Welcome to The Ivy League Look

This blog presents a historical view through articles, photographs, reminiscences, and advertisements, of an American style of men's fashion of the mid-20th century known as "The Ivy League Look" or "The Ivy Look."

This blog will not present modern-day iterations of this "look"; it will be shown in its original context as an American style worn during this specific era. Author commentary will be kept to a minimum.

This is not a commercial site and links to commercial sites will not be posted.

August 31, 2009

Norman Hilton, 1963

(click to enlarge)

Source:

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 5/11/63

August 29, 2009

Clint Eastwood, 1971

In the opening scene of Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan is wearing a three-button herringbone tweed jacket (two cuff buttons), a burgundy sweater vest, a burgundy/navy Guards tie, and charcoal wool trousers (slim cut, cuffed).

Doctor: Sure, Harry. We can save the leg.
Harry Callahan: What are you going to do with those?
Doctor: Going to cut your pants off.
Harry Callahan: No. I'll take them off.
Doctor: It'll hurt.
Harry Callahan: $29.50, let it hurt.
[that's about $165 in 2009 dollars]




August 28, 2009

August 26, 2009

The Kennedys, 1963

What To Do About Sloppy Dress?


"If disorderly attire is a genuine symbol of personal independence, then the college generation should stick by their symbol at least a few decorous weeks after the ink is dry on their baccalaureate degrees. If it is not that, then dishevelment is what it is: a blend of affectation and laziness."

Article:

National Review - 1/17/59

August 24, 2009

Elegy for the Gray Flannel Suit, 1959

(click to enlarge)

"Thinking men along Madison Avenue are now conforming against their old uniform with more sincerely patterned suits"

Source:

The New York Times - 9/27/59

August 21, 2009

Trim tailoring...for just about everyone




"In the 1950s, conservatism and conformity rule, with trim tailoring and similar accessories (hat, pocket square, cigarette, and martini) for just about everyone. Downtime sees the occasional glimpses of flair (shantung jackets, madras prints, Hawaiian shirts)."

Source:

Esquire - The Evolution of Men's Style: 1933-2008

August 20, 2009

August 19, 2009

Guaranteed to Bleed, 1965

(click to enlarge)

Source:

Toledo Blade - 4/29/65

August 18, 2009

August 17, 2009

Sero of New Haven, 1964

(click to enlarge)

Anyone care to translate?

August 14, 2009

Clipper Craft, 1960

(click to enlarge)

"...tailored, trim and terrific."

Source:

Jon Williamson - flickr

August 13, 2009

Canterfield, 1967


(click to enlarge)

"...the now look for campus and career."

Source:

SI - 8/21/67

August 9, 2009

August 8, 2009

What You Will Wear Tomorrow, 1958



(click to enlarge)

"Within the next few years, predicts Bert Bacharach, a leading authority on men’s fashions, you may see the downfall of the Ivy League style. These slender, natural lines, he believes, are as much an exaggeration as the drape cut. Next step, he says, is moderate padding, a bit of a waistline and some semblance of a blade at the shoulders.

What about the distant future? The wonders will continue, experts claim, and before too many years have elapsed episodes like this one may be commonplace: A fellow is out to dinner with his best girl. While staring into her eyes, his hand trembles and a blob of gravy drops on his pants. He just lets it dry, then reaches into a pocket for an eraser and rubs out the spot!

That evening, the same chap surveys himself in a mirror and decides he’d look better in narrower lapels. No fancy tailoring bills for him. He merely takes out a pair of scissors and snips his lapels to the desired width.

He is wearing paper clothes and they are only one of the long-range miracles of masculine [Continued on page 145] fashion foreseen by authorities. Declares Mr. Bacharach: “The changes to come will be utilitarian, not merely a different look. Everything in apparel runs in cycles. We have now reached the zenith of durability in clothes. A suit has a life expectancy of some eight to 12 years. Soon the corner will be turned and suits will have shorter and shorter lives on the theory that men will welcome a good deal of variety in their wardrobes."


