The Ivy Look: Classic American Clothing - An Illustrated Pocket Guide

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Hemingway on Fitzgerald's tie

Photo published in LIFE magazine - 4/10/64

"He was lightly built and did not look in awfully good shape, his face being faintly puffy. His Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well and he wore a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar and a Guard's tie. I thought I ought to tell him about the tie, maybe, because they did have British in Paris and one might come into the Dingo - there were two there at the time - but then I thought the hell with it and I looked at him some more. It turned out later he had bought the tie in Rome." (p. 126)

"...when I met him at the Closerie des Lilas a few days later, I said that I was sorry the stuff had hit him that way and that maybe we had drunk it too fast while we were talking.

"What do you mean you are sorry? What stuff hit me what way? What are you talking about, Ernest?"

"I meant the other night at the Dingo."

"There was nothing wrong with me at the Dingo. I simply got tired of those absolutely bloody British you were with and went home."

"There weren't any British there when you were there. Only the bartender."

"Don't try to make a mystery of it. You know the ones I mean."

"Oh," I said. He had gone back to the Dingo later. Or he'd gone there another time. No, I remembered, there had been two British there. It was true. I remembered who they were. They had been there all right.

"Yes," I said. "Of course."

"That girl with the phony title who was so rude and that silly drunk with her. They said they were friends of yours."

"They are. And she is rude sometimes."

"You see. There's no use to make mysteries simply because one has drunk a few glasses of wine. Why did you want to make the mysteries? It isn't the sort of thing I thought you would do."

"I don't know." I wanted to drop it. Then I thought of something. "Were they rude about your tie?" I asked.

"Why should they have been rude about my tie? I was wearing a plain black knitted tie with a white polo shirt." (pp. 128-129)

Source:

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway



From Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress by Russell Smith:

Reps and Regimentals

There have long been very complicated discussions in men's fashion books and magazines about the correct name for certain kinds of striped ties - Americans call them reps, a word for the kind of weave that produces their corded or ribbed surface, apparently from old French - and about the correct angle and direction for the tilt of the stripe. But these discussions are increasingly academic. The reason for all the consternation was that there is a long-standing British tradition of wearing one's military and sporting associations on one's tie, and that these particularly associative ties are, for a certain British class, almost sacred. If you belong to a certain regiment or went to a certain school, you may, according to this class, wear the tie which signals your belonging; if you wear it without grounds, you are a poseur and a fraud.

Of course, this consideration has never bothered Americans much, and so the image of the loud American blithely walking into an English gentlemen's club, wearing a tie proclaiming his service in some ancient, elite military unit - the Household Cavalry or the Life Guards or somesuch - thus provoking offence and embarrassment, are legendary.

Probably the most famous description of such a faux pas is not by a snobbish Brit but by a laconic American. It comes in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, when the young writer runs into F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse and notices his friend is wearing the blue-and-red striped tie of the Life Guards (a tie that was popular at the time because the Prince of Wales wore one).

...These days, unless you are actually spending a lot of time in England with the kind of person who is likely to recognize famous regimental or sporting ties - of whom there are actually very few - you don't need to worry about avoiding certain colours or patterns. Besides, most of the famous ones are so gaudy and ugly that you might not be tempted to buy one in the first place.

Hedera helix California

In yearbooks from this period, teenagers of the Silent Generation¹ seem older, more mature, than their counterparts of today...

While young men were showing in the late 1940s and very early 1950s remnants of the pachuco style in their one-button roll jackets with shoulder pads and wide lapels, or the influence of black culture in their flared Billy Eckstine collars², and even a retardaire hint of the late 1930s and early 1940s in their Pendleton wool shirts, the driving force of male teenage fashion through the 1950s, especially among the more affluent and upwardly mobile, was in the direction of an Ivy League look: poplin windbreakers from McGregor, khaki pants with a backside belt and buckle, brown and white saddle shoes or all-white bucks, loafers or Clark's desert boots.

Likewise did male hairstyles show the same transition from street-smart pachuco to suburban Ivy League as the pachuco-inspired ducktail or DA (duck's ass) haircut, with luxuriant side locks sweeping back to a meeting point, yielded by the mid-1950s to a modified flat-top with side fenders and by 1960 to the Ivy League austerities of the Princeton cut, short and flat against the head.

