Just five years ago, 1965 photo book “Take Ivy” was a rarity. Most sat proudly on the book shelves of Ivy fans in Japan, with a few battered copies showing up time to time on Japanese auction sites for absurd prices. But now thanks to Men’s Club and powerHouse Books’ recent reprints, T. Hayashida’s photos of Ivy League students and their classic style have become available to everyone.
There remains, however, one part of the “Take Ivy” story still confined to the realm of myth and shadow: a 16mm film taken of the campuses in conjunction with the photos.
Mystery solved? The latest issue of Oily Boy — a seasonal fashion publication for Baby Boomer guys — includes eight whole minutes of Take Ivy film footage in a DVD insert. The eight minutes, mostly from Dartmouth college, show college students in late spring riding around on bikes, attending class, eating at a cafeteria, and rowing, all to a soundtrack from jazz legend Hachidai Nakamura. Rather than straight documentary, many of the segments have narrative frames and appear to have been staged for the camera.
Despite the limited footage, the film does achieve its main goal of capturing the style of elite students in the U.S. We see university stripe button-down oxford shirts, light khakis, and madras galore. The 16mm, however, tends to capture a wider set of people than Hayashida’s carefully framed snaps, so you see some less than canonical looks: bare feet, red baseball jerseys, hooded sweatshirts, etc. Some of the students actually look as slovenly as current Ivy Leaguers — the only difference being that you don’t see students smoking in section anymore. The professors and adults meanwhile are the ones in tweed jackets, rep ties, bow ties, and Shetland sweaters. Maybe they’re the true fashion icons for our current fashion epoch.
Last year I had talked about the film with Shosuke Ishizu, son of legendary VAN founder Kensuke Ishizu. He confirmed that director Ozawa Kyo shot it simultaneously while Hayashida took the photos. Apparently there is almost two hours of footage, which besides the jazz score, included some voice-overs that explain what is happening on screen. The film does exist in 16mm format (VAN’s copy was heavily damaged but they have recently discovered a cleaner version), but the Oily Boy DVD is a muddy video tape transfer. I am guessing it comes from the VHS version, which was made for VAN employees at some point in the 1980s. Ishizu said that there were still some legal rights issues with the Nakamura soundtrack that prevented a full-out DVD release. Even when they show the film to Ivy meet-ups in Tokyo these days, they just play the VHS.
The entire point of producing the Take Ivy film was to have promotional footage for the VAN brand to explain Ivy League style to its dedicated retailers across Japan. To that end, they debuted the film at a a giant party held for their distributors and retailers in August 1965, renting out the entire Asasaka Prince Hotel. They then took the film on tour across Japan; the local VAN retailer would set up a venue, and the VAN guys brought the film and a band to do a live score. (Here’s an invite for one held in Osaka.)
Included in the Oily Boy DVD is also a short present-day discussion between two of the men behind Take Ivy — the aforementioned Shosuke Ishizu and Toshiyuki Kurosu, the young employee at VAN who pushed VAN into a youth-oriented Ivy style direction. A few of their memories:
• They set out on May 23, 1965 to shoot the Ivy league schools over two weeks, but ended up not getting to Cornell and U. Penn at all.
• They spent most time at Dartmouth and found it the most welcoming. Kurosu conjectures that it was because the school had just done a “Japan Week” and was also the alma mater of Olympic skier Chiharu Igaya.
• The timing of the shoot was summer vacation, so not many people were around. But the Dartmouth crew coach kindly set up the entire rowing sequence just for them to film.
• They were most impressed with the school cafeterias, as that self-service food style had not come to Japan yet.
• They were also shocked with how casual the students’ style was: untucked shirts, sneakers with no socks. At the time being fashionable as a Japanese youth meant wearing a suit and carrying an umbrella.
