Since their invention by British soldiers in India, who tried to conceal dust by dying their trousers with tea, khaki pants have been a menswear staple marked by overabundance. Department store racks are lousy with them, and new brands appear and die out yearly. The khaki market is a hard one to win a share of, and an even harder one in which to stand out.
Gregg Donnelly thinks he can do both. “There isn’t a go-to player in the khaki market,” says Donnelly, who founded Jack Donnelly Khakis in 2008. “It’s near impossible to consistently find a quality pair. There are so many companies making khakis right now, but I have yet to find a pair that is truly worth my money.”
It’s true that most khakis aren’t made very well. They sag in the seat, the fit and finish are poor, and they fray and fade poorly. Most are made overseas. The few American-made, high-quality brands are prohibitively expensive. It’s ironic for a product synonymous with traditional American style.
Donnelly thinks the solution is attention to detail, and he’s arranged his business accordingly. “Because our headquarters are less than a few hours from where our khakis are actually made,” he says, “we are afforded the ability to keep a close eye on the entire khaki-making process, and to make sure they’re manufactured to our exact specifications.”
Those specifications include a roomy seat and thigh and a waistband designed not to creep up the hips during wear. Jack Donnelly Khakis’ introductory Dalton pants are available for sale exclusively online, in khaki and stone, with pleats or without. Dalton shorts are available in the same color and pleat options. The cost — $88 for pants, $68 for shorts — is steeper than most department-store khakis, but shipping to anywhere in the US is free. Returns, for any reason, are free as well.
Each pair comes unfinished. Having them hemmed is one step more than would be required of store-bought pants, but, given their quality and Gregg Donnelly’s enthusiasm, a day at the tailor’s might prove a small investment in a pair of khakis that’s actually worth your money. — ANDREW S. EASTMAN
Andrew S. Eastman is a 2007 graduate of Dartmouth College, where he was a member of the rugby team and wrote for The Dartmouth Review. After a short stint at a Boston public relations agency, he began pursuing a law degree at the Saint Louis University School of Law.
IS: “Take Ivy” isn’t due to come out for another month, and yet you’ve already pre-sold the first printing. How many copies have you sold in advance of publication?
WDV: Let’s just say we’ve already had to go back to print, which is very rare, especially for an illustrated book. It’s really taken off because of the blogosphere. You guys are just taking the information and running with it. It’s just viral, which is the dream of every publisher.
IS: The book’s original hype was also driven mostly by the Internet.
WDV: Absolutely. I found the book via new media. I saw the Times write about it, and saw it on either A Continuous Lean or The Trad. The Trad had scanned the whole book, so I saw it and thought, “We have got to do this.” Over several weeks I was on the phone at 10 at night trying to find the Japanese publisher, trying to track down who holds the rights to this thing. We finally found them, and were just elated that we got the rights. So many people had been talking about it online that we thought we might be too late, but we weren’t.
All of us here saw scans and knew we loved it: none of us had seen a copy. Very few people have actually held a copy, so we were all just going crazy for scans, which really says something about the material. And now we’re seeing that a large group of people are really into this. But the timing is perfect, too, right in the thick of the American Craft movement, as some people call it, or a celebration of all things American. (Continue)
Will Fall 2010 be remembered as the peak —and therefore beginning of the end — of the Preppy/Ivy/Trad/Americana trend, or will it mark the beginning of a much larger and longer influence on American style and culture?
Time will tell, and things are heating up in preparation.
According to Amazon, “Take Ivy” is scheduled for release on August 31 (J. Crew’s site says 8/24, the NY Times article says “next week,” and the powerHouse Books website does not have a date). On September 7, soon after the release of “Take Ivy,” Lisa Birnbach’s “True Prep” will be published.
With the double-shot of trad tomes on store shelves this fall, it will be interesting to see how the PITA trend plays out in the media — and society at large.
In the meantime, tune in on Monday for Ivy-Style’s interview with powerHouse Books publisher Wes Del Val about the process of acquiring the rights to “Take Ivy,” with plenty of arcane trivia about the book and its origins. — CC
Until somebody finds the official “Take Ivy” video (our man in Tokyo is working on it), this may be the closest thing to surface so far.
For the past couple of months I’ve been subscribed to the Princeton Campus Life YouTube channel. Most of the archival footage has been recent or early twentieth century. Then the other day I noticed something closer to the heyday: the crew video from 1948-50. So I skimmed through the channel’s videos again and found an absolute gem: a 25-minute, professionally shot (and scripted) orientation film from 1962.
