I don't think we need this thread, Uncle. His stuff should go under the "remembering" thread.

Speak up!!

RH

"So the Brooks Brothers and J.Press-style clothing became associated with the college campus, of which the Ivy League still represents the American ideal, and with the Establishment power and status enjoyed by the Ivy League graduates who wore the clothes and ran everything then, and it retained considerable cachet on that basis for Americans of several classes through the '50s, when a "lumpen middle class ... with few of the old Babbitt status drives" emerged, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his critical essay on Hugh Hefner, "King of the Status Dropouts," in The Pump House Gang (1966):
   
    Hugh Hefner is not "best people" ....  By the old status standards he still doesn't rank, and he seems to sense it.
    Hefner has had little taste for New York-style status competition or even the ... reflection of New York-style that goes on in Hollywood.  For one thing, Hefner's clothes             
    have never fit really well.  His dinner jackets have been a little horse-collary and everything.
    Hefner's genius has been to drop out of the orthodox status competition and to use money and technology to convert his habitat into a stage and to get on the
    stage, not in the spectator seats, and to be the undisputed hero himself.  Through the more and more sophisticated use of machines, Hefner, and to a lesser degree     
    millions of ... homemakers ... have turned their homes into wonderlands, almost complete status spheres all their own.

Get off of my cloud.

As the country's decadence grew, the importance of appearing respectable diminished, many once-aspirant people realized that they did not necessarily need to please the people they had once accepted as superiors and certainly didn't need to abide by elitist dress codes in order to prosper materially, and they "dropped out of the orthodox status competition," which for some meant giving up the Ivy League-style clothes they had once counted upon to make themselves look top-drawer.  This solipsistic Weltanschauung described by Wolfe was reflected in people's increasingly informal dress patterns and attempts to forge personal styles and has yet to reach its nadir, although maybe the Britney Spears/Kevin Federline union is a useful benchmark in that regard.  Not grousing about bygone better days, that's just how it's playing out in the recent past and the here and now."

... ... ... ...

Stay tuned!


J.

"Giving credit where it is due, prominent among the other major mid-'60s destroyers of the '50s American dress status quo were the Mothers of Invention ("Brown Shoes Don't Make It"), whose pre-hippie aggressive freak look spread up the coast to San Francisco, where it mellowed a bit as it crystallized and became a big part of hippie style, and San Francisco's Amazing Charlatans, the very early psychedelic band that played at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada in the summer of '65 and wore Wild West Victoriana ... the retro-Victorian style (sung about in Moby Grape's "Hey Grandma") of the Charlatans and the freak /degenerate look of the Mothers, whose hair was longer by far than any American male contemporaries, mutated into the archetypal extreme hippie style ... the American Indian styles worn by some members of the Buffalo Springfield, for example, was also incorporated into the hippie wardrobe ... and the countercultural embrace of Eastern religions and Zen, crucial elements of Beat, and the Maharishi and his ilk, led to all these fried hippie saddhus, cowboys and Indians and bikers, all on acid, and a couple of years later Jack Nicholson, drunk on Jim Beam but wearing a nice cream-colored Ivy League summer suit, gets his head bashed in in Easy Rider ....

... which brings us back to Rip Van Winkle ... we've always needed to get away from crowds, including crowds of people dressed identically, this escape is part of our Manifest Destiny ... so the hippie look evolved, solidified and became monolithic in its way, and the hippies' supposed nonconformity became its own unimaginative conformity, and the hippie dream died with the advent of the Me Generation and the splintering continued and produced such varied styles as glam, disco, gay, Urban Cowboy, punk, New Wave,  OPH preppy, '80s asymmetry and hair metal (MTV, so much to answer for), Wall Street/American Psycho/Master of the Universe Gecko-Bateman, grunge, hip-hop, bling-bling, Joe Dirt's mullet and Larry the Cable Guy's trucker rig, casual Fridays and the mediocrity of The Gap ("cinch it"), and even incoherent dot-commer no-style, I could go on and on and spin out so many smaller and smaller yet visually distinctive subgroups-within-subgroups, we're a nation of subcultures with wildly pluralistic dress sensibilities and  tastes ... and those who wear Ivy today are denizens of and represent their own subculture, which is attractive to the extent it communicates trustworthiness, decency, and intelligence and repulsive when it tries too hard to proclaim its superiority.

