For Ivy-Style’s 200th post, I thought I’d break out something special I’ve been sitting on for awhile.

Last year, between Los Angeles and New York, I spent six months in my old environs of the Bay Area, including five weeks staying with a former flame (now married to a Hungarian who lost his baronetcy in the revolution), in Oakland on Lake Merritt.

Out for a stroll one day, I popped into Walden Pond Books, one of those massive used bookstores you can get lost in for hours, and of which so few remain today. In the back were several tables loaded with paperbacks from the ’50s, a mixture of science fiction and detective dime novels and reprints of stuff like DH Lawrence and Ovid’s “Art of Love” with lurid covers.

Of these hundreds of books stacked pell-mell, one caught my eye: a 1959 novel called “Try For Elegance” by David Loovis. The characters were described as “white-collar Beats” and included Teena, “a commuter between Park Avenue and Greenwich Village,” and Paul, “a bohemian in a Brooks Brothers suit.”

I had a feeling I’d stumbled across a real lost artifact, and rushed home with the three-dollar book to do some googling.

I found an article in The New Yorker that profiled Loovis and his debut novel. Turns out the author was an Ivy Leaguer who worked at Brooks Brothers’ Madison Avenue flagship, and “Try For Elegance” was largely based on his experience there.

I can’t describe the serotonin-rush of serendipity that flushed over me because of this fortuitous find. In my six years of style blogging, this was without a doubt the coolest find. Who else would have noticed this book and been in the position to appreciate it, put it in context, and share it with an interested readership? If fate has a hand in blogging — if fate has a hand in anything — this was it.

As for the novel, its quality is about what you’d expect from an author you’ve never heard of who’s prone to describing the weather as “warmish,” “bluish” or “fallish.” But for our purposes here, “Try For Elegance” is a fascinating document for its dramatization of what it was like at Brooks Brothers (which is never mentioned by name) during its heyday.

Like his creator, Paul Dunar is the graduate of “a small Ivy League college.” He is a 29-year-old aspiring painter who’s been working for a year or so at Brooks Brothers, and who falls for a 19-year-old spoiled rich girl from the Midwest.

Paul has a taste for good clothes, is conscious of being well dressed, and delights in the pleasure of being well turned out:

The silk jacket beneath his raincoat felt good, his trousers were perfectly pressed and his linen could not have been whiter. He too liked a handkerchief in his suit coat top pocket and as his raincoat fell open, he saw that it was thrust in at a casual and jaunty angle.

Here’s the first description of the store, which ends on a killer line:

It was with great pride that the Madison Avenue store proclaimed its one hundred and thirty years of continuous service; indeed, only two things appeared on its label: the store name and the year of its establishment. It catered in men’s furnishings and clothing to what is know as the perennial taste; suits designed with a narrow shoulder, made of subdued colored materials woven in England, and cut by the store’s own tailors; furnishings distinguished by flair without ostentation. In its long history, the store numbered among its customers American presidents and European kings, as well as all the people alive in the world during the last century and one-third who agreed that this was the style that mattered.

Here’s a sense of what customer service was like 50 years ago:

Of the twenty-six salesmen on the main floor of the Madison Avenue store, fourteen had worked there over ten years, six were members of the Quarter Century Club, and one man had actually been in the employ of the company for fifty-one years.

The latter gent was “more than an old salesman. To the well-bred of the era, he was a landmark, a reminder of youth and a happy, stable world.”

Quite a contrast to Paul’s floor manager, Mr. Pardee, who wears a gaudy watch and had “come in his teens from a tiny town in one of the far midwestern states.” Here’s Mr. Pardee:

He detested to the point of vehemence the term “Ivy League” although the store was generally considered as the long-time stronghold of that type of apparel. Dunar suspected Pardee’s lack of college background and a secret envy of the well-fed, rangy type of boy and man who mostly patronized the store had something to do with it.

Loovis devotes an entire chapter to dramatizing the feeding frenzy during one of the store’s semi-annual sales, during which Paul is poised to make enough money to move into a new apartment:

Even from a distance of three blocks, Dunar could see that a number of people had gathered and were waiting outside the Madison Avenue store…

He noticed the jam of people in front of the elevators. It was as if the cars were lifeboats, and it was necessary to get into one. But it was not often that the store offered reductions, in almost all its departments. And it was not too much to say that customer response to these private sales, unadvertised in the papers (notices through the mail only), was fanatic.

