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 for a year or so at Brooks Brothers, 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 fed salesmen sandwiches during the day to keep up their stamina, and at the end of the day, during which the elderly salesman had collapsed from exhaustion, Dunar then faced 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

On assignment for CNNGo.com, Tokyo-based Ivy-Style contributor W. David Marx reports that “Take Ivy” will be reprinted in the US in August with a price of $24.95.

If you’ve been sitting on an original waiting for the right moment to sell, that moment is probably gone.

But when I went to graduate school at Lehigh in 1963, I moved up a notch, to what was arguably one of the three or four best campus clothing shops in the country. There were of course J. Press in New Haven, The Andover Shop in Cambridge, Chipp in Manhattan… and then there was Langrock on Nassau Street in Princeton.

I don’t want to go into the history of that esteemed firm at the moment, merely give a few fleeting impressions of that sublime outfitters. The owner of Langrock at the time was Alan Frank, a man of impeccable taste who looked as though he could have walked across the street and stepped onto the podium of a lecture hall. In my memory he tended to wear charcoal suits most of the time: flannel in winter, tropical worsted in summer, with the occasional nod to a seasonal Harris Tweed or seersucker sports jacket. Usually a white oxford cloth buttondown, and a dark silk club tie. Very proper, yet he always looked perfectly comfortable and at ease.

The shop itself occupied a regal, colonial-looking brick building on a corner, so the large floor-to-ceiling plate glass display windows (obviously not original because the building had originally been a home) could be seen from two sides. Inside were a series of rooms, each paneled in dark walnut wainscoting and with old Persian rugs on the well worn wooden floors. Hunting prints of course and college shields. Everything to reflect the hushed and slightly dusty ambiance of a gentleman’s club or dining hall. It seemed impervious to time.

In the center of the main room, as one entered from the street, was a large round table, a good five-to-six feet in diameter, laid out with rep striped ties: hundreds of them in military, university and club stripes of the most vivid colors, a wheel of shimmering silk afloat in the dimly polished ambience. To the right was a glass-and-mahogany case which held the club and paisley neckwear. All from England. Also from England and Scotland, in a similar case to the left were the crewneck sweaters (with saddle shoulders), and wool hosiery, as well as cashmere V-necks and beautiful cashmere hosiery in heathery tones of lovat and fawn and tobacco brown and Cambridge grey.

Shirts — mainly buttondowns, with some straight point and rounded club collars mixed in — were stacked on shelves running the length of the left-hand wall from waist to within a foot or so of the ceiling. It was at Langrock that I first saw — and bought —  a true royal oxford cloth shirt. It happened to be in a lustrous pale yellow, not quite cream. It was light as a cloud without being delicate, and I got years of wear out of it.

The two other rooms held the tailored clothing: suits, sports jackets, odd trousers, topcoats and raincoats. And there was a real tailor, not just an alterations tailor but a man who worked a pattern, and who had swatch books of handsome Cheviot and Hebrides tweeds, flannels from the West of England, and Irish linens. I once extravagantly commissioned a hearty tweed sports jacket in a  camel-and-olive check with an orange windowpane. The tailor put a special sweat-proof lining in the back skirt panel of the jacket, “just in case you want to do some riding, Sir.”

My purchases in this sartorial arcadia were actually few and far between because Langrock was violently expensive, particularly for a young man in grad school. But funnily enough, I still have several of their ties today, and always felt I’d gotten my money’s worth. Since I was an English Studies student, I was thrilled to hear from Mr. Frank that John O’Hara was a customer, although I never had the luck to see him on my rare Saturday appearances. O’Hara’s not read much these days, but in his time he was a literary giant. And he wallowed in campus clothes: Jacob Reed (Philadelphia’s best Ivy League store in its day), J. Press and his beloved Brooks Brothers were his haberdashery haunts. He once invited the dandy columnist George Frazier to drink with him simply because Frazier was wearing a Brooks buttondown. O’Hara lived in Princeton at the end of his life, and is buried there. His epitaph, written by himself:

Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time,
the first half of the twentieth century.
He was a professional.

