On Sept. 30, 1965, a Tokyo magazine publisher released a book about the fashion at eight American college campuses. The book is “Take Ivy.” The photos were taken by photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida. The text was entirely Japanese, and the campuses he shot make up the Ivy League. The New York Times hailed it a “treasure of fashion insiders,” and GQ dubbed it a “seminal #menswear tome.” The book has had no shortage of nicknames: “Original style bible,” “Sartorial kayfabe,” “Ivy League bible for Japanese baby boomers” and just about any pairing of a fashion word and synonym for sacred text one can imagine.Last week, “Take Ivy” celebrated 60 years, and its legacy still stands in Philadelphia, Princeton, New York, New Haven, Providence, Cambridge, Ithaca, Hanover and every city between.Stripped of its endless accolades and enduring references, “Take Ivy” is a photo book. It was the first time “Ivy style” was methodically chronicled. Hayashida shot the images in the spring after traveling from Japan. The photos numbered in the tens of thousands, The New York Times later reported. Hayashida wanted to give curious Japanese readers — who appreciated rules and clarity — a better grasp of what seemed like a complicated code of Ivy League fashion.The book includes “Yale University’s 20-Article Dress Code,” a set of guidelines published in 1965 for incoming first-year students. The guidelines reassured students they could “dress casually on campus, now that [they] spend most of [their] time in class or at the dormitory,” but also sternly advised wearing a sport jacket and tie on dates or to restaurants.In “Stalking the Wild Madras Wearers of the Ivy League,” American fashion and culture writer W. David Marx writes about student’s “Ivy style” captured by “Take Ivy.”“They’re dressed in the pinnacle of classic Ivy League style: madras cotton blazers, Oxford-cloth button-down shirts, khaki Bermuda shorts, and patinaed penny loafers, he writes.”Marx, who studied at Harvard and now writes from Tokyo, offers a succinct explanation of “Take Ivy.” Effectively, he says, the book is “young American men strolling across quads, eating hot dogs and studying for finals in libraries.”The strolling and studying hasn’t changed. But the students have. Today, they’re half women and nearly one-tenth international. The Yale College students of the 1960s — almost entirely white, American men — are now less than one-fifth.
The students look different, but the clothes are often the same, especially now. Last month, “Double polo collars, cargo shorts, and lots of blazers — J. Crew, Ralph Lauren, and J. Press — led the preppiest New York Fashion Week in recent memory,” according to GQ’s Samuel Hine. A style catalogued six decades ago is still at the front of the cultural consciousness. “At NYFW, everyone wants to be a preppie,” the recent GQ writeup reads.
What is “Take Ivy” to today’s Yale students?
Some don’t know about it at all. But some still wear the style that the book introduced to Japanese readers. Those who know about “Take Ivy” still have copies and still use it as a style guide — though, slowly, students have crept away from preserving its style rules and closer to subverting them.