• Kurosu came up with the title “Take Ivy” from the Dave Brubeck album “Take Five,” but Paul Hasegawa, who is fluent in English and worked with them at VAN, complained that the pun would make no sense to native speakers. Kurosu admits that his complete lack of English ability allowed him to come up with that name.
• When the brand VAN was getting into trouble with the Tsukiji police for instigating the Miyuki-zoku youth culture, Kurosu went to the police station and showed the “Take Ivy” film to the cops. They ended up liking it and set up a venue for them so they could show it to the Miyuki-zoku kids, and then to get Ishizu of VAN to tell the troublesome kids to stop hanging out in Ginza.
It’s worth remembering that Ishizu, Hayashida, and Kurosu were pushing something very radical at the time in Japan. VAN took a massive bet re-tooling their brand in the mid-1960s from a traditional adult suits brand to the Ivy look. They had a lot of commercial pressure to create these authentic photos and films to win over the Japanese public, as well as stockists, distributors, and retailers. The project ended up being a huge success — and Ivy league style basically invented an entire “youth fashion” market in Japan that remains vibrant to this days. What they didn’t quite know at the time is that this very commercial mission to the U.S. would end up creating one of the most critical archival materials of Ivy League fashion nearly a half-century later. — W. DAVID MARX
W. David Marx is a writer living in Tokyo whose work has appeared in GQ, Brutus, Nylon, and Best Music Writing 2009, among other publications. He is currently Chief Editor of web journal Néojaponisme and formerly an editor of Tokion and the Harvard Lampoon.
Much news in Tradsville over the past week. First up is the “Take Ivy” movie, which I’ve just finished watching. A DVD of it is included in the current issue of the Japanese magazine Oily Boy. A friend in Japan ripped and uploaded it, but asked that I not share. Sorry, guys.
The film is essentially the book but in moving pictures. There’s a jazz soundtrack. Looks to have been shot entirely at Dartmouth. Though it’s only nine minutes, it’s professionally shot (not a Super 8 home movie). At the end there’s an interview, presumably with the photographer Hayashida. I’ll have my girlfriend translate and share any interesting trivia. Overall, it’s very cool.
Next up, I attended the book signing party for Bruce Boyer’s new tome on Gary Cooper, and tout le menswear monde was there. I spent a long time chatting with the curator from the museum at FIT, whom I hadn’t spoken with since dropping out of their Ivy League Look project for budgetary reasons. The book and exhibit are indeed on and are scheduled for September of next year, so start making your travel plans. And they may end up using some of my longer pieces, such as the Q&As for Ivy Style with Richard Press, Paul Winston, etc. More on that as it develops.
And the books keep coming. One of my colleagues at Quest is bringing out a book shortly about the Ivy League. There’s a chapter devoted to capturing the spirit of each school, and I’ve been told there are many photos from the Ivy heyday. I hope to present an exclusive when the publisher is ready.
And speaking of books, last night I went through “Hollywood and the Ivy Look,” the new book out of the UK. The photos are fantastic and I’ll elaborate further in a future post.
The Independent did the typical fluff piece pegged on the book; you can tell it’s from the UK from the word “supposedly” in the following paragraph:
In menswear, where things change with the speed of a ponderous tectonic plate, few modes of dress have remained so insidiously influential over the past 50 years as what people now talk about as the Ivy League look. That is, the squeaky-clean, supremely preppy and indefatigably American style vernacular that supposedly emanated from the US’s top-flight colleges in the 1950s, and was disseminated worldwide by sharply dressed Hollywood stars such as Steve McQueen, Sidney Poitier and Cary Grant in the following decades.
I contributed some fluff of my own for the Singapore newspaper The Straits Times, which recently did a story pegged on Jeffrey Banks and Doria de la Chapelle’s new preppy book. — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD
The handful of 50-somethings who comprise the UK Ivy style tribe put on their best wide lapels and skinny ties (the unfortunate result of buying vintage clothing from different decades) and gathered last Thursday at trad shrine John Simons to celebrate the launch of the book “Hollywood and the Ivy League Look” by Graham Marsh.
