Norman Hilton’s Ivy League Vision 1947–1970

By Nick Hilton

A freshman at Princeton in the fall of 1937, Norman Hilton was introduced to the style of “St. Grottlesex” boys, graduates of elite New England prep schools, icons of Ivy League style. He admired, even coveted, the elite air of these men evident in the confident, patrician look of their clothing.

He didn’t look like them; not at first. His grandfather founded a chain of stores offering a cosmopolitan style of suits manufactured in the family-owned factory. Joseph Hilton and Sons catered to men who dressed like James Cagney, not Jimmy Stewart. Norman’s father, Alexander Hilton, Princeton class of 1919, scion of this successful Jewish clothing family, had married Lillian Gilbertson. Norman’s mother was an Irish Catholic daughter of a Newark butcher. Spurned by both families, Norman grew up not belonging. “All I ever got from Princeton,” he once said, “was an inferiority complex.”

My father was a brilliant, complicated man, perhaps driven by insecurity to attend Princeton and then Harvard Business School. All his life strove to be admitted to the highest-ranking, socially prominent organizations: Pine Valley Country Club, The Royal Company of Edinburgh Golfers, Rumson, Sea Bright, all bastions of Protestant gentry. A keen observer, he had an idea what the Ivy League style said about the man who wore it.

After Harvard and the Navy during World War II, Norman went home to South Orange. His father suggested he, “Go down to the factory in Linden and straighten out the mess my brothers are making there.”  He did. His uncles, Jerome and Charlie Hilton, ignored him. His life-changing moment was finding a box of tweed swatches from J.T. Wright and Son of Hawick, Scotland. The fabrics had no appeal to a Joseph Hilton customer, but they gave Norman the idea. He could use the facility to make clothing in that St. Grottlesex style, until then not widely available.

Michael Cifarelli, born in Italy around 1890 and apprenticed to a local tailor as a boy, started his American career as a cutter at the H. Daroff Company, manufacturer of Botany 500, in Philadelphia. Jerome hired Cifarelli to be Hilton’s “designer,” the man who drew the patterns used to cut the clothes. If ever there was a problem in the shop, if a style of garment had a bump, a ripple, or some extra fullness in an area, it was Cifarelli’s responsibility either to change the pattern or to show the section foreman how to properly make the seams. Cifarelli, a grouchy egotist who knew more and better than everybody about everything, in 1947 drew a pattern for Norman which became known as the “Hampton” model, a three-button-roll-to-two, undarted front, “natural shoulder” jacket, with stitched edges and lapped seams. It was the Holy Grail Norman sought. After a couple of sample iterations it was perfected: for Norman, the epitome of Ivy League style.

The Hilton family version of the myth is roughly this. “Natural shoulder” clothing originated in England, where “county” gentlemen, so-called to suggest their rural estates, would have softly constructed, unpadded tweed jackets custom made for them by London tailors. The New England social elite, Anglophiles generally, adopted this casual-dressy fashion, of which a soft, sloping shoulder, easy-fitting, unpadded body, hook-style back vent and 3-button, low-rolled lapel were defining characteristics. Brooks Brothers may have been the first producers of ready-to-wear clothing in this fashion, while tailor shops in New Haven and Cambridge began to send representatives to school and college campuses and Eastern cities to measure and fit men for custom-made clothes of that style. Some of these salesmen even opened specialty stores. Louis Prager and Sydney Winston’s Chipp in New York, and Langrock in Princeton, and others took advantage of the growing popularity of Ivy League style. Charlie Davidson opened The Andover Shop there in 1948, an icon of Ivy and perhaps the blueprint for that type of shop, offering button-down collar shirts, narrow repp stripe ties, Shetland sweaters and narrow-leg, unpleated trousers, all of which made up the American country squire look.

Equipped with his perfect jacket, family-bred fabric taste, a clothing factory to produce his product and a true Ivy Leaguer’s air of superiority, Norman offered his new line of tweed sportcoats, “Norman Hilton Country Jackets,” to retailers. The choice of name is significant. In 1947 clothing lines had generic titles like Botany 500 and Worsted-Tex or family names like Hickey-Freeman or Petrocelli. Grieco Brothers in Lawrence, Massachusetts produced Southwick Clothing, a collection originally named to be a private label for Paul Stuart. It would be twenty years until Ralph Lauren decided to use his own name on a label (a decision of consequence for Norman.) You could say that Norman Hilton was the first American menswear designer name. You could say it because it’s true.

