This is Ivy-Style’s one-hundredth post.
Over the past 99, I can honestly say that the thing I’m most proud of is never having once attempted to confirm or deny that there is or is not such a thing as “trad.”
For this one, I’d like to present something special: Ivy Magazine from December, 1957 (vol. 2, no. 2), acquired from Collectable Ivy, a dealer in collegiate memorabilia. It’s a fascinating example of an Ivy lifestyle magazine — complete with jazz and clothes — from the heyday and from the source.
I’ve not scanned the entire magazine, as the content is actually rather dull. And you don’t want to read an entire dull magazine at your computer, especially when you’re supposed to be working. But here are some highlights.
The issue includes feature stories on Cambridge University, segregationist David R. Wang and entertainer Jean Shepherd, plus some mediocre fiction and poetry. The front-of-the-book news items include one on the “feminine invasion” at Ivy colleges. There’s also a jazz-on-campus story, but it’s on the Dixieland Revival, not Dave Brubeck.
Put together by undergraduates, the magazine’s advertising roster is fairly impressive, and includes Saks Fifth Avenue, several New York hotels offering student rates, and some travel companies with packages to Bermuda. There are also several recruitment ads aimed at new grads, including ones by Burlington Industries, Ford Motor Company, and Gulf Oil Corporation.
Here are some of the more interesting ads. Playboy took the inside front cover, while MG took the back cover:
Clothing ads are few; the only full-pager is this one by Gant stressing the company’s Ivy cred and the merits of its collar roll:
The article worth reproducing is the cover story, in which two writers argue about prep schools versus public schools. The anti-prep guy opens his essay with a reference to “clothing manufacturers aware of the class-consciousness of the American public,” and argues that isolation from females leads the prep schooler to all sorts of neuroses from which he may never recover.
The opposing writer’s characterization of public-school boys, on the other hand, echoes that of the “Archies” in Nelson Aldrich Jr.’s Atlantic Monthly cover story.
The word “preppie” is used to denote the prep schoolers. Here, in 1957, it’s given quotation marks, as if a neologism. Thirteen years later, after entering common nomenclature vis-a-vis the novel and film “Love Story,” it will lose them, and come to refer to something far less specific.
A note on reading the two essays below: There were technical difficulties when trying to link to larger, easier-to-read files. If these scans are too much of an eye strain, drag the files to your desktop and enlarge them there, or better yet print them out. — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD
Christian Chensvold is the founder and editor of Ivy-Style.
In 1965, Esquire jazz and style writer George Frazier wrote this essay for the liner notes of the album “Miles Davis’ Greatest Hits.”
The Warlord of the Weejuns
By George Frazier
I don’t mean to be a bastard about this, but, at the same time, I have no intention of being agreeable just for the sake of being agreeable. So, I’ll admit at the outset that, damn right, I don’t much care for men who dress badly. It’s not that I necessarily hate them or that I’d ever dream of doing anything to abridge their civil liberties, and, for that matter, I do have a few friends whose clothes are simply appalling (though that’s no problem, for I usually manage to look the other way when I’m with them), but, all the same, I see no point in trying to pretend that I feel very comfortable in the company of the ill-clad.
But the kind of man I do despise is the stupid son of a bitch who, in the arrogance of his ignorance, thinks he’s well-dressed, who assumed that he will arouse admiration because he happens to be wearing a campy blazer by Bill Blass or something swishy created by Cardin. Now that’s the kind of man I can’t stand the sight of, and so much the worse for him if he subscribes to such stuff and nonsense as that somebody named Frank O’Hara was a decent poet. You’d be astonished how many foppishly dressed men respond to O’Hara — the wrong O’Hara. But the hell with that.
All I’m trying to say, really, is that most boutique customers should be lined up before a firing squad at dawn and that there should be a minute of silence to thank God for the existence of people like Miles Davis: Except, of course, that there are no people like Miles Davis. He is an original. He is a truly well-dressed man. He is the Warlord of the Weejuns.
Oh. he’s a cool one all right, but writing about him presents certain problems, for although he is the most modern, the most contemporary of men, he is also a man born out of his time. In a godawful age when a lot of silly bastards dared appear in public in Nehru jackets (thank the Lord that Nehru didn’t have to live to witness that), Miles Davis, I’m afraid, is largely wasted. But before we have the next dance, I want it clearly understood that I’m not advocating that all men aspire to dress like Davis. That would be unrealistic, for it is this man’s particular charm that he is unique, not only in his apparel, but in his lifestyle. His apartment, for example — well, it is like no other apartment I know, tasteful and comfortable and push-buttony and without making anyone feel he better not dirty an ashtray. On days when Miles is in New York and I can take a few minutes from the task of transcribing the corpus of my writings to vellum (a chore I had a couple of monks doing until they became unionized and began to charge me an arm and a leg for a lousy thousand words), I drop in on Miles and, as they used to say, we dish. (Continue)
Playboy in its early years has always struck me as the ultimate men’s magazine. The emphasis on jazz and literature gave it a highbrow edge not found in today’s magazines, in which articles on socially relevant topics, rather than aesthetic matters, provide the weight and seriousness.
Moreover, Playboy’s editorial vision really did encapsulate a lifestyle, whereas today a “lifestyle” magazine is not one guided by philosophy, but by consumer choices. Of course, Playboy is in fact largely credited with creating the modern urban male consumer.
Like bohemian writers in tweed jackets or jazz musicians playing avant-garde music in gray suits, Hefner wore conservative clothing while radically changing America’s views on sex. Recently I discovered a tattered paperback called “Big Bunny,” written by Joe Goldberg in 1967. The book chronicles Hefner and his empire and includes the following passages:
Black-haired, instense, slightly under six feet, he looks, in his often-photographed costume of white button-down shirt, orange cardigan sweater, slacks, loafers and pipe, like a college senior on his way to class.