— G. BRUCE BOYER

G. Bruce Boyer is the author of numerous books on menswear, most recently “Fred Astaire Style” for Assouline. He is currently a contributing editor at The Rake.

]]> http://www.ivy-style.com/boyer-on-langrock-princetons-legendary-campus-shop.html/feed http://www.ivy-style.com/a-second-look-at-take-ivy.html http://www.ivy-style.com/a-second-look-at-take-ivy.html#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:25:53 +0000 Christian http://www.ivy-style.com/?p=1007 Compared to Western fashion magazines, Japanese magazines often get very specific about how to achieve a certain look. Editors and stylists do not just play with themes, as with most fashion editorial, but painstakingly recreate the exact styling from definitive fashion guides and personages.

In its February 2010 issue, Japanese weekend wear magazine 2nd decided to go back to the bibles of Trad/Ivy/Preppy to build perfectly authentic outfits of American casual (see scans below). Stylist Hajime Suzuki showed readers how to replicate exact outfits from the works “Take Ivy,” “Ivy Illustrated” and “The Official Preppy Handbook” with new brands.

First up is “Take Ivy,” a photo book that was incredibly influential in Japanese Ivy circles for decades before recently being rediscovered in the West. Suzuki kicks things off with a suggestion of white oxford button-downs from Michael Tapia, Individualized Shirts or Gambert. 2nd, unfortunately, had to go to vintage pieces from Tokyo’s best clothing recycle shops to find the letter sweater famously worn by a Princeton undergrad in the book. Barns Outfitters, meanwhile, somehow has the identical faded Brown University sweatshirt from the book for a mere ¥13400 — likely more than what the Brown Co-Op wants for something more modern. Other key items include plaid flannel shirts, classic sneakers, varsity jackets, white pants, rugby shirts, chinos and anorak parkas. The overall feel is sporty, but these were students after all.

Suzuki then presents real-life recreations of the Kazuo Hozumi-illustrated work “Ivy Illustrated,” another bible of Ivy style amongst Japanese baby boomers. The book’s images come to life in comical and somewhat unrealistic ways, including goofy smiles and more than one bandana ascot. The general impact is very Tokyo weekend dad rather than New England during the Kennedy era.

Finally, 2nd recreates some looks from “The Official Preppy Handbook,” which had an official translated release in Japan back in the early ’80s. Suzuki outfits a dummy in perfect ski vest over thick sweater with a hint of 2010 magic (it’s all about the plaid bits on the green vest from Cresent Down Works). 2nd doesn’t go for the classic LL Bean Norwegian Sweater oddly, perhaps because LL Bean Japan failed to sell the sweater this year despite its revival in America. The second look in the series does, however, manage to replicate prep-school sloppiness in orderly Japanese fashion by using paint-flecked, art-damaged khakis from Waste(Twice).

The overall feature does a relatively good job of distinguishing the differences between Ivy (in its “authoritative” ’60s incarnation) and preppy (in its “authoritative” early ’80s, Birnbach-curated incarnation.) While most Japanese fashion culture is not particularly comfortable with wild extrapolation, stylist Suzuki does deserve credit for not making the outfits look like period costumes. Traditional clothing presumes a timeless elegance, but the breath of brand options here in Japan for these items gives the wearer a considerable amount of flexibility between playing the classics and playing around with the classics. — 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 Tokyo City Editor of CNNGo and Chief Editor of web journal Néojaponisme.

I met with the curators recently and they are very excited about bringing scholarly attention to this chapter in American menswear history. There will also likely be an accompanying book published by Yale University Press, MFIT’s usual publisher and a nice tie-in considering the subject matter.

The MFIT has released the following statement:

The Museum at FIT is embarking upon the study of menswear, specifically the clothing styles worn on the campuses of America’s Ivy League universities from the early 20th century to the 1960s.

The study will also encompass the rise, fall, and subsequent revival of the Ivy look, both in the United States and abroad, that began in the early 1980s.