The store fed salesmen sandwiches during the day to keep up their stamina, and at the end of the day, during which the elderly salesman had collapsed from exhaustion, Dunar then faced two and a half hours of writing up his sales book.

Here’s what The New Yorker had to say in its profile of July 11, 1959, after dispatching a writer to track down Loovis at Brooks:

We found him deep in wash-and-wear suits, on the second floor, and begged the privilege of an interview. Slender, dark-haired, and dapper, he said he’d be glad to give us a word or two between customers. To break the ice we remarked that he was the best-dressed author we’d encountered in many years.

Loovis later tells the magazine:

“The ‘elegance’ of the title doesn’t refer solely to physical surroundings, by the way. An elegant person is a gentleman, one who knows how to handle himself. He cares for his life, and intends to live it in association with others who care and with things that are beautiful and fine. In my novel, I deal sympathetically with a middle-class hero who wishes to play the game but is ill-equipped to do so.”

You’ll dig the vintage Brooks lingo here:

Mr. Loovis was called away to wait on somebody, and upon returning he told us that Brooks Brothers salesmen take customers in rotation and that, by bad luck, the customer who just had fallen to him had proved an egg, which is a BB term for a customer who takes a lot of time and then doesn’t buy anything. The opposite of an egg, Mr. Loovis told us, is a wrapup — a customer who knows exactly what he’s after and wastes no time getting it — while a sea bass is a big buyer, and a huckleberry is a pleasant fellow who moseys around the store for an hour or so, making no trouble, and eventually buys a necktie or some other small article.

Loovis closes by telling the New Yorker:

“The job gives me a good income and I believe in what I’m selling; there’s an undeniable integrity, a psychological validity, here at Brooks that I mightn’t find anywhere else.”

— CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD

On assignment for CNNGo.com, Tokyo-based Ivy-Style contributor W. David Marx reports that “Take Ivy” will be reprinted in the US in August with a price of $24.95.

If you’ve been sitting on an original waiting for the right moment to sell, that moment is probably gone.

When I was an undergraduate at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA, there was a wonderful campus shop on Main Street called Tom Bass. It served three colleges and a university (Moravian, Muhlenberg, Lafayette and Lehigh University), and it stocked many of the iconic Ivy League labels: suits by Southwick, buttondowns by Gant and Sero, Pringle and Alan Paine sweaters, flannel and khaki trousers by Corbin, and raincoats by London Fog. Anyone old enough to remember will tell you these manufacturers produced clothing of the highest standards in those days (the ’50s and early ’60s).

But when I went to graduate school at Lehigh in 1963, I moved up a notch, to what was arguably one of the three or four best campus clothing shops in the country. There were of course J. Press in New Haven, The Andover Shop in Cambridge, Chipp in Manhattan… and then there was Langrock on Nassau Street in Princeton.

I don’t want to go into the history of that esteemed firm at the moment, merely give a few fleeting impressions of that sublime outfitters. The owner of Langrock at the time was Alan Frank, a man of impeccable taste who looked as though he could have walked across the street and stepped onto the podium of a lecture hall. In my memory he tended to wear charcoal suits most of the time: flannel in winter, tropical worsted in summer, with the occasional nod to a seasonal Harris Tweed or seersucker sports jacket. Usually a white oxford cloth buttondown, and a dark silk club tie. Very proper, yet he always looked perfectly comfortable and at ease.

The shop itself occupied a regal, colonial-looking brick building on a corner, so the large floor-to-ceiling plate glass display windows (obviously not original because the building had originally been a home) could be seen from two sides. Inside were a series of rooms, each paneled in dark walnut wainscoting and with old Persian rugs on the well worn wooden floors. Hunting prints of course and college shields. Everything to reflect the hushed and slightly dusty ambiance of a gentleman’s club or dining hall. It seemed impervious to time.

In the center of the main room, as one entered from the street, was a large round table, a good five-to-six feet in diameter, laid out with rep striped ties: hundreds of them in military, university and club stripes of the most vivid colors, a wheel of shimmering silk afloat in the dimly polished ambience. To the right was a glass-and-mahogany case which held the club and paisley neckwear. All from England. Also from England and Scotland, in a similar case to the left were the crewneck sweaters (with saddle shoulders), and wool hosiery, as well as cashmere V-necks and beautiful cashmere hosiery in heathery tones of lovat and fawn and tobacco brown and Cambridge grey.

