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 …
One night on the quiz show “Jeopardy!” there was a jazz category. The three contestants left it for last, then failed to answer a single question. America’s classical music, indeed… So here’s to spring, seersucker, and Sarah and Miles with something from the Great American Songbook.
It was the summer of 1982, not quite two years after Lisa Birnbach wrote “The Official Preppy Handbook,” and I got a call from my agent in New York. After several rounds of auditions, I (then known as Susan Dow) was cast in “Preppies” and was rehearsing at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, …
Greetings, gentlemen, and hope that wherever you are your spring has sprung. We’re long overdue with a catchup on all the news in Tradsville. We’ll start with something rather salacious and really quite incredulous. We’ve known that Alden has done phenomenally well over the past decade, indeed apparently well enough to misplace $30 million. Former …
One summer day in 1946, Joseph Haspel, Sr. walked neck deep into the Atlantic Ocean wearing one of his family’s seersucker suits. He emerged from the ocean a part of clothing lore. Haspel was attending a convention in Boca Raton, Florida, when he took his now famous dip into the sea. Afterwards he hung his …
After yesterday’s post on George Will, a reader sent in this column on Brooks that the trad columnist wrote for the Washington Post back in 1997, when the appearance of buttondowns in odd colors were enough to spark fear of the end times. Will opens his lament with: Yes, yes, we have been told. Philosophers …
In a column some years ago for the Washington Post, George Will discussed William Zinsser and the craft of writing, making a passing reference to J. Press and the formality observed by old-school WASPs such as Zinsser: Tooting his own trumpet is not the style of this self-effacing and decorous WASP, who never leaves his …
Once the dust had settled from my journey back to California and I was firmly nestled back in the very same apartment where I’d stayed for six months in 2009 (shortly after founding Ivy Style), I began work on a lengthy article. It quickly became clear it was the most important story of my life. …
I’ve seen every masculine change in fashion from the “drape shape with the reet pleat” zoot suit of the WW II years to the latest “New Bohemian” look from Dries Van Noten, and the way I dress is still imprisoned by the years of my youth. But my appreciation of style is not, so I …
There will always be Americans and Englishmen who find the other culture more appealing. You don’t have to look hard to find Anglophiles in the States, and “Downton Abbey” has relit the Anglomania torch that never really gets extinguished. But while having English taste points your class arrow upward in the US, having American taste in England …