Source:

Mechanix Illustrated, October 1958, via Modern Mechanix blog
(via Ivy Style)

August 7, 2009

August 6, 2009

Mad Men, Season 3

(click to enlarge)

I'm breaking from the norm with this post to present a few images from the website for AMC's Mad Men. These are promo shots for Season 3, which takes place during the mid-1960s (1964 to 1965, from what I understand).

Try to ignore Christina Hendricks (it's tough, I know) and take a look at the suit worn by Jon Hamm (as Don Draper). A 3/2 roll to the three-button, or a "three-button with button-on-center" in J. Press terminology. He's wearing something akin to a Brooks Brothers No. 1 stripe repp tie. Narrow lapels. Some padding to the shoulder but nothing excessive. Forward point white shirt, TV fold pocket square. I think it's a good representation of what a man in Don Draper's position on Madison Ave. would wear during this period (not Ivy, but still somewhat conservative). Two buttons on the sleeve would have been appropriate, but I'm sure that three was also common then. I'm also wondering whether Vincent Kartheiser's tie is almost too narrow.

This promo shot features four supporting characters. The costumers really do wonderful work on this show.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Milton's Clothing Cupboard - Atlanta, 1963

(click to enlarge)

Source:

Georgia Tech's student newspaper, "The Technique" - 8/16/63

August 5, 2009

The New York Wasp, 1974

(click it...seersucker and a striped repp tie)


...The threat to the Waspocracy seemed dire. If the children of paradise were fed up with the idea of Brooks Brothers suits, lunch with dad at the Union Club, well-executed curtsies at the cotillion, and keeping blots off the old escutcheon, then the species couldn't survive beyond the plump and docile Eisenhower generation. But the doomsayers underestimated two things: the depression that inevitably follows protest, and the allure of the True Wasp life-style.


Complete article:

New York Magazine - 8/12/74, p. 27

August 3, 2009

Mr. America Now Style Conscious

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Sir: When next you buy a suit, it's a 50-50 chance that your wife or sweetheart will be with you.

And the odds are that in place of the Draped Shape Look of the mid-'40s or the Casual Look of the early '50s, you'll now go for the Natural Look - with its narrow lapels, minimum of shoulder padding, straight, two-button jacket, trim trousers.

Should you - and she - decide against the Natural, though, it's then likely you'll buy the Ivy League Look - with its no-shoulder appearance, slime three-button jacket, even slimmer trousers.

You will probably tend toward today's version of charcoal gray, a gray made lighter by stripes, decoration in the fabric.

You will purchase or receive as Christmas presents ties so narrow they will remind you of Grandpa's era.

You will also adorn yourself a good part of the time with colored shirts - pastel pink, mint green, pale yellow, light blue.

In short, Mr. America, you're finally succumbing to it, you're at last becoming style conscious.

And, say America's manufacturers and retailers of men's clothing - as well as your women - hallelujah, it's about time!

Not since the days of the Revolutionary War has the American male been so aware of the style of his clothing. And as important, not since then has he been so willing to admit his awareness.

For decades most men have entered a store, said to the salesman, "Give me a suit (or shirt or tie, etc.) like the one I'm wearing." And it has taken years to make an American male feel that, maybe, his "good" suit has become a little out of style.

Today more and more men are going into a store and saying, "Show me the latest."

For decades the American husband has been entirely content to wear clothes that automatically have put him in the background. In fact, he has insisted on being inconspicuous.

Recently Ive been at parties where - no fooling - the women have been the "conservative" with their quiet, one-color outfits and the men have been the spectaculars.

Men's fashion shows are spreading all over the country. Such aggressively male organizations as the Rotary Clubs and American Legion Posts actually are asking men's fashion groups to put on shows for their members.

Increasing numbers of newspapers are offering columns and full sections devoted to men's fashions. And the reader response in the articles has startled even the most cynical editors.

