Funny, both candidates in the current presidential race are Ivy League…
Maybe finally we know the difference between Ivy and preppy: you can have an Ivy degree and be anything but prep.
Happy birthday to GHWB, a true American sartorial patriot. — CC
16 Comments on "Happy 92nd To Our Preppiest Prez"
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There won’t be another well-dressed president for a long time…
He’s first and JFK is a close second
@DJP Agreed, and to whom does third place belong?
Well dressed but not Ivy/Trad IMO was Harry Truman who, of course, very briefly co-owned a Kansas City haberdashery.
As president – 1945-53 – he wore a lot of double breasted suits and great looking ties (occasionally bow ties) and packet squares.
Unlike GHWB abd JFK Truman, 31 years old when Kennedy was born, had no prep/Ivy League (last modern president with a college degree)
Pre and leading up to ’80 primary, George H.W. Bush, former Congressman and CIA director, regularly wore button downs and plastic “tortoiseshell” glasses.
A commitment to tradition and consistency, as embodied by GHWB’s manner of dress, is something we may never see again in a President. I fear he’s the last lion of a bygone era, although there’s always hope as “we know what we are but know not what we may be.” What “we” are today shrinks in comparison to who GHWB is, was and always will be.
While i don’t like at all Bush II and his neocons,i believe that George W.Bush the first was a excellent President in the old tradition of post war moderate Republicans.
I think that Bush sr President in 1980 would have been a better choice.
I like the “Ivy” style of Bush Sr.
About the best dressed Presidents,i think that Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were very well dressed.
Check out GW in the top picture – rockin’ those chinos and full cut shirt..
Agree that GHWB dressed the part of the prep school/Ivy educated man. As for the current two presumptive nominees, only The Donald is an Ivy grad (Penn). Hillary is a Wellesley girl.
Hillary went to Yale for grad school.
Wow, I never knew GHWB had such great (trad) style.
Living in DC before the Hinkley shooting VPGHWB’s limo would pull by the K Street store and he would shop the January sale. (That was when you would have a choice of great suit fabrics to choose from). Years later at a fundraiser I mentioned this to him while have the fundraising picture taken. He pulled open his jacket to show the label
and said “this is a Southwick”. The White House wouldn’t release the picture to me.
And then there’s the working, viable supposition that he didn’t care much at all. Like every other DC pol, by the 80s he wore 2 button darted suits, those hideous “forward point” (or whatever they’re called) collared broadcloth shirts, and the Rockport comfort shoes–the black wingtip variety, no less. (ugh).
The romance of elitism aside, a bit of excavation reveals a blacksmith-turned gold rush 49er, midwestern manufacturers, and (still more) midwestern dry good merchants. Nothing wrong with any of this, but ain’t it funny–the family trees of our princes. It wasn’t Connecticut and Maine all the way back. Plenty of Illinois and Ohio for good measure.
Dressing like an American doesn’t mean to suggest one is an ‘elite’.
The suit he’s wearing in that picture with Thatcher doesn’t look all that different from the tan suit that Obama wore a few years ago that got the usual suspects frothing with their usual fury. Obama’s was probably a two-button . . .
@ S.E.
The beauty of the Bush legacy is that they never put on the airs of elitism; rather this is a label which others assign to them. Watch the documentary “41” by HBO and you’ll find GHWB upfront about his humble beginnings. They all know it was the Walker family’s foray into banking that gave them all their leg up.