The annual Harvard-Yale football game presents one of the best opportunities of the year to put together traditional preppy ensembles and turn out in force. My great-grandfather graduated from Yale in 1916, and I’m the proud owner of several sartorial artifacts from his time in New Haven, among them a pipe, a smoking jacket embroidered …
Historically, Ivy style has always championed durability and functionality. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of outerwear, where such weathered classics as the toggle coat and balmacaan remain viable and timeless. However, at certain vivacious moments in the style’s history, discerning collegiate sartorialists have exchanged the reliable for the resplendent, the austere for …
The winter weekend celebration known as the Dartmouth Winter Carnival was an intramural Ivy League event of local consequence before Walter Wanger decided to bring Hollywood into the act. Wanger flunked out of Dartmouth in 1915, but achieved notoriety in the film world. Intensely proud of his days in Hanover burnishing his contributions to the …
Greetings to all, and I hope that your corner of Tradsville has emerged from lockdown and you’ve been able to don some madras and get outside. My first summer here in Newport is already magical. I’ve been surfing at dusk, swimming out to rocks perched in the ocean, and even had my first sail in …
The name Edward Gorey (1925 – 2000) is almost as elusive as the man himself, conjuring either immediate recognition or hesitant diffidence. Even for the former, the breadth of his work is generational. From designing the Tony Award-winning set and costumes for a 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula, to the opening sequence of WGBH’s Mystery! …
In our last post, a comment was left asking me to speculate what if the heyday of the Ivy League Look had never happened, that it had remained the relatively closed, little-known aristocratic style that it was in the 1930s. Would this have been better or worse in the long run for preserving authentic …
I found this post sitting on Ivy Style’s server, never published. The only note is that it dates from a 1933 issue of Apparel Arts. * * * The word “collegiate,” now seldom used in speaking of college men, is altogether foreign to its famous meaning of some eight years ago, when the raccoon coat, …
Here’s another great find by comment-leaver and Facebook group member “Carmelo,” from the Esquire archives. In this case, the March, 1950, issue, in the pre-dawn of the heyday. The copy reads: Let the acrobats have hourglass waistlines. And leave the bulking shoulder pads on the football field. For city and campus alike, naturalness is the …