I’ve previously presented two articles on Brooks Brothers from the troubled Marks & Spencer era. This one, from four decades earlier, was featured in the September, 1950 issue of the Esquire-owned digest Coronet, and also reflects a time of corporate management change.

In 1946 Brooks Brothers was bought by the Washington, DC department store known as Garfinkel’s. The new president John C. Wood put customer fears of radical change to rest when he declared that he would sooner be seen wearing a zoot suit in Times Square than tamper with Brooks policies.

The amazing thing about Brooks Brothers and its image is how slowly things changed over the years. I believe Brooks Brothers customers over 40 feel some of the old mystique and will recognize something of the Brooks Brothers presented here.

This article from the halcyon days of Brooks Brothers is bound to cause some nostalgia, whether for a place remembered but now lost, or for a place one wishes he new. — CHRISTOPHER SHARP

* * *

There’s Only One Brooks Brothers
By Lester David
Coronet, September 1950

Outfitting presidents of the of the U. S. has been almost-routine business during much of the 132-year history of Brooks Brothers, oldest and most famous clothing store in America.

When Abraham Lincoln was shot as he sat in a box of Ford’s Theater in Washington, he was wearing a new Prince Albert coat, waistcoat, trousers, and overcoat just delivered to him by the New York firm. When Ulysses S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt took their oaths of office, they were attired in new suits fitted by Brooks. When Franklin D. Roosevelt met Churchill and Stalin at Yalta in 1945, the great Navy cape he wore on the 6,000-mile air-sea journey carried the Brooks label.

Founded in 1818 when Manhattan was a seacoast town of less than 125,000 population, the store has kept some of the country’s (and the world’s) most noted personages in shoes, socks, pajamas, shirts, ties, hats, and suits. And some — their identity is a well-kept secret —in nightshirts and tasseled caps!

Diplomats and prize fighters, dukes and bankers, Cabinet members and theatrical luminaries stroll every day through the ten-story building on Madison Avenue. The sight of Secretary of State Dean Acheson trying on a new overcoat, or Clark Gable testing a new pair of shoes, or the Duke of Windsor undecided between a red or green dressing gown causes scarcely a flurry. The reason is simply that the store itself is a national legend, as noted in its own right as any of its patrons. (Continue)

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 at the store for a year, 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 feeds the salesmen milk and sandwiches during the day to keep up their stamina, and at the end of the grueling day, during which the elderly salesman had collapsed from exhaustion, Dunar faces 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

The Hartmarx Corporation has closed up its Hart, Schaffner & Marx and Hickey Freeman archives until their full public unveiling. These are the last images I was able to grab before the gate closed.

They date from the 1950s and document the trend in menswear to the natural-shouldered look. The final document has a nice breakdown of how the long, lean effect in the other images is achieved, beyond the svelte physique that nature (or in this case, the artist) has bestowed on the models.

The image above has an interesting collegiate theme: the homecoming reunion of the class of ‘31 (making this presumably ‘51 or ‘56). With the collar roll, glasses and overall vibe, somehow the word that pops into my head to describe this image is “trad.” Also, those familiar with the identity of the blogger Longwing might see a certain resemblance to the gentleman on the left. (Continue)

Last spring, when I found this New Yorker article on the Ivy League Football Association, football season was already over and baseball was in the air. I’ve been sitting on it ever since and if I don’t post it now, I’ll forget and another season will be gone.

It’s not much: The main revelation is that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a third-string quarterback his freshman year at Princeton. The article also gives us an excuse to post the above 1954 class photo of Rumsfeld, in which he looks more like a football player than how we normally think of him: a kind of third-string supervillain plotting world domination in one of the lesser Bond movies. — CC

Students in science and technology today aren’t exactly known for their style (then again, what students are?) But in 1956, MIT’s graduating class of 900 was better dressed than just about any random group of 900 people you could find anywhere today, even among the rich or the glamor professions.

There are also some real characters in there. Click here for the hi-res version. — CC

Previously we’ve posted on the 1956 prep-school angst film “Tea and Sympathy.” Here’s an image from the newly digitized Hart, Schaffner & Marx archives, undated but from roughly the same time. Call this one Tea and Approval. The older gent is obviously the girl’s father, and clearly approves of her suitor’s suit. — CC

It’s overcoat season, and while extra bulk might give you the illusion of being warmer, it also takes away style points.

At least according to this vintage advertisement from Hickey Freeman. While our previous two posts on the newly digitized Hartmarx archives highlighted images of the Hart, Schaffner & Marx brand, this one is from Hickey Freeman, and advocates “comfort and natural lines” with “lapels narrow to emphasize smartness.” Finally, “shoulders are normal,” because abnormal shoulders are so last year.

Hartmarx could not provide a date for the image, but it looks like 1950-55, when menswear began moving away from the big shoulders and drapey double-breasteds of the late ’40s and toward the clean lines and natural shoulders that reigned during the heyday of the Ivy League Look.

Take a look at your own overcoat, as the principle still applies. Are you a man of today? — CC

Recently I was invited to Hickey Freeman on New York’s Madison Avenue, where, in the offices above the retail store, I found the menswear equivalent of buried treasure: Four rooms packed with thousands of documents chronicling 100 years of American history through the lens of men’s fashion.

The recently bankrupt Hartmarx Corporation — which owns the brands Hart, Schaffner & Marx and Hickey Freeman — has brought its extensive archives out of storage and is currently at work digitizing the collection for the Internet.

The archives consist of everything from turn-of-the-century catalogs to Deco-era original oil paintings. Here’s a fraction of it: (Continue)

One of the saddest phrases in the English language is “You missed a great party.” Well here’s one we all missed.

In 1957 jazz historian and Harvard/Yale alum Marshall Stearns threw the ultimate jazz-Ivy shindig. Held in honor of sitar player Ravi Shankar, the party juxtaposed Indian music with jazz, and included a jam session with Dizzy Gillespie. LIFE Magazine captured the soirée, which drew the kind of crowd only possible in New York: a dazzling melange of socialites and hipsters, artists and businessmen, with everyone dressed to the nines. Though LIFE only devoted one page to the event in the magazine, the LIFE archives include an extensive photo set entitled “East-West Jam Session.” (Continue)

For the Beat Generation, there were only two places to live: New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach.

North Beach has been an old stomping ground of mine since my early twenties. I recently paid a visit to the neighborhood after years of exile in Los Angeles.

Broadway is home to San Francisco’s famous strip clubs, such as The Condor Club, where Carol Doda first danced topless in 1964. It’s also where you’ll find famous Beat gathering places like Cafe Vesuvio and City Lights Bookstore.

City Lights, founded by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, was where I’d go for obscure books in the days before Amazon and Bookfinder.

As for Vesuvio, I’d been planning on nursing an espresso there while reading Kerouac’s “Big Sur.” But by the time I got around to my afternoon in North Beach, I’d already abandoned the book. It was, like, hip for a bit, then I got bored and decided to just read “The Red and the Black” again. Whenever I get bored with books, I just read “The Red and the Black” again.

Kerouac is one of the founding members of the Beat movement in literature and hygiene, whose origins go back to Columbia University in 1944. During the Beat heyday, many of its proponents were natural-shouldered; above is poet Michael McClure in 1957, wearing a patch-pocketed 4/3 herringbone similar to the J. Press version we posted about previously.

While I was away in LA, The Beat Museum opened a few years ago. It has a solid collection of memorabilia and cool trinkets for sale. As I was wearing a sportcoat and tassel loafers, the curator/sales clerk asked where I was from. (Continue)