Deputy Director Partricia Mears and Exhibitions Manager Fred Dennis hope to turn this study into a comprehensive exhibition that will open to the public in the fall of 2012. Ideally, the exhibition will be accompanied by a publication similar in scale and scope to recent MFIT books published in conjunction with Yale University Press.

Advisors to the project will include writers Christian Chensvold and G. Bruce Boyer. Chesvold and Boyer are menswear historians who specialize in the Ivy look and other relevant sartorial styles.

Expect regular updates over the next two years as the project and dates of the exhibit and book publication become available. — CC

One of the great things about visiting Paul Winston is that you never know what he’s going to break out for show and tell.

The other day Paul pulled out a stack of several dozen deadstock Chipp pocket squares he’d recently found stashed away somewhere. He figures they must be 30 years old, give or take a decade. Some are English-made, while others are from India. And among this pile of cotton and silk was one remaining price tag that read $11.50.

In a brilliant stroke of inspiration, Paul is selling the pocket squares for their original price.

You’ll need to come pick them out in person, however, as he’s not going to photograph 50 different pocket squares for the purposes of e-commerce. I chose the navy foulard above.

For a souvenir from one of America’s most legendary clothiers, as well as for the best value in pocket squares today, visit Winston Tailors at 11 E. 44th Street #501, right next to Brooks Brothers.

And hurry, because once they’re gone, they’re gone. At least until Paul find another box of goodies. — CC

Yesterday Bruce Boyer and I visited Brooks Brothers, who were showing the Fall/Winter 2010 collection on the sixth floor of the 346 Madison flagship store. The goods represented the company’s growing commitment to reclaiming its heritage, and there were many nods to its golden age in addition to the new girls and home collections.

Though not a separate line, University has a distinctly younger feel, similar to the Brooksgate of yore. This section of the showroom was set up like a locker room, with trophies and athletic gear scattered among the clothes.

Though intended as sport shirts, these new OCBDs feature a vintage-style label, third collar button and button-flap pockets:

Pigskin duffel bag:

Colorful crewnecks:

Moving on from University, here’s a paddock jacket with canine-embroidered cords:

“Real tweed,” Bruce said favorably as he inspected this heavy 3/2 roll jacket:

Speaking of 3/2 button stances, there were quite a few:

This one was an outwear hybrid with quilted lining:

The home collection includes chalk-striped lampshades…

… striped pillows, and the mini lampshades on the table, so your den or office can be as well decked-out as you are.  — CC

It’s out now in the current issue, and was great fun to research, as I got to talk not only to Bruce Boyer and Paul Winston, who’ve since become friends and colleagues, but also Alan Flusser, Denis Black, Ethan Huber and Lisa Birnbach.

The complete text is below, or you can click here for a PDF with the accompanying fashion shoot.

* * *

Damned Dapper: The origins, philosophy and specifics of the “go-to-hell” aesthetic — the conservative WASP’s colorful, critter-filled creative outlet
By Christian Chensvold
The Rake, Issue 8

Thomas Watson Jr. was president of IBM during the years when it was a punchline for sartorial conformity. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, gray suits for employees were standard, white shirts required.

It may seem an odd non sequitur, then, that Watson once ordered a custom sport coat whimsically embroidered with dozens of little skiers, to wear during cocktail hour at the lodge after a long day on the slopes.

Since the time of Martin Luther, the Protestant nations of the Western world have been known for a sober palette compared to the scarlet and purple of their Catholic neighbors. Perhaps this repressed sense of color ironically accounts for the riotous display of blinding pastels that characterize the preppy look of the WASP, or White Anglo Saxon Protestant, a term popularized in 1964 by sociologist E. Digby Baltzell to describe the small caste of elites that ran American business and politics.

While WASPs have largely lost their power stranglehold on American society, their influence on the world of fashion is stronger than ever. And despite their notorious character flaws (bigotry, emotional impotence, fondness for peanut butter), they’ve long led America with sterling examples of virtue and self-sacrifice.

