Our last post was on the fondness of rich WASPs for junk food, which leaves crumbs on their frayed pink buttondowns. This post is on how rich WASPs dressed in Southampton in 1959. Pictured are Vincent Banker and C. Henry Buhl III going Ivy chic in blazer with sockless bit loafers and madras jacket with …
Here’s an idea for the new CEO at Ralph Lauren. How about more of the magical photo shoots that whisk you away to an island of the imagination? Back in the ’80s, Polo would take out 20 pages in GQ or Architectural Digest and run epic narrative ad spreads shot by Bruce Weber. These marketing …
Ivy Style Facebook member Sammy Al-Rawi has dug up some great photos from National Geographic Magazine chronicling student life from the ’40s through the ’60s. If you were a kid in the pre-Internet age, you may have had friends show you copies of National Geographic because there were occasionally pictures of naked women from the …
Today is National Golf Day, for which I offer three documents for your enjoyment. The purely sartorial among you can pore over the details in this photo of the 1959 Yale golf team. * * * Update: Richard Press just sent me an email saying this photo blew his mind, whereupon he proceeded to …
Norman Hilton was known for his high quality and impeccable taste in fabrics. He also knew how to commission a sharp wordsmith. Just look at the copy in the ad below. “Yesterday, today and tomorrow are all one.” Nice line. As for the gentleman depicted with such ample aplomb, I can imagine him in a …
Roger Sack, Cornell class of 1962, was a young man who knew clothes. He inherited a sense of style from his father, who, though the son of poor immigrants, shopped at Rogers Peet, Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart. He was a man of “refined taste,” remembers Sack, whose souvenir from World War II was a …
OK, maybe not ten thousand (as in the school’s fight song), but here are a few. The handsome gent above and below is Aga Khan (no date for photo; Khan graduated in ’59), whose step-mother was Rita Hayworth: Students and professor, 1952: Book fair, 1957: Commencement, 1961: Alumni Day, 1968: This one is captioned “Harvard …
Does menswear move inexorably and unstoppably towards a sartorially dystopian future, or is it possible for things to actually move backward, kind of like the way the stock market “corrects” itself? These three images from Wofford College (which is based in Spartanburg, SC) show how fashion does move in cycles — even as it cycles …
Last summer, when Ivy Style upgraded to a new magazine-style layout that is device-responsive, there were all sorts of glitches to work through. The subsequent jump in traffic also demanded a more frequent posting schedule. We have some 1,300 posts in our archives, and while I was vaguely aware that some of them had layout …
Ayumi Ōhashi (b. 1940) — née Kumiko Ōhashi — grew up in Mie Prefecture and moved to Tokyo to attend prestigious Tama Art University. A pupil of the cartoon illustrator Jun Kawahara, Ōhashi started to experiment with crayon pastels to draw young men in stylish clothing. After showing her work to Shōsuke Ishizu at VAN …
Today, in honor of International Women’s Day, Ivy Style revisits one of our most popular posts: the much-shared, much-lauded, moutwatering girls + bikes + penny loafers post of 2011. It may not be what the organizers of IWD had in mind, but it’s the best this old boys’ club can do. * * * The …
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 …
Yesterday Esquire announced that David Granger is out as editor after helming the magazine for nearly 20 years. His replacement is Jay Fielden, who had been overseeing Town & Country. Will Esquire return to the way it was from the ’30s to the ’60s? Not likely. All the more reason to put your subscription money …
From the September, 1949 issue of Esquire. Subscribe to the digital archives here. From the University of Maine to UCLA, college men spend most of their time pounding the books in class, in the dorm, or in the library with Miss Distraction of 1949. Their keynote is comfort and neatness. The fellow in the window …
Our recent post on William Ivey Long led some presumably blue-shirted commenters to say they were reconsidering white. Above is another compelling case for white by another show-biz gentleman named William. Actor Holden is pictured in a LIFE Magazine photo shoot from 1954. Sometimes a white buttondown is all you need. Except for the times …
What do saddle shoes and kilties have in common? They’re both featured in the Laurence Fellows-penned image above from the Esquire archives, and they’re both not on my Christmas list. Regular readers will know my aversion to both footwear atrocities. But then again I dig bit loafers. De gustibus, et cetera, et cetera. Below is …
This image (another find by comment-leaver Carmelo in the Esquire archives), came with a date but no caption. So I decided to give it one for the headline above. It’s easy to think of penny loafers as a casual shoe since, in the grand footwear scheme of things, they are. But much of the charm …
Last week we ran a post with material from a 1936 issue of Esquire, when the Bass Weejun was in its first year of existence. Subsequent Esquire articles — which are now available from the new online Esquire archives for just $4.99 per month — touted the shoe as ideal for resorts, beaches, and other …
Tonight is the first game of the 2015 World Series, so I jumped into my Internet-enabled time machine to see what I could find. The shot above is considered one of the best World Series photos of all time, and centers on University of Pittsburgh students watching the Pirates take on the Yankees from the …