It’s all here: “Princeton” haircuts, stretched-out shetland sweaters, white socks and no-break trousers, natural-shouldered jackets, collar rolls and ties askew, bow-tied professors, pipe-smoking in the classroom, touch football on the lawn, bicycling across campus, and khakis as far as the eye can see, all from the school most credited with setting the styles of the Ivy League Look. — CC
It’s Menswear Market Week here in New York, and I’ve spent the past few days at a couple of the trade shows. First up, Designer Forum, sponsored by the Custom Tailors & Designers Association, the oldest trade organization in the US.
Pictured above are rep bow ties from Collared Greens, which has combined the preppy, domestic manufacturing, and eco trends all into one. Based in Sun Valley, Idaho, the brand showed neckties and brightly colored, organic-cotton polo shirts. (Continue)
This is a 20-minute clip, so watch it over lunch if you’re the kind of poor schlub who eats lunch at his desk. And if you’re at home, pour yourself a drink and get comfortable.
Love the towel worn as a scarf in the opening. Great chinos and sweaters in action at 2:28. Jackets and ties for trip to Cornell at 4:28. White bucks and grey flannels at 5:51. Rowing against Columbia through New York City at 8:29. More traveling clothes at 10:32.
And finally, at 19:28, the climax: a kiss from a debutante in cashmere and pearls.
Bob Sheppard, the legendary public address announcer for the New York Yankees from 1951 to 2007, died on July 11th at the age of 99. He was raised in Queens and went to St. John’s University, where he won seven letters and served as senior class president, and later returned to serve as a speech professor. While best known for his announcement work, he always considered his teaching duties more important than his announcement duties, but Yankee fans were fortunate to witness his use of the former to elevate the latter.
As a fellow Queens kid who grew up listening to Yankees games on the radio, Sheppard’s voice — dubbed “The Voice of God” by Reggie Jackson — was an integral part of my relationship with the team. Through the dark days of the mid-’80s to the early ’90s, to the triumphant years at the end of the century, the distinctly sonorous cadence of Sheppard’s announcements offered fans an enduring reference point beyond the team’s fickle American League standings.
Sheppard’s manner harkened to a different era, when baseball was largely followed on the radio. In an interview with ESPN, Sheppard said, “The modern public address announcer is a screamer, he’s a shouter, and he is very, very flamboyant,” better suited for a wrestling ring. In contrast, Sheppard described his method as “clear, concise and correct.” As a baseball fan who listened to both Yankees and Mets games, I witnessed the contrast and understood Sheppard’s intent. The game was perfect by itself; it did not need a promoter, but merely someone who respected its dignity. Sheppard did so superlatively and stylishly, as seen in the sack-jacketed 1972 photo above.
“I don’t go to work; I go to a game,” Sheppard once said, as if baseball was too sacred to be a job. As the announcer for the sport’s most storied franchise, Sheppard served as a trustee charged with protecting a key part of New York’s heritage and capturing the imaginations of succeeding generations. He will be missed by millions of fans, including this one. — WILL CHOU
Recent Yale grad Will Chou is currently pursuing graduate studies in history at Ohio State University. He avidly indulges in sports, travel and food and would like Roger Sterling to be godfather to his future son.
When powerHouse Books releases the first English-language edition of “Take Ivy” on August 31, eager readers will finally get a chance to see its enchantingly atmospheric photos as they were meant to be seen: within the hardbound covers of a picture book. Though widely disseminated on the Internet, scanned photos seen on a computer screen just can’t evoke the sense of time and place the same as ones printed on paper and held in the hand.
Gazing at these idyllic scenes of campus quads, where groups of stylish young men live out the best years of their lives in tranquil isolation, cut off from the pressures of work and family that await them, it’s easy to feel drawn into some kind of halcyon golden age far removed from contemporary college life.
And this is what makes “Take Ivy,” created by photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida and three writers, such a special book. For in fact what it depicts is not a golden age at all, but the last rays of twilight on a declining silver age.
Although Hayashida and his team could not have known it, they were preparing the obituary for a moribund celebrity whose demise is imminent. “Take Ivy” chronicles the beginning of the end of the Ivy League Look, the final group of classmen for whom oxford shirts and penny loafers were a uniform, and the last gasp of a sartorial tradition that had slowly germinated, codified, and risen to popularity over the course of 40 years.
Midway through “Take Ivy” is a photo of a freshman wearing a sweater emblazoned with the expected year of his graduation: 1968. He could serve as a single representative of his generation at this time of unprecedented change. Clean cut and “collegiate” (how archaic that word sounds!), when he receives his diploma, he will probably look very different. And a decade later, the staples of his wardrobe — natural-shouldered sack jackets, oxford-cloth button-downs, Weejuns, discreet rep ties — would become symbols of stodginess and elitism in a new age of free-thinking egalitarianism.