Shirts — mainly buttondowns, with some straight point and rounded club collars mixed in — were stacked on shelves running the length of the left-hand wall from waist to within a foot or so of the ceiling. It was at Langrock that I first saw — and bought —  a true royal oxford cloth shirt. It happened to be in a lustrous pale yellow, not quite cream. It was light as a cloud without being delicate, and I got years of wear out of it.

The two other rooms held the tailored clothing: suits, sports jackets, odd trousers, topcoats and raincoats. And there was a real tailor, not just an alterations tailor but a man who worked a pattern, and who had swatch books of handsome Cheviot and Hebrides tweeds, flannels from the West of England, and Irish linens. I once extravagantly commissioned a hearty tweed sports jacket in a  camel-and-olive check with an orange windowpane. The tailor put a special sweat-proof lining in the back skirt panel of the jacket, “just in case you want to do some riding, Sir.”

My purchases in this sartorial arcadia were actually few and far between because Langrock was violently expensive, particularly for a young man in grad school. But funnily enough, I still have several of their ties today, and always felt I’d gotten my money’s worth. Since I was an English Studies student, I was thrilled to hear from Mr. Frank that John O’Hara was a customer, although I never had the luck to see him on my rare Saturday appearances. O’Hara’s not read much these days, but in his time he was a literary giant. And he wallowed in campus clothes: Jacob Reed (Philadelphia’s best Ivy League store in its day), J. Press and his beloved Brooks Brothers were his haberdashery haunts. He once invited the dandy columnist George Frazier to drink with him simply because Frazier was wearing a Brooks buttondown. O’Hara lived in Princeton at the end of his life, and is buried there. His epitaph, written by himself:

Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time,
the first half of the twentieth century.
He was a professional.

— G. BRUCE BOYER

G. Bruce Boyer is the author of numerous books on menswear, most recently “Fred Astaire Style” for Assouline. He is currently a contributing editor at The Rake.

Compared to Western fashion magazines, Japanese magazines often get very specific about how to achieve a certain look. Editors and stylists do not just play with themes, as with most fashion editorial, but painstakingly recreate the exact styling from definitive fashion guides and personages.

In its February 2010 issue, Japanese weekend wear magazine 2nd decided to go back to the bibles of Trad/Ivy/Preppy to build perfectly authentic outfits of American casual (see scans below). Stylist Hajime Suzuki showed readers how to replicate exact outfits from the works “Take Ivy,” “Ivy Illustrated” and “The Official Preppy Handbook” with new brands.

First up is “Take Ivy,” a photo book that was incredibly influential in Japanese Ivy circles for decades before recently being rediscovered in the West. Suzuki kicks things off with a suggestion of white oxford button-downs from Michael Tapia, Individualized Shirts or Gambert. 2nd, unfortunately, had to go to vintage pieces from Tokyo’s best clothing recycle shops to find the letter sweater famously worn by a Princeton undergrad in the book. Barns Outfitters, meanwhile, somehow has the identical faded Brown University sweatshirt from the book for a mere ¥13400 — likely more than what the Brown Co-Op wants for something more modern. Other key items include plaid flannel shirts, classic sneakers, varsity jackets, white pants, rugby shirts, chinos and anorak parkas. The overall feel is sporty, but these were students after all.

Suzuki then presents real-life recreations of the Kazuo Hozumi-illustrated work “Ivy Illustrated,” another bible of Ivy style amongst Japanese baby boomers. The book’s images come to life in comical and somewhat unrealistic ways, including goofy smiles and more than one bandana ascot. The general impact is very Tokyo weekend dad rather than New England during the Kennedy era.

Finally, 2nd recreates some looks from “The Official Preppy Handbook,” which had an official translated release in Japan back in the early ’80s. Suzuki outfits a dummy in perfect ski vest over thick sweater with a hint of 2010 magic (it’s all about the plaid bits on the green vest from Cresent Down Works). 2nd doesn’t go for the classic LL Bean Norwegian Sweater oddly, perhaps because LL Bean Japan failed to sell the sweater this year despite its revival in America. The second look in the series does, however, manage to replicate prep-school sloppiness in orderly Japanese fashion by using paint-flecked, art-damaged khakis from Waste(Twice).

