Elegy for the Gray Flannel Suit, 1959

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"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

Clothing Moves Toward Greater Comfort, 1954

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"The most important trend in men's suits is the swing to natural shoulders. The natural-looking suit is in sharp contrast to the exaggerated lines and padding of older suits. The width of shoulders is the outstanding feature of this model. It has minimum padding, narrow lapels and higher notch."

Source:

NYT - 9/26/54 via the FNB Talk Ivy Forum

Shifts are usually minor

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The slightest ripple in this calm is hailed as a tidal wave. There's so little real excitement in the men's fashion world that its leaders are reduced to grasping at buttons. Thus, the return of the two-button suit, sparked by Mr. Kennedy, has practically caused dancing in the streets, even though tailors admit that the three-button suit is holding its own, especially among members of the opposition party.

Continued...

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The last "revolution in the appearance of the American man was the Ivy League look of the last decade. Was it a revolution of was it an example of the few finally dominating the many? After all, large numbers of influential men had been wearing Ivy League suits all along. The rest of the country finally gave up trying to lick them and decided to join them, which is to say, they followed suit.

Source:

Revolution! - NYT - 4/1/62 (with article images from Decline & Fall, FNB Talk Ivy Forum)

Yes, there is another part of the article but I can't locate an image.

The Yale Man

The Yale man dressed impeccably in the preppy uniform of the day, though ''preppy'' wasn't in wide use then. ''Natural shoulder'' was what men's magazines called the Yale look, and for decades the clothing stores near campus at Elm and York Streets in New Haven were the natural-shoulder capital of the universe. Its bulwarks were Fenn-Feinstein and J. Press. In New York, not far from the Yale Club, there was Haberdasher's Row, commencing at 44th Street and Madison Avenue: Brooks Brothers, known as just ''the Brothers''; J. Press (there was also one in Cambridge, Mass.); and Chipp, which had a retail store but also did big business in custom tailoring. (We have Chipp to thank for, among other innovations, jackets and trousers of patchwork madras.)

In the 1950's and 60's, an experienced observer could tell where a Yale man shopped just by his shirt: plain pocket meant Fenn-Feinstein; pocket with flap, J. Press; and no pocket at all, the Brothers, which in those days didn't believe in shirt pockets, perhaps because almost all their suits still came with vests. Vest aside, to determine the origin of a suit might take closer observation; if it had a lining of bright red silk (like several of the suits of one of my classmates, a guy so Cole Porter-ish that, like Porter, he kept a piano in his room), it was most likely a custom job from Chipp; if it had a button fly, it was probably from the Brothers, which still sold such garments up on the geezers' floor, where you could also get voluminous high-waisted boxers of the kind sometimes on display in the Yale Club locker room. They had three buttons at the top and came up almost to the nipples, as if made with a built-in cummerbund.

All the sartorial niceties of the Yale style began to erode, as I've suggested, with the enrollment of what became the class of 1968 -- my class, as it happens, and also the class of George W. Bush. I seem to recall the president-to-be going sockless and wearing corduroys and cable-knit sweaters, but that could describe any number of us. He did not cut the figure of, say, Strobe Talbott, another classmate, who became deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration. Strobe was a full-fledged intellectual, so he could carry off the affectation of wearing plaid Bermudas well into November.

Article source:

The Yale Man - NYT - 9/19/04

Photo source:

A Restless Transplant - Brian Kupke and his Yale Sweater

Inspiration:

Old School (Thanks!)

Shoulder Shifts

"Hip," natural-looking shoulders and an easier fit have come to imply sartorial independence and a certain patrician carelessness. Then again, they may signify nothing more than another swing of fashion's pendulum. The rise and fall of men's shoulders, after all, can be seen as the equivalent of women's soaring and dipping hemlines.

A cursory look at the styles of the past several decades confirms the point. Natural-shoulder suits sold by Brooks Brothers, J. Press and other standard-bearers of American style in the 1950's were fine for many men, but unfortunately rendered others pear-shaped.

Source:

NYT - Men's Style: Shoulder Shifts - 2/3/91

Suntans and flat-fronts

Cornell Daily Sun, April 5, 1956

Watching 'The Graduate' (1967) the other night on Turner Classic Movies, I coveted Dustin Hoffman's wardrobe, his preppy button-downs and flat-front chinos. Steve McQueen and Sean Connery's James Bond set off similar pangs of sartorial envy.

Looking for a little historical perspective, I asked John Weitz, the 77-year-old designer, about pleats versus flat-front.

"Obviously, it all goes in circles," he said. "The modern-day circle started after the war, when the men came back wearing what are now unfortunately known as chinos but were then called suntans, because they were a tan pant and they were flat." Until then, Mr. Weitz continued, "the only people who wore flat pants were the upper classes. You saw them in Brooks Brothers and the Ivy League. The rest of the country wore great big pleated pants in a rather bad imitation of the Duke of Windsor."

Source:

NYT - On the Pants Front: The War of the Pleats

No Fashion Future in Ivy League

New York Times, August 19, 1957

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"A man past college age who dresses as though he was on still on the campus reminds me of a sophisticated woman wearing her teen-age daugher's dress"

Soothing anonymity

New York Times, September 28, 1958

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With thanks to Decline & Fall (FNB Talk Ivy Forum) for finding this.