.  I still have this stupid habit of thinking of/believing in a kind of 'pure Ivy League America', doubtless based upon tiny glimpses of NYC in films, books and on TV.  Then there's the music of course.  Without a time machine, it all has to remain a European fantasy.  Perhaps, thinking about this, TRS is more realistic about it than I ever can be. 

Jimmy was fine on the 'phone, except when he allowed himself to be dominated by internet-induced waffle and imagined others were similarly tuned in.