A reader sent me these three photos illustrating the rapid change in dress and grooming on campus beginning in 1967. These shots are of our friends up north at the University of Alberta, and feature the same club seen over three academic years. Above is the year ’67-’68.
Below, ’68-’69:
And finally, with barbers and tailors preparing to file bankruptcy, 1970-71:
When I matriculated at Gainesville in 1965, males wore coats and ties to football games, fa gawd’s sake! I think a case could be made that 1965 was the beginning of the end of lots of good stuff.
Pretty much the same at UNC-Chapel Hill. When I started in the Fall of 1968, the standard default outfit was khakis, OCBDs and Weejuns. Starting Fall of ’69 and definitely by Fall of ’70, it was bellbottom jeans, chambray workshirts and boots(usually Frye). Hair length extended by an average of three inches. Many fewer guys dressing for a game, but it did continue, especially with dates from off-campus; have to admit, though, it looked more like a Beatle’s album cover than a Norman Hilton advert.
Clearly something terrible happened in the US at the end of the 60’s. A spiritual nuclear bomb.
Andrew
Yes something terrible happened. It was the Vietnam War !!!!!!
Vietnam War was disruptive, but why this manifestation? There had been anti-war protesters every major conflict engaged in by Britain or the United States since at least the Crimean War, but people didn’t change their clothing style The mass use of marijuana and LSD seems to have been the predominant thing changing people’s personal presentation on a mass scale.
Quote by John Hughes as retold by P.J. O’Rourke:
“I couldn’t go looking for a job wearing what people were wearing in 1970,” he said. “But I didn’t really know where to buy clothes that people weren’t wearing in 1970. I remembered that before I became hip my mother used to take me to Brooks Brothers in the Loop. So I went there. Behind the shirt counter was the same sales lady who’d been behind the shirt counter when I was a kid. She looked at me for a moment and said, ‘I knew you’d be back.’”
Still today i ask to me why this this happened,which chain of events have determined iy,and if and if it could be stopped.
I imagine that without Vietnam war and maybe with a diverse pop music (from 1964) could be different.
I think it was just the “Next New Thing”. Radical and conservative students dressed like members of The Byrds. Some of it might have been political, but what would explain leisure suits, urban cowboys, disco poly shirts, urban lumberjacks, etc…..?
Yet more proof, I think, that the wider society influenced Ivy college clothing more than the Ivy colleges influenced the wider society – When it came to menswear trends.
Ivy menswear has at least two personalities: The style of the Ivy colleges and the style sold as Ivy to the greater populous.
Rewind this to the genesis of Ivy: The style existed long before the Ivy name and exists far long after it being the style of the Ivy colleges.
So what is Ivy Style? A snapshot of college boy fashion during a few decades or something greater which spans over a century, but which can still include the college boy period?
I fancy the later.
But it is only a personal opinion.
Consider the Burberry (21) Trench Coat. A double-breasted raincoat born of war. Very “Ivy”, very Brooks. Yet I’ve yet to see it ever predominate in images of Ivy collegians.
The short answer: communism.
It may sound archaic and overly simplistic to say that because we’ve now been conditioned to be ignorant of that force. But, most of us it the 1960’s certainly saw it that way. From the mid-1950’s to the early 1970’s foreign political forces actively worked to influence cultural institutions in the west through art, film, fashion, the inteligensia and media to undermine the idea of transcendent values. The fact that they succeeded so spectacularly was no less a surprise to them as anyone else. Twenty years later when the old soviet block collapsed and some of those influencers immigrated to the west, they were shocked to find that all of the cultural crap they had invented had actually been adopted wholesale in western society.
At the same time college students were influenced to believe that anyone can wear whatever clothes they want, they began being taught patently pro-soviet ideologies like post-modern, post-structuralism. Neither of these happened in isolation from each other.
The coat dates from 1901.