And for that they have as good a chance for getting into heaven as anybody else — unless, of course, St. Peter guards the “pearly gates” like a nightclub bouncer enforcing a dress code. In that case, WASPs will surely have their trousers damned to the netherworld.

GOING TO HELL

Tom Wolfe may seem an odd springboard for a story about color. But while the dandy author’s wardrobe may be all white, his prose is pure purple. He’s also a keen sartorial observer, and in 1976, in an article for Esquire entitled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine,” Wolfe uses the catchy phrase “go to hell” to describe the garish pants worn by elite Bostonians vacationing on the island retreat of Martha’s Vineyard. The phrase continues to enjoy limited usage, and the passage that birthed it is worth quoting in full:

[Bostonians on Martha's Vineyard] had on their own tribal colors. The jackets were mostly navy blazers, and the ties were mostly striped ties or ties with little jacquard emblems on them, but the pants had a go-to-hell air: checks and plaids of the loudest possible sort, madras plaids, yellow-on-orange windowpane checks, crazy-quilt plaids, giant houndstooth checks, or else they were a solid airmail red or taxi yellow or some other implausible go-to-hell color. They finished that off with loafers and white crew socks or no socks at all. The pants were their note of Haitian abandon… at the same time the jackets and ties showed they had not forgotten for a moment where the power came from.

IN THE BEGINNING

The social history of clothing is an elusive topic, forcing the writer into the anthropological role of outside observer, removed in both space and time, as he attempts to chronicle the customs of a closed caste. Nowhere is this more apparent than in charting the dress of America’s Protestant Establishment in the years before preppy style became a mainstream commodity.

Color was present in the male wardrobe long before the dour Victorian era and its Great Masculine Renunciation, and color has reappeared in various guises ever since, perhaps most elegantly in the Palm Beach look of the 1930s, as captured in Esquire and Apparel Arts illustrations. But the particular use of color as expressed by the WASP establishment seems to have originated, or at least been codified, in the postwar heyday of the Ivy League Look, emanating from a combination of resorts, country clubs and college campuses up and down the eastern seaboard.

The summer 1953 issue of Gentry, a short-lived menswear magazine with an editorial policy as snobbish as its name implies, credits Palm Beach, the Florida resort town where Eastern Elites have long sought refuge from cold winters, with popularizing the madras blazer the previous winter season. In 1955, LIFE magazine reported on a “radical new line” at Brooks Brothers consisting of red, green and yellow blazers and trousers in 13 different colors. A company spokesman called it an entirely new category of clothing, to go along with business, formal, sport and summer wear.

And in 1963,  just six months before President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sports Illustrated ran “A Cool Wave of Color,”  declaring that the president golfs in lemon yellow and sails in bright red. The article continues:

At country cocktail parties for a couple of summers past there have been occasional brave red and green jackets sprinkled among the old reliable blazers and madras jackets. Pro golfers— who helped start it all— have even taken to black and white and gray to distinguish themselves from the brightly clad spectators in the gallery.

For Ethan Huber, owner of O’Connells, a traditional menswear store in upstate New York founded by his father in 1959, friendly competition helped popularize the use of color in the male wardrobe. Huber recalls his father spinning tales of local country clubs whose members would engage in a kind of sartorial one-upmanship to see who could don the most audacious hue of trousers. Customers would then come in asking for cords or chinos in ever more outlandish shades of the spectrum, and the elements of the style were set. “You still have an old generation that does this because they’ve always done it,” says Huber. “They’re guys aged 60-80 who buy a lipstick-pink shetland sweater or orange corduroys and wear them to the hockey game because that’s what they’ve done all their lives.”

But that’s a small portion of O’Connells’ clientele: “Do people actually buy those?” customers unfamiliar with the go-to-hell look will ask. “I may have 1,000 trousers in any given size, 100 of which are really fun,” adds Huber, “but 99 percent of people would never wear them.”

The most iconic colored trouser is the only one that bears a trademark: Nantucket Reds, made by Murray’s Toggery Shop, founded in 1945 on Massachusetts’ Nantucket Island, another offshore playground of the Eastern Elite. After break-in, the cotton canvas pants take on a special shade of faded red typically described as “lobster” and “tomato soup.” When paired with a navy blazer, says John Murray, son of the founder, “It’s a classic New England look.”