The overall feature does a relatively good job of distinguishing the differences between Ivy (in its “authoritative” ’60s incarnation) and preppy (in its “authoritative” early ’80s, Birnbach-curated incarnation.) While most Japanese fashion culture is not particularly comfortable with wild extrapolation, stylist Suzuki does deserve credit for not making the outfits look like period costumes. Traditional clothing presumes a timeless elegance, but the breath of brand options here in Japan for these items gives the wearer a considerable amount of flexibility between playing the classics and playing around with the classics. — W. DAVID MARX

W. David Marx is a writer living in Tokyo whose work has appeared in GQ, Brutus, Nylon, and Best Music Writing 2009, among other publications. He is currently Tokyo City Editor of CNNGo and Chief Editor of web journal Néojaponisme. (Continue)

Mark your calendar and plan to be in New York sometime in the fall of 2012, as you won’t want to miss an exhibit on The Ivy League Look currently in development at the Museum of The Fashion Institute of Technology.

I met with the curators recently and they are very excited about bringing scholarly attention to this chapter in American menswear history. There will also likely be an accompanying book published by Yale University Press, MFIT’s usual publisher and a nice tie-in considering the subject matter.

The MFIT has released the following statement:

The Museum at FIT is embarking upon the study of menswear, specifically the clothing styles worn on the campuses of America’s Ivy League universities from the early 20th century to the 1960s.

The study will also encompass the rise, fall, and subsequent revival of the Ivy look, both in the United States and abroad, that began in the early 1980s.

Deputy Director Partricia Mears and Exhibitions Manager Fred Dennis hope to turn this study into a comprehensive exhibition that will open to the public in the fall of 2012. Ideally, the exhibition will be accompanied by a publication similar in scale and scope to recent MFIT books published in conjunction with Yale University Press.

Advisors to the project will include writers Christian Chensvold and G. Bruce Boyer. Chesvold and Boyer are menswear historians who specialize in the Ivy look and other relevant sartorial styles.

Expect regular updates over the next two years as the project and dates of the exhibit and book publication become available. — CC

One of the great things about visiting Paul Winston is that you never know what he’s going to break out for show and tell.

The other day Paul pulled out a stack of several dozen deadstock Chipp pocket squares he’d recently found stashed away somewhere. He figures they must be 30 years old, give or take a decade. Some are English-made, while others are from India. And among this pile of cotton and silk was one remaining price tag that read $11.50.

In a brilliant stroke of inspiration, Paul is selling the pocket squares for their original price.

You’ll need to come pick them out in person, however, as he’s not going to photograph 50 different pocket squares for the purposes of e-commerce. I chose the navy foulard above.

For a souvenir from one of America’s most legendary clothiers, as well as for the best value in pocket squares today, visit Winston Tailors at 11 E. 44th Street #501, right next to Brooks Brothers.

And hurry, because once they’re gone, they’re gone. At least until Paul find another box of goodies. — CC

Yesterday Bruce Boyer and I visited Brooks Brothers, who were showing the Fall/Winter 2010 collection on the sixth floor of the 346 Madison flagship store. The goods represented the company’s growing commitment to reclaiming its heritage, and there were many nods to its golden age in addition to the new girls and home collections.

Though not a separate line, University has a distinctly younger feel, similar to the Brooksgate of yore. This section of the showroom was set up like a locker room, with trophies and athletic gear scattered among the clothes. (Continue)

The following article is actually the first one The Rake assigned me, but it was held for several issues while they waited for new spring clothes to photograph.

It’s out now in the current issue, and was great fun to research, as I got to talk not only to Bruce Boyer and Paul Winston, who’ve since become friends and colleagues, but also Alan Flusser, Denis Black, Ethan Huber and Lisa Birnbach.

The complete text is below, or you can click here for a PDF with the accompanying fashion shoot.

* * *

Damned Dapper: The origins, philosophy and specifics of the “go-to-hell” aesthetic — the conservative WASP’s colorful, critter-filled creative outlet
By Christian Chensvold
The Rake, Issue 8

Thomas Watson Jr. was president of IBM during the years when it was a punchline for sartorial conformity. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, gray suits for employees were standard, white shirts required.