Sunbathing and studyingOn a sunny day outside of Morse College, a shirtless Yale student sprawled out on the lawn between his college and Payne Whitney Gymnasium, according to a “Take Ivy” photo. Its caption explains the student was “desperately trying to get bronze skin while also preparing for an exam. The photo — probably the most evocative in the collection — conjures the first warm day at Yale when a beaming sun tells students they’ve survived the New Haven winter. The caption continues, “Ivy Leaguers frown upon students who earn good grades but have pale skin from spending too much time inside.”On that early spring day, Gonzalez sat on the couch wearing dark leather J. Crew penny loafers, white ribbed gym socks with red stripes and red gym shorts with white stripes. Gonzalez lives in Berkeley College, whose colors — unsurprisingly — are red and white. Celebrating his college’s colors, his outfit could be called “allegiant.” Daniel Cappello used that term to describe Yale students in “The Ivy League,” his Assouline volume. “Yalies, both matriculating and graduated, bear a remarkably genuine love for their alma mater.” Cappello revisits the impression of “Ivy style” first catalogued by “Take Ivy.”“Yale students tend to dress with a similarly unaffected classic ruggedness — what might be called the Maine look: a sporty Patagonia fleece or North Face jacket to temper the brisk autumns of the Northeast,” he writes. “New Haven, with its maritime climate, makes Yale a natural habitat for the Land’s End look. Gonzalez gets it. He pairs his worn penny loafers with trousers or either striped or plaid shorts and tech fabric outerwear from Arc’teryx or The North Face. Recently, a minimally vibrant — almost burnt orange — yellow raincoat has been his go-to. He talked to me about “Ivy style” — not just as “Take Ivy” presents it but a modern version which “from time to time,” Gonzalez enjoys “tapping into.”He told me: “Fashion has a lot of different niches that are objectively good. Most of us gravitate toward a few and leave the others behind. ‘Ivy style’ is one of them I admire and wear. But I never fully make it my own.”Gonzalez’s sartorial impulses are tempered by feelings beyond aesthetics. He echoed David Brooks, who last year wrote “HOW THE IVY LEAGUE BROKE AMERICA,” in The Atlantic:“Every coherent society has … an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was … a man born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles like the one on Fifth Avenue, in New York City.”Gonzalez calls New York home, too, but told me, “Fashion shouldn’t be limited to the uber wealthy. So much of what becomes mainstream often comes from working-class groups. Fashion is one of our most prevalent forms of cultural exchange and language between different groups.”That conversation, he believes, should include everyone — though few have his roommate’s fluency in it.
Standard Bearer or Wearer?
Griffin Santopietro ’28, a Berkeley College sophomore and Gonzalez’s roommate, has a fondness for “Ivy style” immortalized by News ads. He’s an “Icon” for J. Press, the storied New Haven institution that has outfitted U.S. presidents and Nobel laureates in navy blazers and Shetland sweaters since 1903.
Griffin Santopietro Yale ’28 for the J. Press Icons campaign
Santopietro, who is also a writer, is originally from Maine. He’s now a Connecticuter but still sports Cappello’s “classic unaffected ruggedness.”
Last year, at the Yale-Harvard Game — which “Take Ivy” venerably calls “one of the world’s three biggest intercollegiate games” — Santopietro wore a waxed-cotton Barbour jacket, black leather gloves, a classic navy “Y” sweater and Japanese selvedge denim. He posted the photo with the aesthetics of a J. Press catalogue to Instagram and captioned it: “Harvard lost.”
Indeed, they did. But Santopietro’s outfit looked as though the football game was merely incidental.
He told me that he “didn’t want to be awkwardly formal,” and Santopietro’s classmate Saketh Sadhanala ’28, a student in Morse College, agreed. “I just don’t feel comfortable wearing something crazy,” he told me. “Instead, I prefer wearing normal staples with a little bit of a flair.”
Sadhanala told me his favorite thing in his closet is his Acne Studios 2021M. “They have a ‘personality’ that keeps me away from my other black pair of Levi’s.” Their “personality” is wide straight legs, a slight flare from the knee, a long length and a vintage wash for a heavily worn-in look.
Both men — and Gonzalez — agree about not making too big of a deal out of their clothing. Santopietro, specifically, resists letting “Ivy style” become doctrine. “There’s no reason to be didactic about it,” he said. “Not every day will be my best outfit, because there’s no reason for it to be. But I never want to end up in just sweatpants and a t-shirt. I want people to know I’m conscious of where I am.”
On the book’s limits, he arrived somewhere close to his roommate. “When you’re talking about this era … it’s very white, very male. What’s important is not to re-create that, but to take the style principles and modernize them.” For him, that means “dressed up but functional. The ‘Take Ivy’ men were the first generation that went into their dad’s closet to wear his old clothes.”
“But,” he quipped, “they’re all wearing them in a cooler way.”
Sadhanala told me: “We’re far less formal today than the past. ‘Ivy style,’ to me, isn’t ‘law’ but more of a place to draw inspiration. I balance expressing myself while nodding to tradition.”
Each of the three men — Sadhanala, Santopietro and Gonzalez — get noticed on campus for their style. But none of them take it too seriously.