Since teenagers defined themselves so aggressively by fashion, the deliberately stylized upward mobility of teen fashions in this period, together with the ubiquitous coats and ties, adult dresses and high heels, of more formal occasions, suggested something about the social aspirations of the Silent Generation, its desire for success and an adult identity.

Ed. notes:
¹ The Silent Generation, as first defined in 1958 by Princeton dean Otto Butz, consisted of the high school and college generation of the 1950s and early 1960s (i.e., those born between the last years of the Depression and the end of World War II).

² From Wikipedia: "Eckstine was a style leader and noted sharp dresser. He designed and patented a high roll collar that formed a "B" over a Windsor-knotted tie, which became known as a "Mr. B. Collar." In addition to looking cool, the collar could expand and contract without popping open, which allowed his neck to swell while playing his horns. The collars were worn by many a hipster in the late 1940s and early 1950s."

Source:

Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950 - 1963, by Kevin Starr, 2009


Hedera helix 'California'

The Well Dressed Playboy, 1955

...men's fashions had been the raison d'etre of Esquire magazine, but it only emerged as a key component in Playboy once the magazine was firmly established. Sporadic features during the first year of publication had seen Playboy cautiously dip its toe into the waters of men's apparel, but by 1955 it was ready to immerse itself more wholeheartedly in the pleasures of shopping for clothes. That year saw Jack Kessie, a graduate of Drake University in Des Moines, appointed as the magazine's first fashion editor (under the pen-name Blake Rutherford). Kessie had already contributed a few freelance pieces to the magazine, but as appointed to the staff because 'he had the kind of casual elegance which Hefner thought exemplified the Playboy style'.

Kessie's first feature - 'The Well Dressed Playboy: Playboy's Position on the Proper Male Attire' (January 1955) - set the tone for the magazine's early fashion coverage. Resolutely didactic, it counselled readers to be 'conservative in all departments' to avoid being 'caught up in a perplexing, phantasmagoria of color combinations, patterns, styles, designs and cuts'. This sense of conservative elegance was informed, above all, by the smart-but-casual traditions of Ivy League style. 'Few will argue', Kessie asserted, 'against the fact that it is to the Ivy Leaguers that we owe the current national acceptance of the trim, tapered look in men's clothing' (Playboy, October 1955), the fashion editor affirming that there was 'an authentic Ivy look in active sportswear, just as there is in town' and decreeing that readers steer clear of 'the kind of gruesome garbage...touted as the hottest news from Majorca, the Italian Riviera, Cap d'Antibes and Southern California: Old Testament sandals, ballet-dancer shirts that tie north of the navel, too-short swim trunks laced and latticed up the side, etc.' (Playboy, July 1957). Instead, Kessie prescribed a style that would allow men to dress 'casually and correctly...and still retain individuality' - for tennis, white shoes and shorts, worn with a red Lacoste knit shirt; for swimming, 'trim, fly-front cotton poplin trunks with side tabs for a waist-clinching fit'; and for golf, 'pleatless, poplin, olive green shorts' teamed with a 'good-looking glen, plaid, long sleeved shirt' and 'the best golf shoes you can afford' (Playboy, July 1957).

Source:

Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America, Bill Osgerby, 2001

Campus "Leisure-Style"

"In the world of male fashion...the early 20th century saw the development of a new, leisure-oriented aesthetic. Indicative was the rise of the 'Arrow Man' as a fixture in advertisements for Arrow shirts from 1905 onwards. A model of well-groomed and chisel-jawed masculinity, the 'Arrow Man' became the first in a series of youthful and stylish masculine archetypes whose virile muscularity guaranteed a fashionability untainted by suspicions of effeminacy. The Progressive Era also saw an identifiable 'collegiate' or 'Ivy League' style of dress take shape. Clothing firms such as Campus Leisure-wear (founded in 1922), together with the movie, magazine and advertising industries, gave coherence to this smart-but-casual combination of button-down shirts, chino slacks, letter sweaters, cardigans and loafers - a leisure-style that steadily reached out from the campus into the wider male population."


