Last week Baltimore Magazine posted a video clip of John F. Kennedy during his years as a Harvard student. It’s 1940, the US is about to enter the war, and Kennedy will soon leave Cambridge for the Solomon Islands. This is footage from the twilight of the golden age of upper-class collegiate life, the era …
Pictured is freshman William Song keeping the Ivy Look alive and well at Harvard. He donned this festive outfit for what might be considered the rather serious matter of initiation into the Harvard Crimson Business Board. Wearing a vintage Brooks Brothers blazer, Song says he stopped by The Andover Shop on the same day as …
Here’s a post that originally ran in the summer of 2012, and which makes for a perfect follow-up to yesterday’s post on a video from the University of Pennsylvania made in 1967. This is another school promo film, but from precisely a decade earlier. * * * Recently I ran across a video for Penn …
Today is Hey Day at the University of Pennsylvania. The tradition, now in its 101st year, involves juniors rising to senior status by marching in similar outfits, which today consists of “fake straw hats, red t-shirts, and canes.” While Penn students enjoy this special day, the rest of us can enjoy this video of just …
Three more years until shaggy hair, sideburns, and possibly new clothes. Or would that be old clothes? — CC
This post, originally from 2010, is being reposted again (it returned to the front page last October) as a follow-up to the recent shot of Bernie Sanders as a college student. While the bottom photo appears to be a boatneck sweater, the others all appear to be crewnecks worn high in the front on purpose. …
Who’s this public persona during his college days, wearing his crewneck sweater high in the front, as we’ve analyzed before. Shield your eyes from the comments below while you formulate your guess. I’m sure someone’s seen this image before. — CC
Spring is here, and, while not quite ready to call for my whangee and yellowest shoes like Bertie Wooster, I am getting ready to pack up the woolen tweeds and flannels until fall. Sometime in the next few weeks I will get the summer stuff out of storage at the dry cleaners, and I have been …
For your Friday we offer this shot of one of your fellow Ivy enthusiasts from around the globe. Pictured here is Rene at the Eiffel Tower in the city he calls home. Along with his Ivy Style Club Tie, he’s wearing what I assume is a slack jacket from Paris-based J. Keydge. Writes Rene: I …
A reader submitted the fascinating graphic above that supports the assertion around here that the 1967/68 academic school year marks the rapid fall of the Ivy League Look. The chart shows not the wearing of buttondowns and penny loafers, but the beginning of a sudden spike in facial hair, even mere sideburns. The spike trends …
Recently we posted about a company called Worsted-Tex and how it used the term “Ivy League” to sell mass-market clothing as soon as the heyday of the Ivy League Look took off. In 1960 the company began filing lawsuits against other brands that were using variations of the term “Ivy” in their products. In a …
Lisa Birnbach’s “True Prep” raised plenty of Old-Guard eyebrows with its inclusiveness. Whereas 1980’s “The Official Preppy Handbook” was WASPy to the core, the sequel opens the club to black, Asian, gay and Muslim preps as Birnbach declares “It’s a whole new old world.” As an example that those flying the preppy flag in 21st …
For yesterday’s Easter post I shared the collection of top hat images that fills my apartment, one of which is a rakish photo of Aly Khan, an international playboy who married actress Rita Hayworth. His son, known as Prince Karim, the fourth Aga Khan, was featured in one of Ivy Style’s earliest posts, which we …
In the late ’90s I discovered the surprisingly large vintage costume-ball scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, where about three separate groups put on 19th-century-themed events with live music for waltzes, polkas, and English country dances. There was a smaller scene in LA (in Pasadena, naturally), but nothing like it here in New York. …
This week was National Library Week. Yep, there’s a day — or in this case a week — for just about everything. I asked the college men in our Facebook group to submit a photo of them hitting the books, and one man rose to the challenge. Pictured is Ben Schmidt either studying for class …
On this Good Friday we look at shots taken for LIFE Magazine in 1955 by renowned photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. — CC
Recently on the Ivy Style Facebook page, an important question was posed to the members: how do you keep your white shirts looking white, especially around the collar? The post was quickly inundated with various pieces of advice, which ranged from home remedies to professional laundering. The great, and varying, advice from that post has …
In 1947, a letter from the Student Tailor Shop gave official notice to Princeton’s incoming class of ’51 that the university required its own wardrobe. “The style of clothing worn around the campus,” it read, “is different from that sold in metropolitan centers and home town stores.” From four-button suits and detachable-collar shirts in the …
Another great find by Carmelo Pugliatti showing mass-market Ivy at the dawn of the heyday. And the worst-dressed award goes to the young man in the middle, who’s wearing a coat that looks like an orphaned suit jacket, along with a hat for over which his classmates will give him infinite grief. — CC
From now on, get all your news from the Washington Post. Or at least from the gentleman of the press pictured above wearing his Ivy Style Club Tie. Matt Schudel has been writing obituaries for the paper for many years. So next time a prominent persona dies (last week it was Don Rickles), be sure …
Golf fans out there are no doubt tuned into The Masters, where weather conditions for the first two days made the iconic tournament quite a challenge for the players. Those more inclined to sartorial matters and looking for an eloquent Saturday afternoon read should head over to the website of Nick Hilton, son of the …
This week marks the centenary of America’s entry into World War I, also known as The Great War. (Whether this week marks our entry into a new war is another matter.) Above is an image of what Brooks Brothers did that fateful year of 1917. Its Christmas advertisement took special note of soldiers, and seems …