An Interview with Ivy Style Founder Christian Chensvold

From Trad to The Esoteric Tradition: An Interview with Ivy-Style Founder Christian Chensvold

by Michael J. Lotus

Christian Chensvold founded the Ivy Style site in 2008 and operated it until 2021.  He founded the Dandyism site in 2004. Christian was born in 1969, in Berlin, the son of a captain in the U.S. Air Force.

In 2023 Christian published The Philosophy of Style.  I recently purchased and read The Philosophy of Style and found it entertaining and enlightening. I heartily recommend it to Ivy Style readers.

I hope Ivy-Style readers will enjoy the following conversation with the site’s founder, Christian Chensvold.

INTERVIEW:

ML: Christian, how did you get interested in men’s clothing and personal style?

CC: I was quite literally born with the stars for it, as I’m sure we’ll get to later in the interview. Even as a young boy I had a sense for my favorite clothes and that they could make me feel a certain way. During the rebellious teenager years, I was gently mocked for having a sense of order and neatness. Once all that was gone, by the time I was a senior in high school I was already on this path. I’d seen some crucial films — “Wall Street” and “The Untouchables” come to mind — and was starting to imagine myself in a world of elegance. I bought GQ and M magazines, then Flusser’s “Clothes and the Man,” and when I graduated my parents gave me some money for my first solo road trip. All the ads in the magazines said, “London Paris New York Beverly Hills.” Those were all too far from the Wine Country north of San Francisco, not to mention too expensive, except for Beverly Hills. So I drove the family pickup truck down to LA for a week. One of the critical things to come from that was the film “The Moderns” which I stumbled upon at a vintage movie theater. It’s set in Paris in the ‘20s and combines bohemian glamor with the world of cafes and artists and writers. That fall in freshman English my first essay was called “Hermes on Rodeo,” which already shows a budding desire to write about style with a sense of dandy wit. So that’s how writing merged with fashion, which I describe further in the intro to The Philosophy of Style.

ML: How did you come to start Ivy-Style.com?

CC: While I knew traditional Anglo-American dressing through Flusser and of course the world of Ralph Lauren, in 2006-2007 I began learning about what at the time was the online “trad” world, which here on the site I dubbed Tradsville. I enjoyed learning about the history of the companies I didn’t know, such as J. Press and The Andover Shop, and a part of me needed to embrace that combination of gentlemanliness with the playful “go-to-hell” aspect. I was charmed by the clothes, which was something I needed at the time, when I was in the netherworld of Los Angeles, where I lived from 2001-2009. On the cultural side, it represented the pinnacle of our national style via the WASP establishment, and was something I had to work through as an American. When I learned about the jazz connection, I thought it was an interesting chapter in American history, when African American musicians briefly dressed like Northeastern college guys. I pitched that to Ralph Lauren Magazine, and “Ivy League Jazz” became one of its most popular stories. Shortly after I was ready for a new creative project and decided to try my hand at this, which launched October 1, 2008.

ML: One of my favorite things about your style writing is the sense of history, the desire to dig back and find out how it all happened. What got you going down that path?

CC: That’s also in the stars. When I was born there were four major planets — including the Sun, which directs everything — located in the Fourth House, which rules home, history and heritage. Since I reached maturity at age 18, I’ve always looked backwards for the sense of purpose and meaning to my life.

ML: Am I right that Ivy-Style.com was more about the clothes and the tailors, and Dandyism.net, which you founded in 2004, was more about the philosophy and mindset?

CC: That’s certainly correct about dandyism, which is the oldest and most thorough tradition of elegance we have. It is our “philosophy of style,” and the source of the most inspired thinking in the new book. But Ivy-Style was always a culture and Americana site from the very beginning. When readers would argue about it in the comments section or on other forums, detractors would always say “it’s just a clothes blog,” but it was never just that for me.

ML: In “The Philosophy of Style” you refer to various books which influenced your thinking. What type of reading did you do, and how did you come across the books you mention?

CC: I think it goes back to those formative years in college. I ended up becoming an English major, so I was discovering style and writing at the same time. What’s so interesting about the 200-year history of dandyism is that it’s the writings, not the clothes of any particular era, that made the tradition and why it is still discussed today. With Ivy-Style.com, I enjoyed finding sartorial passages in midcentury books and sharing them in posts, so the connection between wearing clothing and chronicling society in writing has always been there.