Released in September of 1965 and apparently shot in spring of the same year, “Take Ivy” is a chronicle of the penultimate year of the heyday of the Ivy League Look. Only one year remained in which this style would still be considered smart by the majority of students. When the fall semester of 1967 began, following the torrid Summer of Love, America would begin to change with head-spinning rapidity, and the Ivy League Look would tumble into sudden free fall like a sartorial albatross hurled from the top of Nassau Hall.
In his novel “The Final Club,” Princeton alum Geoffrey Wolff tersely summarizes the rapid fall of the Ivy League Look. Referring to the Ivy Club, Princeton’s most exclusive eating club, he writes:
Lining the second-floor hall were group portraits of Ivy members, and Nathaniel paused to examine them. Till 1967 the club sections were photographed indoors, in the billiard room; dress was uniform — dark suits, white shirts, Ivy ties. In 1967 a white suit was added here, an open collar there. In 1968 the insolent, smirking group moved outside, and was tricked out in zippered paramilitary kit, paratroop boots, tie-dye shirts, shoulder-length locks, and not a necktie in view.
The photos in “Take Ivy” show the Ivy League Look as a house of cards trembling in the winds of change. The students pictured are more stylish than those of today, but they are also less formal than those who had come before. “Take Ivy” shows more tees than ties, more sweatshirts than Shetlands. While the clothing items themselves are purebred Ivy, the students’ lack of formality, elucidated in the text, is the first step in the gradual casualization of the college wardrobe, a process that has reached its logical conclusion in the flip-flops and pajama bottoms on today’s campuses.
If “Take Ivy” were a glass whose contents were the Ivy League Look, it would be both half empty and half full. Much is gone, but much remains (though what remains won’t be there for long). With their seemingly effortless nonchalance, the students teeter on the edge of a fence, with the past on one side and the future on the other, simultaneously upholding tradition and dismantling it. And it’s for this reason that “Take Ivy” is bittersweet on the eyes.
A few years later, in jeans and sideburns, after Vietnam War protests, public-figure assassinations, and a zeitgeist demanding a complete revaluation of all values, these students would have looked back on their college years the same way we look at “Take Ivy” nearly half a century later: as a simpler time forever gone. — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD
The latest issue of Singapore-based The Rake just came out, with the following piece on the past and present of madras, for which I interviewed Paul Winston, Ethan Huber of O’Connell’s, and Brooks Brothers merchandiser Jeff Blee.
American Indian: Madras, named for the Indian city where it originated, remains a distinctly yankee summer staple
By Christian Chensvold
The Rake, issue 10
Though Brooks Brothers and Chipp were just across the street from each other — at 44th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City — their customer base was miles apart. That’s why one summer evening in the early ‘60s, Chipp employees moved dozens of unsold patch-madras sportcoats from one side of street to the other, changed the labels from Brooks to Chipp, and started ringing up sales the next day.
It’s one of Paul Winston’s favorite stories. Fresh from college, he had just joined his father’s legendary company Chipp, purveyors of the Ivy League Look but with a predilection for experimentation and whimsy — like Kama-Sutra linings in sober grey-flannel suits. This creativity also gave birth to the patching of madras, that comfortable, inexpensive and quintessential summer fabric. The fateful “Late-Night Madras on Madison Merchandise Swap” consisted of sportcoats from a third party used by both Chipp and Brooks Brothers. “We couldn’t get patch-madras sportcoats in fast enough, and Brooks couldn’t sell them,” Winston remembers. “Relatively speaking, we were considered edgy, and they had old-line, conservative blue-blood customers who looked down on it.”
The passing of time makes fertile ground for irony. Brooks Brothers has all but declared 2010 the year of madras, offering dozens of products in categories from shirts and shorts to sportcoats, ties, pocket squares and even loungewear. And guess what? Patched items are the best sellers.
“It is an interesting year in terms of madras,” says Jeff Blee, divisional merchandise manager of men’s furnishings for Brooks Brothers. “We made a much more sizable investment in it this year. It fits the two ends of the fashion spectrum: It can be very subdued and traditional in a Nantucket way with blues and reds, but can also be a good vehicle for what I like to call Palm Beach Prep, which is a little more over-the-top in terms of color, with pinks, greens and oranges. (Continue)
Since their invention by British soldiers in India, who tried to conceal dust by dying their trousers with tea, khaki pants have been a menswear staple marked by overabundance. Department store racks are lousy with them, and new brands appear and die out yearly. The khaki market is a hard one to win a share of, and an even harder one in which to stand out.
Andrew S. Eastman is a 2007 graduate of Dartmouth College, where he was a member of the rugby team and wrote for The Dartmouth Review. After a short stint at a Boston public relations agency, he began pursuing a law degree at the Saint Louis University School of Law. 
Bob Sheppard, the legendary public address announcer for the New York Yankees from 1951 to 2007, 
When powerHouse Books releases 
bottoms on today’s campuses.
The latest issue of Singapore-based