"How come? Why?" I asked Michael Daroff, head of H. Daroff, makers of the largest men's clothing brand in the medium-priced field ("Botany 500") and one of the leaders in the men's fashion revolution.

"World War II have it the first big impetus," he said. "The American designer and manufacturer get away from European styling. They were thrown on their own and had to come up with something and they did.

"This gave the American woman, with her acute style sense, a chance to move in and she did." (Women buy more than 70 percent of all men's furnishings, are with the men when more than 50 percent of all suits and topcoats are sold).

Makers and sellers of men's clothes are now determined to push the fashion revolution, for understandably they want to snatch a bigger share of the customer's dollar. "The fact that the biggest increases are being shown by leaders in style changes shows what lies ahead," says Daroff.

Article and advertisement source:

The Milwaukee Sentinal - 11/18/55

August 2, 2009

The Secret Vice


It's the secret vice! In Europe, all over England, in France, the mass ready-made suit industry is a new thing. All men, great and small, have had tailors make their suits for years, and they tend to talk a little more with each other about what they're getting. But in America it's the secret vice. At Yale and Harvard, boys think nothing of going over and picking up a copy of Leer, Poke, Feel, Prod, Tickle, Hot Whips, Modern Mammaries, and other such magazines, and reading them right out in the open. Sex is not taboo. But when the catalogue comes from Brooks Brothers or J. Press, that's something they whip out only in private. And they can hardly wait. They're in the old room there poring over all that tweedy, thatchy language about "Our Exclusive Shirtings," the "Finest Lairdsmoor Heather Hopsacking," "Clearspun Rocking Druid Worsteds," and searching like detectives for the marginal differences, the shirt with a flap over the breast pocket (J. Press), the shirt with no breast pocket (Brooks), the pants with military pockets, the polo coat with welted seams—and so on and on, through study and disastrous miscalculations, until they learn, at last, the business of marginal differentiations almost as perfectly as those teen-agers who make their mothers buy them button-down shirts and then make the poor old weepies sit up all night punching a buttonhole and sewing on a button in the back of the collar because they bought the wrong damn shirt, one of those hinkty ones without the button in the back.

And after four years of Daddy bleeding to pay the tabs, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of these schools turn out young gentlemen who are confident that they have at last mastered the secret vice, marginal differentiations, and they go right down to Wall Street or wherever and—blam!—they get it like old Ross, right between the eyes. A whole new universe to learn! Buttonholes! A whole new set of clothing firms to know about—places like Bernard Weatherill, probably the New York custom tailor with the biggest reputation, very English, Frank Brothers and Dunhill's, Dunhill's the tailor, which are slightly more—how can one say it?—flamboyant?—places like that, or the even more esoteric world of London tailors, Poole, Hicks, Wells, and God knows how many more, and people knock themselves out to get to London to get to these places, or else they order straight from the men these firms send through New York on regular circuits and put up in hotels, like the Biltmore, with big books of swatches, samples of cloths, piled up on the desk-table.


From "The Secret Vice" by Tom Wolfe, for New York Magazine and published in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965

August 1, 2009

"I can't stand preppy boys", 1962

Prettiest Miss Like Boys -- But

It's a fortunate thing that pixie-like Jean Leslie Allen has never depended on boys.

Now that she's won the national junior miss contest, the daughter of a Providence, RI, pediatrician finds shes' getting a stream of phone calls from boys who "just want to go out with a title."

On the other hand, the boys she would enjoy dating don't call because of her sudden fame.

Fortunately, Jean has her feet very much on the ground, and continues to enjoy the houseful of kids ever present in a family of five children. She's noticed that when her brother, a student at Brown University, brings dates over, that she's subjected to more scrutiny than usual, but she remains unconcerned.

Jean knows the kind of boys she likes - and doesn't like. "I can't stand preppy boys. They all look alike. The Harvard haircut, the identical sports clothes. Boys my age try to (sic) hard to conform. That's why I prefer boys a little older."

Complete article:

The Free-Lance Star - 5/1/62