 
Back to the happier subject of uncovering nonstandardized Ivy clothing ... even if you weren't there yourself and have never actually seen weird old J. Press, Brooks, or Chipp garments that don't exactly match the illustrations in the Official Preppy Handbook, say an old real Abercrombie & Fitch khaki cotton sack jacket with hitherto unseen inverted Kremlin-dome-shaped pockets and a label that reads "Safari," it is readily apparent from old Brooks Brothers and J. Press advertisements in The New Yorker and elsewhere that there existed numerous stylistic variations of the Ivy look and that many different details were tried out with more or less success, including the number of coat buttons, the presence of darts, trouser cuffs, jacket cut, material, pattern, etc. ... and if go-to-hell clothing is thrown into the mix, Katy bar the door, weird variants abound!  And these weird vintage variants are cool, and if you gave some to me, I'd wear them to a party, if not to the office or to court!  This is what we mean by "jivey Ivy!" "

... ... ... ...

It's a period of time I've often wondered about too in the story of all this, speculating on who still wore the clothes after the Ivy boom in the US as the style has never disappeared, Press has never closed down, etc.

Who wore it then?

The poor who couldn't afford to update their wardrobes?
The mean who didn't want to spend more money clothes than they had to?
The conservative (small 'c') who stuck with what they knew out of timidity?
Those with no interest in clothes who just carried on shopping where they'd always shopped?
Those who wore it in an ironic way? The 'All-American Boy' boys.

For there must have been a time when the style was really looked down on after it had been so popular. Tom Wolfe in '67 equates it to 'wet smacks' working at IBM ("The Secret Vice") as I've mentioned before in this connection. Where those who wore the clothes just out of love for them in the face of fashion & public opinion really that many?

Any ideas?

Last edited by Russell_Street (2008-04-26 04:52:38)

RS
Keep it comming,

I heard marketeers call Preppy in the early 80's "Edgey Ivy"!!! To link the new pigeon hole with past and make it more familiar to the new audience.

"No such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing" Quote attributed to many people. Based on the functionality of IL clothing and the diverse climate of the NE States of America, I am sure that at least one New Englander has delivered this quotation.

Again, Keep it coming.

"Always leave people wanting less."



RH

"At college I started out low on clothing, having avoided buying new clothes the previous summer for a number of reasons, mainly because I was busy having fun, but I also wanted to get my new clothes without interference, and anyhow most of my old  clothes (aforementioned buttondown oxfords, Lacostes, Levi's cords, Top-Siders, Incontinence pants Gazelle and Rod Laver, Puma Clydes, Tretorns and Sperry canvases (the two best no-sock sneakers ever) still fit me, though they were in various stages of disrepair, which of course was cool.  My idea was to arrive minimally stocked and then to get money from home for clothes as needed, to buy frugally so that I'd have money to go to New York on the weekends, and continue to wear my old clothes.  Which I did.  Then I gave some stuff to my roommate, some of my old stuff got trashed or just wore out, it got cold and I needed a sweater and a scarf, and voila,  there was J.Press right across the street, full of Shaggy Dogs and smelling pleasantly of clean wool.  Bought a scarf, a sweater and two great 55% wool/45% cotton Viyella shirts in navy and white/red/black tattersall with plain tennis collars (Horace is the only one to have commented on his preference for the plain-collared Viyella shirt).   Not only has Viyella gone to a less durable 80% cotton/20% wool mix, I've never seen a plain collar Viyella shirt again.

