Despite the fact that you’re supposed to be learning to think for yourself, college has always been a conformist environment. Those with an excess of individuality may be respected, but are rarely popular. And even during the heyday of the Ivy League Look, not every student was a perfect example of the style. What became codified …
Our last post was called “Come Fly With Me” and featured Frank Sinatra’s private jet. In this post we look not at flying in planes, but leaping from them. Contributing writer Jeff Samoray examines this little-known bit of historic trivia. * * * Sixty years ago this past May, curious onlookers gathered in Woodbury, Connecticut, …
We’ve got one more post — for now — on pop music from the 1950s. I mentioned in the comment thread on the “Optimism And Prosperity” post about discovering my parents’ record collection, which included some 45 RPM records from the late ’50s, when my father was a teenager, and which he later converted to …
How cool was it to dress Ivy during the heyday? Cool enough for the El Capris, an African American doo-wop band from Pittsburgh, to cut a B-side called “Ivy League Clean” in 1958. The song failed to chart, however, and the band became just another forgotten doo-wop band whose name starts with “El.” That is …
Contributing writer James Kraus is an arch-connoisseur of the 1950s and ’60s. Herein he takes us on a tour of the years of the Ivy heday, giving us a broad overview of what else was going on in American life besides penny loafers and buttondown collars. Part one covers the first half of the heyday, …
Last week we ran a photo from 1954, the dawn of the Ivy heyday. The post was entitled “The Ideal” and featured tennis player Vic Seixas wearing a J. Press sportcoat for a Sports Illustrated clothing spread. Now, as promised, is the rest of the article. The piece is entitled “The Not So Odd Jacket” …
This photo may be familiar to half of you, while the other half are seeing it for the first time. It’s floated around Tradsville for years, but I’m not sure we ever posted it here, and even if we did, it’s due for a curtain call. Why today? Because it was recently posted to our …
Here’s a post that originally ran in the summer of 2012, and which makes for a perfect follow-up to yesterday’s post on a video from the University of Pennsylvania made in 1967. This is another school promo film, but from precisely a decade earlier. * * * Recently I ran across a video for Penn …
Recently we posted about a company called Worsted-Tex and how it used the term “Ivy League” to sell mass-market clothing as soon as the heyday of the Ivy League Look took off. In 1960 the company began filing lawsuits against other brands that were using variations of the term “Ivy” in their products. In a …
For yesterday’s Easter post I shared the collection of top hat images that fills my apartment, one of which is a rakish photo of Aly Khan, an international playboy who married actress Rita Hayworth. His son, known as Prince Karim, the fourth Aga Khan, was featured in one of Ivy Style’s earliest posts, which we …
On this Good Friday we look at shots taken for LIFE Magazine in 1955 by renowned photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. — CC
Another great find by Carmelo Pugliatti showing mass-market Ivy at the dawn of the heyday. And the worst-dressed award goes to the young man in the middle, who’s wearing a coat that looks like an orphaned suit jacket, along with a hat for over which his classmates will give him infinite grief. — CC
Within one year of LIFE Magazine’s 1954 feature “The Ivy Look Heads Across The US,” which surely would have caught the eyes of the apparel industry given the magazine’s enormous circulation, Botany 500 was already jumping on the new menswear trend. You can all but imagine the product development meeting. Let’s come up with a …
One often sees the subject of watches come up here in the comments section as well as on Ivy Style’s Facebook group, usually concerning which timepieces might confer an Ivy aura. That can be a wormhole, since people wore a variety of watch styles over the decades. However, there are watches that were popular during …
A lot of original photos of JFK has gone on the auction block at Bonhams. There are a couple of sartorial details worth noting. The photos are from 1954, when Kennedy hadn’t fully sanitized his wardrobe of Ivy affectation in order to better reflect the American public via the medium of television. In the photo …
No, not the couple. The guy’s outfit in this 1959 illustration. Check out the full image: He’s matched light blue socks to his light blue shirt. That’s a matchy-matchy no-no, to say nothing of harmonizing with the drapery. The other items are fine, including what we assume is a navy knit tie, and penny loafers …
Michigan halfback Tom Harmon doing his sports radio show, in classic combo of button-down collar, knit tie and cardigan, 1940. Below, crew cuts and crewnecks. University of Illinois, 1956: The archetypal combo of argyle socks and tassel loafers. Looks cooler if you’re 20, though. University of Illinois, 1956: Varsity sweater, OCBD, and lovestruck Wake Forest …
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on vests, let’s take a look at a micro-fad that struck a group of Yale students in 1950. We’ve used some of these photos on Ivy Style before, but not the whole batch. The shots come from an April 1950 issue of LIFE Magazine, which reported on the …
Midcentury modern fans, as well as guys who are single (or sometimes wish they were), will likely enjoy heading over to our fraternal site Masculine Interiors for a fine article posted yesterday. It’s about Playboy’s architectural and interior design articles of the ’50s and ’60s, and was written by contributor James Kraus. Kraus’ previous articles …