Indeed, in certain circles, garish pants are practically a form of fraternal initiation. Author and custom clothier Alan Flusser calls wearing go-to-hell colors “a brahmin kind of indoctrination.” For Flusser, who attended the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania, the origins of WASP leisurewear can be traced back to the advent of sportswear in the 1920s. “Part of the evolution of sportswear was colors that you didn’t wear in town,” he says. “And when you have money and spend time in sunny places, you begin to see color.”

Like the white flannels of the English gentleman, colorful sportswear signals the wearer is at play, not work. Easily soiled, the clothing is thus impractical, making it a symbol of both conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. “Navy blue aside,” notes Paul Fussell in “Class,” his 1983 classic on the American status system, “colors are classier the more pastel or faded.”

“You wouldn’t have someone not from money walking around in clothing that would draw a lot of attention to himself,” explains Flusser. “Up to the ’60s it was always a brahmin, upper-class thing, because they could wear it and not be laughed at.” For Flusser, the postwar starting point of the look is Brooks Brothers’ celebrated pink oxford-cloth buttondown. “Pink symbolizes this whole subject matter,” he says. “Imagine a guy wearing a pink shirt: If people didn’t understand what that was about, you had to be prepared to be laughed at.

“When my brother was at Harvard,” Flusser continues, “the kids were wearing blazers and red or yellow pants and would always use color in some sort of interesting way. There was a sense of who could wear the most outrageous tattersall vest. But being able to wear that kind of clothing comes from a certain lineage where you felt, ‘This is what we do, and if people don’t understand it, they don’t understand it.’”

Flusser recalls a girl who refused to go out with him when he came courting in madras pants, “and she didn’t understand them at all.”

Menswear author Bruce Boyer, who in the early ’60s attended Moravian, one of America’s oldest colleges, agrees that bright WASP leisurewear is probably a countermeasure to drab Monday-to-Friday garb. “It used to be said that the man in the gray flannel suit was so color deprived that on the weekends he went crazy on the golf course,” says Boyer. “If you’ve got to wear a black and white wardrobe most of your life, maybe you go crazy in the other direction with fuschia corduroys and a turquoise shetland crewneck.”

“It’s certainly ironic,” adds Flusser, “how this look derived from the most conservatively dressed people in other circumstances.”

BROOKS BROTHERS AND J. PRESS, BASTIONS OF AMERICAN STYLE

Brooks Brothers and J. Press, founded in 1818 and 1902 respectively, have for generations been the leading purveyors of the Ivy League Look, and during the heyday, their shops freely juxtaposed colorful leisurewear with the grey-suit uniforms of the Atomic Age company man.

“One of the great things about Brooks Brothers is that side by side with three-piece grey flannel suits were ancient-madder dinner vests and The Fun Shirt,” says Flusser, referring to the retailer’s famous patchwork-striped casual shirt. “So out of this bastion of conservatism was born this outrageousness that WASPs — and also Jews — came to adorn themselves in. It wasn’t fashion stores, but the oldest-money, most proper places where you could buy this stuff.”

In “Style and the Man,” his 1996 guide to the world’s finest menswear purveyors, Flusser describes Brooks Brothers’ whimsical offerings:

To most outsiders, Brooks was a stronghold of conservatism and dry style, but to those of the gray flannel life who frequented country clubs or other Ivy League settings, Brooks was also one of the primary wellsprings of the preps’ ‘king of the hill’ party clothes. Around the horn-rimmed set’s many private playgrounds, the stylish button-downers would engage in a form of sartorial one-upmanship that brought wild dollops of golf course color or tartan-inspired outrageousness into classic ensembles that made insiders smile while outsiders winced.

And later:

It was not aberrational to spot some young prep sporting maize corduroys, blue-striped oxford button-down, repp tie, tweed jacket, brightly colored socks, and tasseled loafers. Pink and peach oxford button-downs were accessorized in combinations that made the whole look masculine and handsome.

