Ivy for the Ladies

Classic campus outfit consists of a pink shirt ($8), Bermuda shorts ($15)
and striped elastic belt ($2.25) [all Brooks Brothers] - LIFE, April 5, 1954

And of course, it is not just a men’s store any longer. In fact, it was something of a sociological event when Brooks, the bastion of masculine conservatism, opened a women’s department back in 1976. Not that women and Brooks discovered each other then for the first time, you understand, since the ladies had been lurking about the store for years, making off with raincoats and Shetland sweaters, ordering Bermuda shorts and polo shirts from the boys’ department. In 1949 Vogue photographed a woman in a pink Brooks Brothers button-down shirt. The decision to start a women’s department simply reflected an awareness of the arrival of the businesswoman and Brooks Brothers’ determination to accommodate her. After all, the firm has dressed her husband since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

G. Bruce Boyer, from Elegance - A Guide to Quality in Menswear, WW Norton & Company, 1985