It may seem an odd non sequitur, then, that Watson once ordered a custom sport coat whimsically embroidered with dozens of little skiers, to wear during cocktail hour at the lodge after a long day on the slopes.

Since the time of Martin Luther, the Protestant nations of the Western world have been known for a sober palette compared to the scarlet and purple of their Catholic neighbors. Perhaps this repressed sense of color ironically accounts for the riotous display of blinding pastels that characterize the preppy look of the WASP, or White Anglo Saxon Protestant, a term popularized in 1964 by sociologist E. Digby Baltzell to describe the small caste of elites that ran American business and politics.

While WASPs have largely lost their power stranglehold on American society, their influence on the world of fashion is stronger than ever. And despite their notorious character flaws (bigotry, emotional impotence, fondness for peanut butter), they’ve long led America with sterling examples of virtue and self-sacrifice.

And for that they have as good a chance for getting into heaven as anybody else — unless, of course, St. Peter guards the “pearly gates” like a nightclub bouncer enforcing a dress code. In that case, WASPs will surely have their trousers damned to the netherworld.

GOING TO HELL

Tom Wolfe may seem an odd springboard for a story about color. But while the dandy author’s wardrobe may be all white, his prose is pure purple. He’s also a keen sartorial observer, and in 1976, in an article for Esquire entitled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine,” Wolfe uses the catchy phrase “go to hell” to describe the garish pants worn by elite Bostonians vacationing on the island retreat of Martha’s Vineyard. The phrase continues to enjoy limited usage, and the passage that birthed it is worth quoting in full:

[Bostonians on Martha's Vineyard] had on their own tribal colors. The jackets were mostly navy blazers, and the ties were mostly striped ties or ties with little jacquard emblems on them, but the pants had a go-to-hell air: checks and plaids of the loudest possible sort, madras plaids, yellow-on-orange windowpane checks, crazy-quilt plaids, giant houndstooth checks, or else they were a solid airmail red or taxi yellow or some other implausible go-to-hell color. They finished that off with loafers and white crew socks or no socks at all. The pants were their note of Haitian abandon… at the same time the jackets and ties showed they had not forgotten for a moment where the power came from. (Continue)

Nomenclature in Tradsville is a tricky thing, and depends largely on your point of view. Those who like hair-splitting will tell you that a short-sleeved gingham shirt is Trad but not Preppy. Likewise, bit loafers are WASPy but not Ivy.

Fair points to an extent, though it gets tedious pretty fast, and bloggers and forum posters have to use slashes — Ivy/preppy/trad — to make sure they’re covering all the bases.

The March issue of Esquire also weighs in on the taxonomy of Tradsville by differentiating between The WASP and The Trad in its fashion spread on American style tribes. This despite that, save for the double-breasted blazer, most of us would consider the clothing items that are mentioned (go-to-hell pants, rep ties, herringbone sport coats) and tastes and pursuits (John Cheever, squash) pretty interchangable.

Which is why this whole WASP vs. Trad thing is pretty silly. — CC

If there’s one character in “The Official Preppy Handbook” who could be singled out for derision, it’s the skier. Wearing mirrored sunglasses and a cocky sneer, he looks like the kind of guy you’d hate everything about.

Everything, that is, except his ski cap from Moriarty of Stowe, Vermont.

For five decades the Moriarty cap and the Stowe ski industry grew in tandem. Here is a story that appeared in the June 2006 issue of Skiing Heritage Journal, recounting how Anabel Moriarty founded a cottage industry and outfitted American Winter Olympians, including her son, from 1956-2006.

Today, as the opening ceremony marks the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics, I wish I could tell you that Moriarty is still a dominant force in ski hats. But there is no longer a store on Main Street, according to the Stowe Chamber of Commerce. The Vermont Ski Museum was also unable to locate a store representative.

But there are still hats available. The museum has a few caps left emblazoned with Stowe, and an Internet search reveals some interesting things for preps who turned left at Bohemian. Moriarty hats and sweaters also appear on eBay from time to time.

The optimist in me believes the Moriarty hat is simply dormant. I’d also like to think there are some Vermont knitters just waiting for someone to appreciate their work again.

As the old advisement used to say, “The People of Vermont make great maple syrup, great cheddar, and the best ski hats in the world.” — CHRISTOPHER SHARP