There was a good thrift shop on Crown Street in New Haven that I got an incredibly soft-shouldered, narrow-lapeled dark brown thin tweed sack from, it wore out after carrying me through years of good NYC use, and I discarded it, I didn't think then to save it for future analysis, but I wish I still had it now for the tailor to duplicate.  As you know, most guys in college did not wear tweed jackets or blazers as everyday wear after the '60s, in my day hardly any as I recall, though a few of the more sheltered or uptight girls did.
 
When I needed a new tweed jacket a couple of years later, I got a perfect tweed sack at Press, one of the best I ever had.  Certain places required jackets, hence the tweed.  I only bought sparingly, always for a specific need and never just to have something for the sake of having it.  Press was great because it was there, they did not require cash, the stuff worked, it all went together without labor, and it was so easy to just go there as a nearly one-stop place to get any required nice clothes for special occasions.  No pilgrimages to a holy shrine, just the natural little old place across the street to go for a nice scarf or sweater, a present for your father or a cashmere scarf for your girlfriend, a clean nice shirt when needed.  That was how we viewed it then.  The fetishization of Press (cf. the inane fantasy movie Metropolitan) is bizarre to me but then again it's impossible to find a three-button sack otr these days ... too bad the suits, jackets, and blazers don't fit me better, the rest of their stuff is still fine, as far as I'm concerned, for what it is.  I don't think of it as the last sane place in a world gone mad, though, any decent tailor can make a sack, though every one will ask you why."   

To be continued...

J.

"In the spring I wore white and pale yellow polo shirts (Brooks had a killer pale creamy yellow long-tailed tennis shirt made of thin but not mean velour, a non-prep material generally but who cared at all about that, the shirt was awesome and deformed so fetchingly, fuck a wannabe's rules), pale khaki Levi's cords, Kudus and the Tretorns, Lavers, or Etonics.  Jeans or cord jacket or navy Harrington if chilly, maybe a light lambswool v-neck sweater (Brooks Brothers had absolutely the best Shetland v-necks, made in England, cashmere was too luxe then), with Lacoste or Fred Perry polo shirts, sometimes a t-shirt underneath.  V-necks and polo shirts were made for each other and are great for spring because there's no itchy collar to irritate you.  V-necks get short shrift in the OPH and in Fussell's Class (fun reads but pseud's bibles as you know), but v-necks have always been impeccably mod and always were, and I knew it then and know it now.  (I seem to recall them being called "Army Smarmy" in the Sloane Ranger handbook, another classic pseud's bible.)  The v-neck is relaxed, not repressed.  I like crewnecks too, have enough Shaggies, and I wear them in cold weather, but not under tweed jackets, they're too bulky for that.   

Levis's (or Lee Storm Rider) jeans jackets and cord jackets were rebellious prep ... I had a great O'Neill jacket of tough navy-blue sail material lined with navy neoprene from the sailing outfitters down the road from the boathouse, was turned onto it by a girlfriend on the sailing team, this beautiful girl was a legend, she also got me into Saabs, anyway the jacket was great with cords or khakis and blucher mocs, a little surf and turf.

As far as seersucker goes, I wore seersucker bathing suits as a kid and always had summer bathrobes of seersucker, but the seersucker suit was somewhat too loud and Fauntleroyesque for my college crowd.  Same with madras for the most part.  Now I really like madras shorts in hot weather, it's almost California '80s punk in my mind.  But both madras and seersucker wearers can seem to try a bit too hard ....  And seersucker north of Washington, D.C., it's just off, latitudinally, terroir-wise.   In New York City, if you must wear a suit to the office in the summer, you wear 7- 8 oz. tropical wool in lighter shades of gray.  If it's hotter than 90 , khaki cotton poplin or navy cotton, if you must.  Dandies make their own rules I suppose, but the more I think about it the more I think seersucker suits on men today are costumes.  (I think they look good on women.)

For summer sports jackets, I prefer unconstructed oxford cloth and chambray, and other plain cottons in solid colors, I find them much more low-key, versatile, and wearable than seersucker or madras."


And more still to come...

J.