In 1952, LIFE Magazine ran a profile on the Taft family, one of America’s great political dynasties, having produced President William Howard Taft. The family also produced a prep school — The Taft School in Watertown, CT — which was founded by William’s brother Horace Dutton Taft, an early Skull & Bones member, and attended by …
As a curtain call to our series of ’70s posts from last week — not to mention yesterday’s post on Yale from Richard Press — Barnaby Conrad III shares these memories of Yale in the decade between the fall of the Ivy League Look and the rise of prepdom. Conrad is a writer and artist and …
The role of Yale in American popular culture and the sartorial legacy of New Haven together comprise the metaphor of my life. Ivy Style jogged my memory a few weeks ago when we posted an ad for Macy’s showroom on York Street from a 1941 edition of the Yale Daily News. “Macy’s Knows Its Yale,” …
Some of you may remember one of my smaller web projects from a few years back called MasculineInteriors.com. I’ve always enjoyed decorating my apartments and really liked working on the site. In the end it proved too narrow a topic — or perhaps too broad. It was purchased, but looks like the owners never …
Memorial Day weekend traditionally marks the beginning of summer and the wearing of one of its signature fabrics. And so Ivy Style is pleased to introduce The Original Madras Trading Company, a third-generation maker and weaver with offices in New York and Chennai, India, the city formerly known as Madras that gave the distinctive checked …
From Alan Flusser before retirement: three buttons, contrast buttonhole stitching, double vents, hacking pockets and ticket pocket. Plus horizontal striped shirt, to complete the Gekko-in-the-Hamptons look.
Madras season is officially open, and what better way to declare it than with patch madras shorts. Surely you agree?
Best wishes for a delightful holiday weekend as we remember those who’ve given their lives to defend this great nation of ours, and when we also remember what a great genre of clothing our forefathers have given us. Note the great sartorial variety in the image above, from charcoal suits to madras shorts, all thrown …
Here’s a gallery of album covers from the Ivy heyday, when jazz was as common on campus as buttondowns and Weejuns.
Today’s Google Doodle — the little graphics and animations that sometimes accompany its home page — celebrates the legendary Savoy Ballroom. The Harlem nightclub shut down a generation before I was born, but that didn’t stop me from learning about its importance in American cultural history, as in the late ’90s all of us who …
I have been enjoying this website immensely since I discovered it a few months ago, and it has really stirred up memories for me. I attended a small boarding school in rural Maine from 1955 to 1960, on account of being held back a year after a small incident with the headmaster’s daughter in my …
Our little run of ’70s-themed posts has been brought to you by St. Johns Bay Rum and its fragrant and practical soap-on-a-rope. For those of you who don’t remember the ’70s, when the item was popular, soap-on-a-rope isn’t just a silly novelty. If you have a shower that lacks a ridged shelf for soap, you’ll …
According to the tumblr page where this photo was found, it’s a Ralph Lauren catalog or advertising image dating to 1972. It may be the earliest RL print ad we’ve seen, and I think is notable for how early he had developed his signature narrative, tradition-inspired and aspiration marketing imagery.
In the late 1970s, Japanese companies went on a mad spree to secure licenses for American traditional brands. Everyone knows that Onward Kashiyama acquired J. Press, and maybe even that VAN Jacket made Japanese versions of Gant shirts. But what is lesser known is that Macbeth — a trad clothier founded in 1967 by former department …
Window shopping is a lot like web surfing: you browse, you gander, you move on. I surfed by The Suit Room the other day; that’s the site maintained by former Ivy Style contributor and Newton Street Vintage proprietor Zach DeLuca. He had some nice vintage shots of Langrock, the legendary campus shop at Princeton, which …
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as you’ve probably heard before. So when someone posted a picture of Clark’s Wallabees on Ivy Style’s Facebook group, wondering their place in the Ivy/prep pantheon, my bias against them immediately showed. The shoe gave me childhood trauma in the late ’70s — not because I was …
The fall of Brooks Brothers wouldn’t be complete without a drawn-out denouement of ignominy. And so the $27 billion Del Vecchio family is being sued by a former Hong Kong investor (suggesting perhaps globalism just isn’t good for American companies). Reuters reports: The billionaire Italian family that until recently owned Brooks Brothers has been accused …
As the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. That certainly applies to menswear brands. But just because smaller ones may disappear without registering a thud, that doesn’t mean starting one is any easier. Yet Philadelphia-based Junior’s managed to establish itself as a new independent classic menswear retailer, and did so while launching …
Jack Lemmon, who was born to play the sack-suited, dyspeptic advertising man of the Atomic Age, was also pretty deft on the keyboard, and so we round out this musical weekend with a snippet of his chops in this duet with Dinah Shore. We’ve previously done posts on Lemmon’s films “Good Neighbor Sam,” “Bell, Book And …