Source:

Masculinity and Men's Lifestyle Magazines, Bethan Benwell, 2003

How Phyllis Was Won

The authorities of MIT discouraged privacy for mixed-sex couples. MIT didn't know where to put its female students; some were housed across the river, at 120 Bay State Road, and then the university opened up a section of Blexley Hall. Phyllis's room in either dormitory was out of bounds, but there were chintz-covered sofas at 120 Bay Street Road, and corners of the big reception room where the lights - stately floor lamps with pleated shades and three-way bulbs - could be dimmed to coziness. Students would lounge and lie in the semi-dark with their brush-cuts and perms; the boys then wore white bucks and narrow rep ties, the Ivy look not yet yielded to the blue-jeaned geek look, and the girls wore single-strand pearls and pastel sweaters whose wool seemed to melt in the hand.

Source:

Villages, John Updike, 2004

Pat Conroy: Gant shirts and Weejuns

"Oh we have to. We just have to. We have to make the scene at the Shack. My daddy told me to show you where all the gang hangs out. Jim Don has a new Impala. He packed tomatoes last summer and made enough money for a big down payment. Are those Weejuns you're wearing?" she asked Ben.

"What?" Ben asked.

"Weejuns. Loafers. Everyone at school wears Weejuns."

"No, they're just loafers. I don't know what kind they are."

"That's a Gant shirt, isn't it?"

"It might be. Mom bought it at the PX yesterday."

"No, it's not Gant," she said impatiently. "The PX doesn't sell them and there's no loop at the back."

"It's Ivy League, though," Ben offered. "It's got buttons on the collar."

"That's no big deal."

From:

The Great Santini, Pat Conroy, 1976
______________________________________________

"You guys have got the worst sense of style I've ever seen. Why don't you wise up and buy a couple of Gant shirts. And you're the only two guys at the school who don't wear Weejuns. Man, everyone on the team's got Weejuns."

"I don't like Weejuns," Luke said.

"Yeah, I bet you like those shit-kicking tennis shoes a lot better," he said, laughing as I laced up my shoes. "What kind of shirt is that you're wearing, Tom?"

He pulled back my collar and read the label.

"Belk's." He sneered in disbelief. "A Belk's polo shirt. Jesus Christ. That's embarrassing. I'm nominating you two for Bess Dressed in the Senior Superlatives. You've worn the same pair of khakis for two straight weeks, Tom."

"No, I haven't," I protested. "I've got two pairs of khakis. I alternate them."

"That's pitiful. That's just plain pitiful. Not at all cool. Not fitting the image at all."

From:

The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy, 1986

[Ed. note: Setting is coastal South Carolina (the "Lowcountry"), ca. 1961]

Tiger Rags

A key aspect of student culture that changed with some frequency was personal appearance. Like their college peers elsewhere, young Princetonians were keenly responsive to national fashion trends for both youth and adults, particularly those emanating from New York clothiers, from which many of their fathers took their sartorial cues. But for the first six decades of the last century they also tried to fashion a recognizable "Princeton style," whose distinctiveness some popular magazines were all too ready to certify. In most aspects, however, these various expressions of Tiger fashion were widely shared with - if not borrowed from - other eastern colleges, especially their Big Three competitors in all things. The "Princeton Look" was in reality an "Ivy Look," which in turn was largely traceable to an eastern prep school template. Only when Princeton diversified its student body, when the numerical and social dominance of prep schoolers declined substantially in the 1960s and the attendant "cultural revolution" took adolescent fashion in strange new directions, did Princeton dress drift away from a single stereotype. A partial return to "preppiness" in the late 1970s could not prevent the new-millennial "Princeton Look" from resembling ever so strongly the sartorial heterogeneity of most American campuses.

Source:

The Making of Princeton University, James Axtell, 2006

Ovid in Ossining

It is the peculiar and original genius of Novelist John Cheever to see his chosen subject—the American middle class entering the second decade of the Affluent Society—as figures in an Ovidian netherworld of demons. Commuterland, derided by cartoonists and deplored by sociologists as the preserve of the dull-spirited status seeker, is given by Cheever's fables the dignity of the classical theater.

All this has escaped attention largely because the U.S. bourgeoisie has not been encouraged to think well of itself; indeed, it has been made accustomed to having its very virtues excoriated by the writing classes. More important, Cheever, like a demiurge disguised in street clothes, has hidden the demonic quality in his work under the conventional natural-shoulder style of the realistic story.

Source:

Ovid in Ossining - Time Magazine - 3/27/64