In 60s ties,trousers and lapels of suits and jackets were gone more and more “minimalistic”,so why “the Next New Thing” would not be a back to more classic proportions and patterns?
A return to the better 30s-early 50s classic styles.
In truth some steps in this direction were made in 1969-1970…but the world went crazy so we on one side the counterculture’s rags and on the other side grottesque huge lapels and ties,big chess on the jackets,and flared trousers.
And for alls long hairs,huge moustaches and sideburns for years and years.
The horror,the horror.
Wentworth
An original Burberry (21) Trench Coat is a gigantic thing. It’s an A-line cut raincoat with a wool button in liner. With the kick pleat unbuttoned it gets even larger. I’ve owned one after college, it was fine walking eight blocks to the office, but I can’t imagine having to deal with it going to classes. It lasted almost thirty years, wore the crap out of it. On the other hand, I still wear the Gloverall I bought my senior year in high school for college, 1970.
I observed, beginning circa 1964, was that high school/college students began adopting clothing worn by emerging rock musicians.
First Beatles-like longer hair on boys (tame and neat compared to what soon came.
The Beach Boys and other “surfer bands” caused some “California-casual” attire – e.g., ringer t-shirts and sandals – to appear in eastern U.S. schools. The Endless Summer was a huge hit with Boomers in 1966 and while the surfers wore conservative suits and ties when they flew on airlines (https://i1.wp.com/lushpalm.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/endless-summer-rv-crew.jpg?w=1180 Note the rebel on the right wearing sneakers with his dark suit ), it was California-casual attire we were smitten with: https://i1.wp.com/lushpalm.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/endless-summer-rv-crew.jpg?w=1180
And I recall for the first time at a high school basketball game circa 1966, seeing that several guys who up till then were hard core Ivy wearing high heeled, purple suede Frye boots rather than Weejuns beneath their khakis – nobody but farmers wore denim yet in Virginia. Why? Because then-young folk/rock idol Bob Dylan wore those boots in performances.
The dam broke after Woodstock (1969).
IMO this rock/free love/surfong/anti-establishment driven cultural tsunami would have occurred, although less rapidly perhaps, absent the Vietnam conflict.
Posted wrong link to Endless Summer surfers in suits. Here’s the right one:https://i2.wp.com/lushpalm.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/endless-summer-surf-travel.jpg?w=1180
Someone informed me last night that “Endless Summer” fillmmaker Bruce Brown died a few days ago.
Yes, CC, Bruce Brown died Dec 10 in Santa Barbara at age 80. “https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/13/570437097/remembering-bruce-brown-whose-search-for-the-perfect-break-redefined-surfing
“I had no formal training,” (Brown said). Before heading to Hawaii to film his first full-length feature, “I got in the plane with a book on how to make movies. It was a real thin book, too.”
@jerry Marxist plots everywhere!!! Make sure you check under your bed at night, before going to sleep. Ooh and the closet, you know how the Marxist pushed homosexuality on the greater public all to undermine democracy.
@ Jerry.
So sorry, our posts crossed. However, you do make a salient point: The Ivy colleges did not exist in a vacuum.
I cannot say if Communism was at the root of the change in American collegiate dressing, but I do believe that the colleges were not as insular as certain clothing theorists would say.
The Ivy colleges once had a certain style. A style that existed before and after their students wore it.
Of that much, history agrees with us.
@ Mac McConnell
We agree.
And what of the black/grey herringbone, sometimes black velvet collared, Chesterfield overcoat?
Very Brooks, very ‘Ivy’.
Many of those on campus?
I have my doubts.
Ivy menswear in the mainstream was to evoke an Ivy lineage. It was a style. Many wearers quite simply were not from the Ivy colleges. In fact, most were not.
If Ivy style is just to be what was worn by the majority on campus looking back over the century plus history of this menswear style then Ivy is blue jeans.
Clearly Ivy Style is not just that.
The name “Ivy” comes from the colleges, the style “Ivy” comes from a wider world.
In my humble opinion.