And later:
[Hefner's] dress is conservative-casual. His suits are custom-made Continental or Ivy League — he has two complete wardrobes. But he says, “Taste isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you develop. When I came out of the war, I was wearing the broad shoulders, wide lapels like everybody else. But when I went to work [as a copywriter] for Carson’s [a Chicago department store], I discovered Ivy and Brooks Brothers and wore it consistently thereafter.”
That is, until he started wearing pajamas all the time.
Lastly, let this be a lesson to our younger readers: There was a time when it was possible to wear conservative clothes unironically, keep your hair neat and smoke a pipe, and still be a Casanova. — CC
Photo from the Chicago Tribune.
John Vliet Lindsay, mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973, personified the resolute confusion with which clubby, liberal WASPs faced the social upheaval of the era.
Entering politics as a successful young lawyer, Lindsay represented the wealthy Upper East Side of Manhattan, known as the Silk Stocking District, in Congress from 1958 to 1965. While serving, he compiled a liberal voting record on matters that would have little immediate impact on the residents of his wealthy district.
This abstract approach to politics, which had little to do with serving the immediate needs of his constituents, brought Lindsay attention and admiration as a Congressman. It would fail him, however, when he moved into the mayor’s office. (Continue)
This Father’s Day, why not do something really classic and take your cue from the TV show “My Three Sons”? Simply put on your finest suits and share an exciting father-son bicycle ride. It’s certainly more original than playing catch in the backyard.
Airing from 1960-1972, “My Three Sons” centered around a single father raising three boys. As aeronautical engineer Steve Douglas, actor Fred MacMurray became a pop symbol for cardigan-and-pipe fatherhood. (Continue)
Take a look at the guy above: Mild-mannered schoolteacher, or James Bond, license to kill?
Providing Ivy Infotainment comes with constant pressure to dig up fresh material. We thought we were scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one until we scoured the dusty archives of Wikipedia and found a curious tidbit of pop-culture trivia.
Pictured here are screenshots from the 1961 saccharine-fest “Tammy Tell Me True,” a sequel to the equally tooth-rotting “Tammy,” whose title song was a hit for Pat Boone, which pretty much says it all. In the follow-up, Sandra Dee stars as the titular country bumpkin, while John Gavin plays her love interest, a professor at a small Southern college. Gavin is the epitome of the clean-cut collegiate, while Dee, as usual, is lousy with virginity.
Half Mexican and fluent in Spanish, Gavin was born John Anthony Golenor Pablos. He is best known for his role as Janet Leigh’s boyfriend in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Other credits include “Imitation of Life,” “Spartacus” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” Gavin graduated from Stanford and performed air intelligence in the Navy from 1952 to 1955. In 1981 President Reagan appointed him ambassador to Mexico. (Continue)
I recently wrote a shortie for the blog at RL’s Rugby.com about Geoffrey Wolff’s 1990 novel “The Final Club.” This is the novel set at Princeton in the late ’50s I alluded to in the Bruce Boyer interview, which caused a reader to ask what book I was referring to. It can now be revealed, and I’ve excerpted some sartorial passages below that I think you’ll enjoy.
Wolff is the brother of Tobias Wolff, whose novel “Old School,” another campus tome set in the same era, was the subject of a previous post.
Here’s a New York Times article about their brotherhood and literary rivalry.
Though I enjoyed both books, I preferred the energy and stronger coming-of-age themes in “The Final Club,” which centers around a half-Jewish boy named Nathaniel who attends Princeton, takes in the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, goes sailing and dances outdoors under the stars. Basically the life we’d all like to lead, at least for a day, if we could eliminate the bigotry and disillusion. (Continue)
For the latest installment in Ivy-Style’s series of reminiscences and anecdotes, the blogger known as Longwing spins a tale about a trip to Nantucket in his love-struck youth, and its effect on his sartorial tastes.
In the summer of 1979 I traveled from my home in Louisiana to visit a girlfriend who was summering in Nantucket. She was working as someone’s nanny and sharing a home with about 20 similarly employed youths. The girlfriend thing turned out to be a disappointment, but Nantucket was something to remember.
I had learned the prep look in New Orleans, where it was known to the locals as Uptown and on campus as preppy. Up to that point the look meant little more to me than welcome relief from the “Saturday Night Fever”-inspired styles of my early high school years. My own beginner’s wardrobe was quite simple: I spent 90 percent of my time in khakis, an oxford (usually in need of laundering), and Top-Siders. Many of my friends had clothing that showed true devotion to the style, but I’m not sure I even noticed. And getting my sober ass down to Perlis to stock up on the goods was not a high priority.
The trip to Nantucket changed all that. The so-called girlfriend was working days, so I had plenty of time to look around the island, and I liked what I saw. I liked the red pants. I bought some. I liked the way everyone looked like they had just gotten off their sailboat. My friends in New Orleans were more likely to look like they had just returned from a fishing trip, which is fine, but didn’t capture my imagination in quite the same way.
Even though the signs had always been there, I needed to break away from my limited view of campus and fraternity life to understand that the look was more than I knew.
The following spring I made my way to Louisville for Kentucky Derby, where I would once again experience the style in a potent form. Only after experiencing Nantucket and Louisville did I begin to understand that there was much more to this look that I had so casually and carelessly co-opted.
I’ve never been back to Nantucket, though I wouldn’t pass up the chance to go again. I’d be very surprised if it were anything like I remember. It was quaint in a way that is hard to imagine now.
And honestly, I’m not sure I want my memories tampered with anyway. — LONGWING
The corporate conformists take a curtain call as we complete our troika of posts on IBM. After all this sartorial sobriety, we promise something bright and fun for the next post. (Continue)