ML: Tell us about your fictional work. What led you to writing fiction?

CC: I first began writing stories as a child, and still have much of the schoolwork. It was all very imaginative, as I’m of the generation of boys who saw “Star Wars” in the theater in 1977. I wrote fiction for my high school newspaper and had a college short story — my first attempt at a female protagonist — published a few years later in a regional magazine. I was extremely prolific in those first few years out of school, and had a poem published circa 1995 in a glossy magazine called Poet. I wrote a novella entitled “Rewinding” about a young fogey in San Francisco who meets a wealthy eccentric who awakens his protégé to the decline of Western Civilization — a kind of Lord Henry figure, from “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” This of course was more of a work of practice, and wasn’t very good from a literary standpoint, though I picked it up not long ago and was shocked at how prescient it was, especially in a surreal dream sequence. I also won a regional fiction contest with a story about a protagonist who wanders through an antiques store while working through his family memories and relationship with his father. When I became a professional writer — doing essays, lifestyle and fashion stories and working as an editor at a business magazine — the fiction ceased for about five years until I published a couple of droll midcentury retro sci-fi stories from a series called “A Bachelor in Space: The Adventures of Drake Sutton.” These ran in a vintage-style newsstand magazine called Outré, and a few other places. It was fun to be imaginative, but it wasn’t the best fit as the format was too plot driven, whereas the stories in the book are much more voice driven.

ML: I hope we won’t scandalize anyone here if we delve into your own, shall we say, pulling back from men’s fashion as a central life focus. Have I characterized that accurately? Tell us about that.

CC: Someone said, “All roads lead to disillusion.” I went to New York in late 2009 during the recession. I was flat broke, and two weeks shy of my 40th birthday, so I had nothing to lose. I ended up being there for 12 years, during which time Ivy-Style took off and allowed me to keep an apartment I was very pleased with. But eventually the conflicts within our character must be resolved if we are ever to find tranquility and not become bitter old men. So, in my life story, the 12 years in New York turned out to be about something that had nothing to do with a professional career. I went there in crisis, and I left it as a man reborn.

ML: Please tell us how “The Philosophy of Style” came to be written or compiled from your earlier writings.

CC: Somewhere around 2015 I was starting to think about style theory again. The feminine side of my subconscious was also trying to break through into consciousness, so I remember feeling I’d already learned all I could about masculine elegance and spent some time trying to unravel the mysteries of the French concept of chic but couldn’t find what I was looking for. That’s when the phrase “philosophy of style” came to me, and sometime around then G. Bruce Boyer suggested I bring out a compendium of my writings. The earliest parts of the book go back to 1994, while the latest were done right before publication in 2023. I got sidetracked with various web side projects — Masculine Interiors, for example, and the two mini-book versions of “The Disengage” and “These Are Our Failures” short stories — so the compendium was delayed until I returned to California in 2021 and began working on it in earnest, including writing the title piece, my longest work of fiction at the time, and a semi-autobiographical account of working in style media in New York, though the story is set between 1965 and 1982.

ML: Is there any message or concept you mostly wish to convey to readers? My sense, when I read it was that the first part of the book marked an ascent, from a focus mainly on clothing, to a discussion of dandyism as an approach to life, which occurs at the physical center of the book, which I take as an esoteric signal of its centrality as a message. Am I on the right track with that?

CC: I think so. The book is organized in a very specific way. It starts with the midcentury Americana, moves on to ruminations on style theory, goes on to dandyism, and then concludes with the most esoteric section, which is on dandyism as a late branch of chivalry related to the Ars Regia, or Royal Art of spiritual development, which comes to us from the Greco-Egyptian Hermetic tradition through Renaissance and Medieval alchemy during the Christian era. Then come the three works of fiction, culminating in the title piece, which is the culmination of 30 years of thinking about style and its ultimate possibilities.

ML: I also sense that the three tales reflect an imaginative working out of various concerns and themes in your own life.

CC: They were written between 2016-2022, and looking back I realized that all three involve a protagonist who’s a writer who leaves the milieu in which he was living and working and “drops out” of society. Right before the book came out, I wrote a cover story for the weekly paper here back home called “The Great Escape” in which I posited four time-tested paths for escaping contemporary life: art, nature, spirit and time travel.