Party photos have been posted on Facebook and are available here. There is also a tumblr associated with the book featuring many great vintage images. — CC
Last week I Jeffrey Banks and Doria de La Chapelle presented me with a copy of their new book, “Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style.” It was a great honor as a couple of my Q&As for Ivy Style are cited in the credits, as is W. David Marx’s article on the Miyuki-zoku, plus work from early Ivy Style contributor Deirdre Clemente.
While “Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style” doesn’t boast groundbreaking research, it’s a solid overview well timed for a new trend and new generation. Perhaps a quarter to a third of the book may seem extraneous (fashion writers, like literary scholars, feel they must cite sources they feel are related but which often feel tangential). However the bulk of it is devoted to precisely the origins of this style — prep and college students in the Northeast and the WASP establishment — while still taking an inclusive approach apropos for 2011.
Here the authors offer a terse summary of the style:
Preppy has always been acknowledged as an inherently American phenomenon, a fashion — or anti-fashion as some have called it — whose imagery perpetually connects us to idyllic college days, sport, and the spirit and vitality of youth. Preppy’s origins are rooted in the grounds of the elite Ivy League universities of the 1920s, where young, WASPy and wealthy gentlemen invented a relaxed new way for collegians to dress by co-opting athletic clothes form the playing fields, mixing them with genteel classics, and decking themselves out with caps, ties, pins and other regalia to signify membership in a prestigious club or sport. They then embellished the look with the best possible accessory: an air of complete and utter nonchalance.
But you can’t feign nonchalance until you nail the details:
In the elite, insular and often snobbish collegiate world, one’s identity was in the details: what a man wore, how his tie was tied, where his hair was parted and what club he joined were of paramount importance. Among the reasons behind Ivy League style’s resounding popularity with college students was the immense peer pressure to conform and its close relative, the deep need to belong.
And speaking of conformity, here’s Banks and de La Chappelle the Ivy heyday:
It didn’t take [postwar, college-educated men] long to learn that “working in corporate America demanded a knowledge of certain codes, many of which were embedded in the corporate uniform.” America had become more and more politically conservative, and Ivy League clothes — with their inherently understated quality and ability to blend in — were the perfect expression of the new “buttoned-down” philosophy. Ivy college graduates, well schooled in conformity, went to work uncomplainingly in their narrow-lapeled sack suits with skinny ties, while older alums, inspired by the slimmer, more youthful-seeming style, also joined the growing band of sack-suited men.
Some of the photos will be familiar, while others are fresh. Here is a handful of images I liked, which Rizzoli was kind enough to provide. Above is a scene from the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” Below, Groton students, from the graduating class of ‘67, in madras jackets: (Continue)
Last night Jeffrey Banks (pictured above) and Doria de La Chapelle signed copies of their new book “Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style” at Saks Fifth Avenue. It was a full house, though hardly a Prep-a-Palooza. Besides your humble blogger in rep tie and pinned club, there was just KJP and sweetheart: (Continue)
Later this year Reel Art Press will release a lavish photographic coffee-table book full of rare images of Hollywood icons wearing Ivy garb. It will surely be a delight to behold. Reading it, however, may be another story.
One should never judge a book by its cover, but we’ve had an Ivy book by this author before, and it missed the mark by a mile. London-based Graham Marsh is also one of the co-authors of “The Ivy Look,” our review of which holds the record for most comments on a post not involving free sweaters.
In addition to the daffy notion that Porsches, midcentury furniture, French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zippo lighters belong to a style genre called “Ivy,” and are therefore intimately related to Bass Weejuns and oxford-cloth buttondowns, the book’s inexplicable error in judgment was its inability to articulate the origins of the Ivy League Look, as if the style suddenly appeared on album covers, movie posters and cigarette ads out of nowhere.