Of J. Press, founded in New Haven, Connecticut near Yale University, Flusser writes, “This style of dressing still employs punches of strong color to idealize the spirit of buoyancy and optimism of the American traditionalist.”

“Ivy Leaguers take themselves quite seriously,” notes Denis Black, manager of J. Press’ Boston store.  “But when they have a festive occasion, they like to show up like they work for Ringaling Brothers. They come dressed like that at Harvard commencement, or for the Harvard-Yale football game. They all work for important firms where they’re stodgily dressed, and want to unwind on the weekend in kelly green corduroy pants with a bright yellow shetland sweater.

“That kind of stuff is very important for J. Press,” adds Black, “and is a signature of this style of dressing.”

FROM RAGS TO STITCHES

Amid the green pants and yellow sweaters stands the most notorious and damnable item in the go-to-hell wardrobe: the critter pant, or trousers emblazoned with an embroidered motif. Often based on sailing and oceanic imagery, such as anchors, whales or lobsters — or in rare instances one leg with lobsters and the other with bowls of butter sauce — critter pants are as baffling to most Americans as they are to the rest of the world.

“I don’t know what the first embroidered motif was or where it came from,” speculates Flusser, “but it certainly came off a necktie design, there’s no question about that.” Lacoste’s crocodile emblazoned on polo shirts was the first embroidered logo, Flusser points out, and it, combined with club-tie designs, was the likely inspiration for the first pair of critter pants.

Paul Winston says it wouldn’t surprise him if his father Sidney invented embroidered pants. Winston, now 76, is a New York-based custom tailor who in the early ’60s began working for Chipp, his father’s legendary menswear shop that, along with Brooks Brothers, J. Press and Paul Stuart, formed the cluster of traditional clothiers centered around 44th Street and Madison Avenue. For its embroidered pants (or skier-emblazoned sport coats, as in the case of IBM’s Thomas Watson, Jr.), Chipp made sure to use lock-stitch embroidery. “With other pants, if you sat on a rock on the beach and snagged one of the lobsters or frogs,” Winston says with a chuckle, “the whole thing would pull out. But ours wouldn’t do that.”

Chipp is also the company most credited with the patching of madras, seersucker and tweed, which began when Sidney Winston got the idea of using leftover scraps of fabric, sewing them together like a quilt, and making trousers and jackets from it. Patching soon became one of Chipp’s trademarks, though not in the literal sense: Winston has reaped no royalties from mainstream retailers’ many patch-madras offerings the past few seasons.

At O’Connells, Ethan Huber recalls such embroidered motifs as cigar-smoking pigs (the capitalist sort, of course), and mysterious acronyms such as “SYLA” (for “See Ya Later, Alligator”) paired with alligators, and BTEB (”Behind the Eight Ball”) paired with ominous black billiard balls. Onlookers would think the recondite lettering suggested some secret club.

HOW IT’S WORN

It’s worth noting that Wolfe’s “go-to-hell” passage describes not only the accursed trousers themselves, but how they’re worn. For Flusser, this is the most elusive aspect of dressing. “You can take any article of clothing and wear it,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean to do so is stylish. The important thing about wearing a bright colored trouser is knowing how to wear it: building an outfit around one discordant pattern or color, and surrounding it with things that present it.”

In the eyes of the tribe, the “right” way to wear a hellbound item is to pair it  with otherwise “correct” clothing. “You wouldn’t wear wild-colored embroidered pants with a brightly checked shirt,” says Boyer. “You’d wear a blue, white, yellow or pink oxford-cloth buttondown. But bright pants with a bright shirt would be interpreted not so much as bad taste, but as breaking the code.”

Likewise, a color’s shade has to be just right, as in the special shade of pink that distinguishes a Brooks Brothers oxford from its imitators, or the perfect fade on a pair of Nantucket Reds, indicating years of summers spent sailing. And certain colors, such has purple, have found little place within the genre.

