The concept of rules, which we’ve been exploring lately, is related to other approaches to dressing that certain men gravitate to. Some become obsessed with formulas for how items are coordinated. These formulas could be timeless or they could be trendy. Last month Alexander Aciman wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Succumbing …
In our last post we discussed Japan and the concept of menswear rules. Let’s pick up where we left off. Now I may have been a bit quick on the draw in the previous post, going off on a tirade about close-minded clothes-minded guys obsessed with dressing according to rules and formulas. The concept of …
It’s always fun flipping through the Japanese magazine Free & Easy and seeing all the botched English, such as “Made in trad.” Having spent a summer in Japan, I can assure you that nonsensical English used in advertising and the media provided hearty guffaws on the hour. But sometimes the Japanese are unintentionally perspicacious, as …
This morning we were alerted to a sportcoat made for Cary Grant in “Monkey Business” for the scene in which a youth serum gives the 48-year-old Grant the tastes and behavior of a college student. The jacket, currently for sale from a movie memorabilia company, did not make it into the film. It was made …
The other night I was browsing the streaming Netflix options and ended up watching “Monkey Business,” the 1952 screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe. I hadn’t seen the movie since starting this website, and a very interesting scene caught my attention. Grant plays a chemist who thinks he’s discovered a youth serum (which, …
While performing a Google Image search for some random terminology recently, I came across an illustration that caught my eye. It turned out to be from an artist named Joe Bowler who made his living in the ’50s and ’60s doing advertising and magazine illustrations. Quite a few have details that would interest us here, …
Frequent comment-leaver Old School alerted us to this 1966 Gant ad, which he’d found on the web but didn’t think had been tumblred to death. The ad copy attests to correctness of Gant’s oxford buttondowns, including its “casual roll of the collar.”
This week GH Bass & Co. took a big leap into fashion relevance with a new ecommerce site and Weejun-focused marketing campaign called “Power To The Penny.”
Japanese photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida (林田照慶), who created legendary photo book “Take Ivy” as well as follow-ups “The Ivy” and “Take 8 Ivy,” died on August 8 after a battle with cancer. He was just 15 days shy of his 83rd birthday. Hayashida was born in Tokyo in 1930, studying political economics at Meiji University. After …
Lately we’ve been talking about the year 1954 as an arbitrary starting point for the Ivy heyday. Both LIFE Magazine and Playboy ran big stories on the look that year, and Miles Davis is believed to have first donned Ivy duds about that time, serving as an example of the many guys who would become …
Last week the website Cool Material asked me to contribute to its “Wear This” series and pull together an outfit based on stuff currently on retail shelves. The result is illustrative of how I’ve been dressing lately: a foundation of traditional items spiced with stylish accessories that give off — to me, at least — …
Last week Ivy-Style.com presented Julien Dedman’s 1954 Playboy article on Brooks Brothers. In this post, Rebecca C. Tuite, whose book on Seven Sisters style is forthcoming, examines the author’s parody of life at Yale. * * * “Yale men everywhere join in one brotherhood at eventide to remember the golden days of yesteryear and the …
We continue our series of related posts with these images by Nina Deen, the photographer who shot the 1954 LIFE Magazine article “The Ivy Look Heads Across US.” These photos, which didn’t make the print edition, surfaced several years ago when LIFE put its archives on Google, and were taken in J. Press’ New Haven …
We just got a note from Kamakura Shirts saying that it has just launched an oxford campaign in celebration of its newly operational e-commerce store, as well as its fully stocked oxford-cloth buttondown collection. Says our contact, “Unfortunately we did not have enough of them for a long time, and we are afraid if we …
Yesterday Allen Edmonds contacted me with a sneak peek at a survey they just completed. It is, as you’d expect, all about shoes, with the most interesting parts pertaining to the women who were surveyed. First off, the women all had incomes between $50,000-$200,000, and while there were only about 500 of them, Allen Edmonds …
Gentleman’s Gazette just published a great story on the history of madras. There’s much on the origins of the fabric in India, but even more interesting is Sven Raphael Schneider’s recap of the bleeding madras damage control at midcentury, when irate consumers were quickly educated that authentic madras was “guaranteed to bleed.” According to Schneider, …
Do kids still use the term “dope” to describe something cool? Evidently they do, and they’ll even use it to describe stodgy ol’ Brooks Brothers. If you’ve puzzled over who exactly is the target customer for Brooks’ more youthful offerings, I think we’ve found the answer. This week a Cornell-bound teen wrote a piece for his …
The colors of the American flag are almost the same as the traditional choices of oxford-cloth buttondowns. After all, who the heck wears yellow? And so on this Fourth of July Ivy Style bids you Happy Independence Day with this festive “fun” shirt from Brooks Brothers, which is almost as old as America itself. Let the …
Besides the obvious things like career and family, the two things for me that make life worth living are art and sport. During the winter I’m more focused on the art side (typically concerts), while in the summer I like to play outdoors. So when Birchbox, a company that introduces you to new stuff via …