Geographically and temporally removed from the epicenter of the Ivy League Look during the heyday (New Haven, according to our own Richard Press), and given the bohemian sensibilities of UK Ivy fans, it’s no wonder the authors were reluctant to credit the style to privileged students at elite universities.
With this new book, Marsh evidently turns his attention once again not to the source but the simulacrum, finding his Ivy mecca not in suburban Connecticut, but the film studios of Hollywood. — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD
In “This Side of Paradise,” F. Scott Fitzgerald called Princeton “lazy and aristocratic.” How times have changed.
In the age of meritocracy, sloth is hardly a helpful quality in gaining admission to the elite university. And anything “aristocratic” would have to be an individual eccentricity as the school is seeking to discourage “exclusivity” by banning freshmen from joining fraternities and sororities.
The announcement made national news.
“We have found that [fraternities and sororities] can contribute to a sense of social exclusivity and privilege and socioeconomic stratification among students,” said Vice President for Campus Life Cynthia Cherrey and Dean of Undergraduate Students Kathleen Deignan in a statement posted on the school’s website.
“A major concern is that they select their members early in freshman year,” they continued, “when students are most vulnerable to pressures from peers to drink, and before they have had a full opportunity to explore a variety of interests and develop a diverse set of friendships. We hope students coming to Princeton will want to expand their circle of acquaintances and experiences, not prematurely narrow them.”
Citing drinking and targeting freshman sounds like a ploy for a bigger agenda of social engineering. Attempting to legislate students’ social lives in the interest of eliminating “exclusivity” and promoting “diversity” is political correctness run amok, and I say this as a guy who was never in a fraternity or any other college organization (or college, for that matter) that could be considered exclusive, and whose friends are as diverse as they come. But this levelling effect in the interest of equality is obscene. — CC
Last week Women’s Wear Daily ran a feature on the upcoming book “Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style,” by Jeffrey Banks and Doria de La Chapelle.
Among other things, the story includes the great photo above of Deerfield Academy’s class of 1961. The story’s author, David Lipke, goes on to note preppy style’s relative imperviousness to change in the 50 years since the photo was taken.
Princeton gets mentioned as the leading artiber of the Ivy League Look in the following passage:
The book traces the origins of the style to the Ivy League universities of the East Coast, where, following World War I, a privileged set of young men developed a new style centered on a greater amount of leisure time and athletic influences. Princeton, in particular, was fertile ground for the cohesive new look, as it was among the more homogenous and isolated of the Eastern schools, with a student body largely compiled from just a handful of preparatory schools.
“Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style” is due out October 4. — CC
The Ivy trend has officially reached the cash-grab phase: Abercrombie & Fitch — which once sold tweed sportcoats and other authentic Ivy-style items — has released a new collection for teenyboppers entitled “Elements of Ivy.”
The web copy reads: “Distinguished from the rest and exceptional by every standard, Elements of Ivy is a collection of collegiate classics.”
“Distinguished from the rest?” Certainly not from the rest of the brand’s clothing. — CC
Yesterday The Sartorialist ran a photo of “Take Ivy” author Shiro Itoh and announced the publication next month of “Take 8 Ivy,” which was touted as a sequel to the seminal Japanese book chronicling American collegiate style.
I was able to flip through “Take 8 Ivy” here in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. Basically it’s nothing near a true sequel to “Take Ivy.” It’s a collection of short photo essays about each Ivy college — with most of the photos taken of buildings in the 1980s.
Photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida did an incredibly boring book in the ’80s consisting of just architectural shots, and I suspect some of these photos come from that. There are some student pictures, but it’s mostly late ’70s/early ’80s style — far from the classic Ivy League Look everybody so idolizes. There are a few ’60s photos scattered throughout, likely outtakes from “Take Ivy” or alternate versions of the same pictures.
But overall this feels more like something they would sell to tourists at Harvard’s Coop than a book for style aficionados. — W. DAVID MARX