Though a silly piece of Hollywood prepsploitation, the 1984 film “Making the Grade” is nevertheless illustrative of the ethos surrounding garish clothes as worn in a WASPy milieu. Set at a New England prep school, the film includes a school dance scene in which students wear a plethora of Crayola-colored and audaciously patchworked pants and blazers. Yet not only does not a single character show any self-consciousness about what he’s wearing, he’s also completely oblivious to the harlequin garb of his peers.

At least that’s how it seems. “There’s a very conscious, planned nonchalance about this style of dressing,” says Boyer. For WASPs bring to colorful plumage the same tempered restraint and calculated disregard they bring to all other aspects of life. Ironic dressing is completely foreign to a group of people utterly devoid of an ironic sensibility. Sure, the clothes are obnoxious, but they’re also “correct.” If there’s such a thing as earnest irony, this is it.

ESPRIT DE CORPS

Long since made mainstream — and perhaps saved from extinction — by Ralph Lauren, clothing that’s go-to-hell in spirit is still worn by the remnants of its founding tribe. And oddly enough, one of the places the infernal clothing is brought out most frequently is at Sunday worship.

“Deliberately outlandish WASP clothing is still outside the public view in certain pockets of Washington DC,” says an anonymous political insider, “especially during the hot summer. At my Episcopal church, I recently saw a gentleman in his late 50s wearing a patch-madras sport coat, Nantucket Red shorts and Weejuns without socks. Evidently it was good enough for God.”

God, like the rest of the tribe, probably didn’t even notice. “In a world where everyone is wearing Nantucket Reds or corduroy pants embroidered with lobsters,” says Lisa Birnbach, “it’s really not that big a deal: One’s eye adjusts.” Birnbach’s 1980 bestseller “The Official Preppy Handbook” makes note of a particular genetic defect among preppies, namely “specific color blindness,” which leads to “primary colors and brilliant pastels worn indiscriminately in preposterous combinations.”

The whole point is to have an insular code, says Birnbach. “Whether it’s slang or clothing, it’s a way to identify one another in one’s group — and many of these Old Guard, WASPy types weren’t particularly interested in knowing people from another group.”

Satiric in tone and purpose, “The Official Preppy Handbook” at one point suggests readers use pink and green crayons to color a black and white illustration. And in this quintessential preppy color combination (not surprising, the official colors of the prep school in “Making the Grade”), is the seed of preppy’s own undoing, the point at which the scale tips from style to satire, from cultural expression to marketplace pastiche. It’s the IBM gray-suit, white-shirt joke all over again, but for a new generation and with a different punchline.

END OF ONE ERA, BEGINNING OF ANOTHER

Because those viewed as privileged make for easy targets, and because the elements of the style are so fixed, WASP whimsy lends itself to easy parody, most recently and notoriously in the Smirnoff “Tea Partay” commercial, a YouTube favorite. Here pastel clothing is used not for the tribe to differentiate itself from outsiders, but for outsiders to lampoon the tribe. Time passes, the old order withers away, and an age of irony engulfs us all. The tribe, plagued by a tragic flaw, relinquishes its power, and the rest of society, like characters in an archetypal myth, overthrow the tyrants and don their vestments.

Even more odious, today the best-selling Nantucket Reds at Murray’s Toggery Shop are the pre-faded version, for those unaware that patience is a virtue.

For Boyer, taste and tradition, rather than emanating naturally from a land of authenticity, have become just another commodity to be hawked in the marketplace. The mass availability of preppy style today can be read either as a sign of the omnipotence of egalitarianism, or as the last example in fashion of taste coming from the top down, rather than the bottom up. “Capitalism is a great engine of democratization,” notes Boyer.

O’Connells’ Ethan Huber adds the retailer’s perspective: “In the ’80s there was an incredible amount of business we did with madras and go-to-hell pants. Now there’s another resurgence, and you have madras at Wal-Mart.”

CODA

Like an Old Money family that returns each year to its summer home, let us revisit Martha’s Vineyard, scene of Tom Wolfe’s Boston Brahmins and their go-to-hell pants.