The product was made to a standard of quality his competitors were unable to match. The sole outlet for Hilton Manufacturing had been the family’s chain of stores. The Linden factory was thus protected from the constant demand for lower prices that caused other firms to adopt cheaper, more “efficient” tailoring techniques. Norman Hilton Country Jackets were made with hand-basted fronts, hand-sewn armholes and sleeves, hand-felled collars, and each one was hand-pressed with dry irons inside and out. His passions, the finest cloth, the natural shoulder, and the elements of taste and style that defined the American gentleman were expressed in the motto he created:  “Doing One Thing Well.”

Norman’s first sales call was to the on-campus cleaner at Princeton, Eric Mihan, who bought a few tweed jackets and put Norman Hilton in business. Within a year he had found shops in the northeast, notably Henry Miller in Hartford and White of New Haven, who believed in him. In time the list grew, and by the early 1950s the customer list included stores from Zareh’s of Boston to Carroll and Company, a new shop in Beverly Hills. In 1955 Peter Newman, Adam Gimbel’s Saks Fifth Avenue men’s clothing buyer, gave Norman the idea to produce suits of Yorkshire gabardine. Norman then had a nationwide audience which grew with the increasing popularity of Ivy League style.

Norman Hilton’s sense of style was a constant; the expression of it a continuum. At lunch, in ’21 or La Grenouille, he fit in with men of diverse taste, British peers, Hollywood stars, his father’s New York pals or Prince Ranier. He laughed at the word “class” but he respected sophistication. The look of his collection thus changed with time, but according to strict guidelines. He knew that the soul of tasteful clothing was in the fabrics and that a change in the body style of jackets could be a welcome innovation to both the devout Ivy Leaguer and the successful Californian. Norman’s target customer, he believed, was the New Yorker reader, and his Ogilvy-inspired lifestyle ads in the magazine spoke directly to the American cognoscenti.

So, by the mid-60s emerged an evolved style, a London-inspired “West End” model, a body-tracing, two-button, front-darted version which quickly found acceptance by a nationwide audience. In 1967 the factory produced a memorable 67,000 garments under his label, persuading Norman to expand his brand by introducing a line of dress furnishings and sportswear to be designed by a young man he’d hired named Ralph Lauren. This brilliant stylist had bigger plans, however, and he soon convinced Norman to invest in his own venture, Polo. Within a few years the staff who had been with him in the boom times left Norman to join Ralph over on 55^th Street. The torch had been passed.

The dramatic fall in demand for his purist version of New England style coincided with the rising acceptance of what came to be called “updated traditional.”  It was not this decline in popularity of true Ivy that demoralized Norman. Rather it was the weird turn in the taste of men generally. Early exemplars of a style change are always absurd, leading to variations eventually less dramatic, less extreme. Tailoring houses like Hiltons had to pander to the wild demands of the public and the ridiculous notions of retailers, making “leisure suits” out of glistening polyester double-knit fabric with military-style details like button-patch pockets, even epaulets. He could not participate in this production of schlock, and unable to translate the current craze to anything he understood, Norman lost interest, leaving a younger generation to navigate the market. Soon, though, when he was appointed United States agent for Burberrys of London, Norman’s fuse was relit; under his guidance their business here grew from under $700,000 to something like $23,000,000.

When my father died at his home in Sea Island, at 93 in 2011, he still had about a dozen sport jackets in his closet. Robust hand-woven Shetland tweeds in the colors and patterns he favored, tailored in his original, three-button shape. Alongside were trousers of gabardine and flannel that he wore to dinners at The Cloister despite the warm climate there. His shirts were not Ivy; custom-made of Thomas Mason’s or D.& J. Anderson’s superfine cotton, all with French cuffs and spread collars. To Norman there was nothing formulaic about good taste, no rigid rule. There was always a spontaneity, always a personal element, and always, always, his insistence on quality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Hilton represents the fourth generation of Hiltons behind the clothing company Hiltons Princeton. He is the author of A Tailor-Made Man: Riches to Rags and Recovery – The U.S. Clothing Industry, 1970 – 2000.