ML: I will mention that “The Philosophy of Style” as a physical package, is beautifully done. Please tell us about the process which led to such a lovely presentation of your work.

CC: That’s very kind of you to mention, especially as there’s an Ivy-Style tie-in. My graphic designer Dot Dakota has been a colleague for 20 years. She created the Ivy-Style logo, helped select the green, burgundy and gold color tones used throughout the site, and created many of the sponsors’ ads over the years. Anyone needing her services can contact me at christian@dandyism.net and I’ll make the introduction. The cover image was made from a photo I took at the Metropolitan Museum, which Matthew Karl Gale then turned into a new graphic with the necktie added. Devoted readers will know him for several pieces he’s written for the site, as well as my partner in the creation of the Ivy-Style Club Tie and belt.

ML: What have you been doing since retiring from Ivy-Style?

CC: Recently I came across a quote from Mark Twain saying how most men are dead at 27 but their tombstone says 72. That was literally the case for me, when all the youthful ideals began to crumble. Every aspect of life began to be revealed as a kind of illusion, and there were devastating losses of family and friends. I limped along all split-apart inside for 20 years — coincidentally the amount of time Parisifal spends looking for the Holy Grail in the Medieval legend — and then in 2017 I hit a new low and was clear I had major inner work I could no longer avoid. The first thing I felt instinctively was that I had to get stronger, so I joined a gym and did fight training with a tough old guy I met in the park, who turned out to be Italian mafia. This was the year Jordan Peterson became famous, and my article on him in National Review was blurbed on the back of his best-seller. I read voraciously, and for the first two years it was an agonizing process going through every memory and blocked feeling. I think I created a category on Ivy-Style called Level Up where I shared my first few articles on this process. Soon the Spirit, divine spark, or supra-personal dimension of the self took hold and helped guide the process, and I left New York at the end of 2019 with the wild idea about living a quiet life in Newport, which was interrupted a few months later by covid, which shut down everything. Long way of addressing the question, which is that since turning over the site I created a newspaper column called Spirit that distills metaphysical teachings in an entertaining way, and also created a successful two-year campaign for the major Wine Country tourism bureau called Soulful Travel, which combined ancient wisdom with nature writing. I wrote several cover stories on my mother’s astrology (as well as losing her to cancer and being unable to grieve), the “magic” of creative acts, escape from modern life, and a story on liberation pegged on Bastille Day. I also re-designed and relaunched dandyism.net last year and brought out The Philosophy of Style.

MB: And I understand you have a new book out on your spiritual journey.

CC: Yes, it’s called Dark Stars: Heroic Spirituality in the Age of Decadence.  It is an allegorical quest-tale that also serves as a practical guide to the Western Esoteric Tradition and the possibilities for spiritual transcendence under the present circumstances. It’s definitely the culmination of my life experience so far. And it’s funny but I just remembered having arrived in New York in late 2009 and going to my first event, which was a gallery reception for Barnaby Conrad III, whom I’d just met in San Francisco the week before. I remember chatting with an older lady there who said, “You have to reinvent yourself every 15 years.” So the process that really began in 2009 with my adventure into the unknown to fix my broken self, something I didn’t understand at the time, closes 15 years later with the creation of this new book. And just to add a little spooky synchronicity, in 2009 I spent six months between LA and New York in an apartment here in my hometown of Santa Rosa, and when I came back in 2021 there was a major housing shortage, and I was willing to leave anywhere within a 30-mile radius. But I ended up not only in the same apartment building, but the exact same unit, number 15, thereby closing the loop of my journey back east.

ML: In closing, is there anything you’d like to say to the Ivy-Style readers?

CC: Absolutely, thank you. I started the site in 2008 because it felt like a cool project. I had no idea it would be a hit, take me to New York, and allow me to live there for a decade. When I retired, I believe there were 2,500 posts I’d either written or edited, spanning every kind of information and entertainment. I really enjoyed approaching a narrow topic from a broad point of view and am so grateful to the loyal readers and dozens of contributors. I’m also very proud of the fact that the site was born from Miles Davis getting dressed at The Andover Shop, and I believe we first began honoring Black History Month in 2011 and made jazz and Polo’s early African American models a recurring motif. We also helped cement the Jewish contribution to the Ivy League Look, as well as the Japanese, people who’d been dear to my heart since college, when I spent a summer in Japan. Thank you all once again.