In 1998, a couple of Wall Street guys decided to start a clothing brand. They named it Vineyard Vines, and opened a retail store on the island retreat. Originally based on colorful motif ties, the company now carries a full collection of bright sportswear that strikes many world-weary eyes as an over-the-top preppy caricature. Between 2003 and 2006, the company’s annual revenues grew from $5.7 million to $37.2 million.

The Vineyard Vines website includes a section with hundreds of photos of customers dressed in the brand’s bright colors and whimsical designs. It’s as sure a sign as any that we’re all going to hell.

* * *

From Paul Fussell’s “Class”:

“Go-to-hell in spirit also are the sports or playtime trousers which identify the upper-middle class, especially the suburban branch. One common type is white duck trousers with little green frogs embroidered all over them. A variation: light-green trousers, with dark-blue embroidered whales. Or signal flags. Or bell buoys. Or lobsters. Or anything genteel-marine, suggesting that the wearer has just strolled a few steps away from his good-sized yacht.”

From Lauren Lipton’s “Mating Rituals of the North American WASP”:

“What do you call those preppy pants, the kind where the right front leg is, like, yellow, and the left front leg is pink, and the right back leg is, I don’t know, green and the left back leg — ”
“Go-to-hell pants,” Luke interrupted. “What’s your point?”
“You people are lunatics,” Bex scoffed. “You can wear pants like that, but you won’t say one little ‘I love you’?”

M. magazine, 1990:

A prime reason WASPs like meeting people and socializing…. is that it gives them the chance to prove what daring fellows they are.  All WASP men have “go-to-hell” clothes for such occasions, usually poisonous green pants with little whales or anchors printed on them.  Even though they wear dumb clothes to the office, WASPs with real guts always include one “go-to-hell” item, in their business attire too.

Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.,”Preppies: The Last Upper Class?”
Atlantic Monthly, 1979:

“Preppies of all ages and both sexes demonstrate an unwavering taste for luminescent pastels and hard primary colors, a taste evidently designed to evoke the infantile gaiety of the nursery or the youthful certainties of Playskool.”

Nomenclature in Tradsville is a tricky thing, and depends largely on your point of view. Those who like hair-splitting will tell you that a short-sleeved gingham shirt is Trad but not Preppy. Likewise, bit loafers are WASPy but not Ivy.

Fair points to an extent, though it gets tedious pretty fast, and bloggers and forum posters have to use slashes — Ivy/preppy/trad — to make sure they’re covering all the bases.

The March issue of Esquire also weighs in on the taxonomy of Tradsville by differentiating between The WASP and The Trad in its fashion spread on American style tribes. This despite that, save for the double-breasted blazer, most of us would consider the clothing items that are mentioned (go-to-hell pants, rep ties, herringbone sport coats) and tastes and pursuits (John Cheever, squash) pretty interchangable.

Which is why this whole WASP vs. Trad thing is pretty silly. — CC

Everything, that is, except his ski cap from Moriarty of Stowe, Vermont.

For five decades the Moriarty cap and the Stowe ski industry grew in tandem. Here is a story that appeared in the June 2006 issue of Skiing Heritage Journal, recounting how Anabel Moriarty founded a cottage industry and outfitted American Winter Olympians, including her son, from 1956-2006.

Today, as the opening ceremony marks the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics, I wish I could tell you that Moriarty is still a dominant force in ski hats. But there is no longer a store on Main Street, according to the Stowe Chamber of Commerce. The Vermont Ski Museum was also unable to locate a store representative.

But there are still hats available. The museum has a few caps left emblazoned with Stowe, and an Internet search reveals some interesting things for preps who turned left at Bohemian. Moriarty hats and sweaters also appear on eBay from time to time.

The optimist in me believes the Moriarty hat is simply dormant. I’d also like to think there are some Vermont knitters just waiting for someone to appreciate their work again.

As the old advisement used to say, “The People of Vermont make great maple syrup, great cheddar, and the best ski hats in the world.” — CHRISTOPHER SHARP