Actually, when I said "was a plain collar," that was a typo. I meant to say "wasn't." I just corrected it.

Last edited by Coolidge (2008-04-28 12:54:00)

More from The Ivy Style Sage:

"In college, ribbon belts and belts of any kind really were very much afterthoughts, if worn at all, the idea was to dispense with as much as possible and to strip it down so as not to be *fussy*.  Intentionally omitting something  at times.  Overaccessorizing is the dead giveaway.  I happen to like ribbon belts in the summer because they don't "wear hot" like leather does, but I don't wear them with suits and I'll often skip or forget to wear a belt if I'm preoccupied and wearing an untucked tennis shirt anyway.       

During my days at college and grad school I went to many punk-rock shows wearing navy blue black t-shirts or Fred Perry shirts or short-sleeved striped or checked broadcloth buttondowns from Brooks (Ben Shermanesque now that I think of it, but 100% cotton), loud tartan scarves (from Press and Andover, ha ha!) (Rotten loved tartan in '76-'78, so did the Faces, Page, Jagger, Slade too, circa 1971-73), dark gray Levi's Sta-Prests, Converse All-Stars, and in winter,  a great gray herringbone tweed overcoat over all.  Yale's art school had many ultrachic cutting-edge supercool punks, urban intellectual art and architecture and design and drama students, none of the other Ivies had them to that degree, Brown would probably be second) and I had lots of fun with them and other pals at golden-era concerts by Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, the Clash, the Ramones, Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine, Captain Beefheart, Johnny Thunders, Public Image, Bad Brains, et al.   

After Yale I moved to Boston and began to shop at the Andover Shop.  I loved their English ties, broadcloth and oxford shirts by R. & O. Hawick, English duffle coats, Shetland scarves, real Harrington jackets, removable-lining Invertere sb raincoats of Grenfell cloth, Alden shoes, and Scottish wool blankets.  The Harvard Coop had a great record store but its clothes and gear did not compare favorably to the Yale Co-Op's.  I got my first bespoke jackets and suits from the Andover Shop, and a summerweight two-button undarted navy blazer that I loved.  Brooks at this time was at a peak, with great oxford-cloth summer jackets, English-made v-neck sweaters in brown heather and navy lambswool, Brooks' own penny loafers (classic USA-made Sebagos, the good stuff), and lots of good summer broadcloth buttondown shirts. "

After Grad. School next -

J.

"Here are a couple of responses to some comments made on the thread:

Re blazers and other traditional jackets, tweeds etc., on campus during the '60s, though I was in grade school myself then, I'm relying on yearbook, alumni mags, and archives from my (and family members') schools which show that the the guys still owned the jackets through the early '80s, even if they were only worn for certain occasions and not as casual daily wear ... of course, at some prep schools, jackets were required, at least through the '70s, after which I don't really know .... my school used to require jacket and tie but doesn't any longer and hasn't for years, the kids there today can dress for school the way we used to dress on weekends, the lucky tykes ....

To Horace, whose observations have always been great, when I say "passe" I don't mean  that Ivy/preppy clothes went suddenly totally unworn by anyone in the '60s and '70s, just that by the late '60s they were not nearly as cool or desirable to the student masses as they had been five years earlier, which is obvious ... a lot of people no longer tried to fit that bill or look that part ... women arrived at the formerly all-male college I'm writing about at or near the height of the anti-Vietnam student protest era, and that event during that era combined to reduce to a degree the prevalence of the consciously preppy dress there ....

... but nevertheless all the men were wearing tweed jackets and blazers on their way into the big-domed ceremonial hall for freshman assembly in September 1968, that's for sure, that's a real photo ....

... all this shit reminds me of the old geezers in Gluyas Williams or Lampoon cartoons who show up on campus for reunion or The Game and get all agitated because nobody's wearing raccoon coats and beanies or boaters, or guys who graduated in the '40s and '50s showing their wives their old rooms in the '60s and '70s and trying to convince the stoned-out students that Sinatra really was still cool ... complaining that the place is dead compared to the old days, which may well be true and if so is due in no small part to the raising of the drinking age in the '80s ....

... the wrinkled look came out because dudes threw their clothes, whether from Brooks or Sears or wherever on the floor as soon as they could get away with it, and while the laundry service charged next-to-nothing for wash and fold, I don't recall that it even offered ironing, and no student I knew ironed clothes  ... we'd have one proper shirt, pressed by the dry cleaner, ready to go, but then that would get worn and thrown into a corner wrinkled, and then the next time an unwrinkled shirt was needed one would have to be borrowed from someone or just taken without asking or bought new at the Coop or Co-Op or maybe someplace a bit nicer ... I never thought about clothes in advance, and most of the "nice" clothes I got in college were just affordable replacements for my old high-school clothes ... one pair of charcoal gray wool trousers and one blue-white university-striped shirt ... that I happened to need one day in order to cadge a nice dinner out somewhere or for a weekend in the city, later for interviews .... I'm also remembering sweaters and scarves given as Christmas presents ... but an obviously just-bought "school wardrobe" was something that wasn't cool ... I had one blue blazer and one Shetland tweed jacket during college and I bought a great used suit at a thrift store for college graduation (end of term and no money for clothes, only for fun and grad school, hence a new J. Press suit was out of the question) when I realized that I had outgrown my other suit, a navy suit from Brooks Brothers that I had owned for five years or so already ... the following September I went to grad school and bought a nice new navy sack suit at one of our fave suppliers ... and that was my suit for the next two or three years (I bought one more sack suit in mid-gray for work, and one in cotton for the summer months, and rotated these three suits for a couple of years ... I had many old striped and foulard-patterned ties so I thought I was achieving a different look every day, pretty funny to me now ... I just remembered one other tweed jacket I had during college, I got when I went thrifting with a girlfriend and I liked it better than my "good" one ..... anyway, now I have trunks in my attic full of my little brothers' Brooksgate and L.L. Bean stuff, and old relatives' Aquascutum and Brooks and other junk, including a tub of wooden racquets, hardly any of it fits me even remotely but there are a few things I still hold onto even though I should have donated them long ago ....."

J.

What's to quibble? Damn good read.

Bad Brains, that brings back memories. My hearing's never been the same since I saw them live, but it was worth it.

It is an interesting read, hearing about all of this from someone who followed the style devoid of self-consciousness, just because that's what everyone was wearing.

In a way, though, that context makes the clothes less interesting.  Sounds like these cats weren't "into" their clothes...if in school today they'd happily sport t-sirts, flip flops, etc.

I like to see people dress for deliberate effect.  That's where it gets intriguing.

Last edited by captainpreppy (2008-04-30 10:54:58)