It’s easy to imagine them flipping through pages of “Take Ivy,” sinking into a Berkeley-red sofa and dissolving into the kind of laughter that is somehow at their expense and in their favor. The culprit would be Hayashida’s section titled “Play hard…” which, with the matter-of-factness of the Yale Dress Code, observes:
“When with male friends, male students may go on drinking sprees, which although usually tempered, sometimes involve the students binging to the point of unconsciousness.”
“Take Ivy” endures as proof that beneath the fabrics and formalities, college life at the Ivy League has long been a precarious balance — between style, study and the stir of social hours. In 60 years, the more dated pretenses of social life have faded. But the best style conventions have stayed.
The 1965 Yale dress code guidelines are absolutely absurd on so many levels. No mention of khaki pants or V-neck sweaters — two essentials of the 1960’s collegiate style. I never saw a pair of pink socks on a male student during my entire time in college. I guess the “plain tow” loafers were in case you got drunk and had to be towed back to the dorm. And those cardigans definitely needed to be in an orthodox style. What alternate universe were they living in?
Those rules are an actual historical document, even if it contradicts our imagined view of how it was “supposed to be”. I also found a few odd things there (e.g. “a pair of black trousers”). Instead of “khakis”, they simply said “cotton trousers”. Apparently, plain white was the most preferred color.
I see time-travelling Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater 3000 is visiting mid-60s Princeton in the topmost interior photo. I’m a little bit heartened by how much of the look captured by Take Ivy survived into my time as an undergrad at Durham in the 2000s.
The plain toe blucher. The most under appreciated item in one’s closet, armoire, or foot-locker. Comfortable. Durable. Handsome. Quiet. Reliable. Sexy. Strong. Supportive. Versatile.
Last week, “Take Ivy” celebrated 60 years, and its legacy still stands in Philadelphia, Princeton, New York, New Haven, Providence, Cambridge, Ithaca, Hanover and every city between.Stripped of its endless accolades and enduring references, “Take Ivy” is a photo book. It was the first time “Ivy style” was methodically chronicled. Hayashida shot the images in the spring after traveling from Japan. The photos numbered in the tens of thousands, The New York Times later reported. Hayashida wanted to give curious Japanese readers — who appreciated rules and clarity — a better grasp of what seemed like a complicated code of Ivy League fashion.
The book includes “Yale University’s 20-Article Dress Code,” a set of guidelines published in 1965 for incoming first-year students. The guidelines reassured students they could “dress casually on campus, now that [they] spend most of [their] time in class or at the dormitory,” but also sternly advised wearing a sport jacket and tie on dates or to restaurants.In “Stalking the Wild Madras Wearers of the Ivy League,” American fashion and culture writer W. David Marx writes about student’s “Ivy style” captured by “Take Ivy.”“They’re dressed in the pinnacle of classic Ivy League style: madras cotton blazers, Oxford-cloth button-down shirts, khaki Bermuda shorts, and patinaed penny loafers, he writes.”
Marx, who studied at Harvard and now writes from Tokyo, offers a succinct explanation of “Take Ivy.” Effectively, he says, the book is “young American men strolling across quads, eating hot dogs and studying for finals in libraries.”The strolling and studying hasn’t changed. But the students have. Today, they’re half women and nearly one-tenth international. The Yale College students of the 1960s — almost entirely white, American men — are now less than one-fifth.
…“plain tow” loafers?
Coat and tie recommended for date night. I concur.
I miss the card catalogue.
Thanks for the contribution, Mr. Clifton.
This article is confusing.
The 1965 Yale dress code guidelines are absolutely absurd on so many levels. No mention of khaki pants or V-neck sweaters — two essentials of the 1960’s collegiate style. I never saw a pair of pink socks on a male student during my entire time in college. I guess the “plain tow” loafers were in case you got drunk and had to be towed back to the dorm. And those cardigans definitely needed to be in an orthodox style. What alternate universe were they living in?
Those rules are an actual historical document, even if it contradicts our imagined view of how it was “supposed to be”. I also found a few odd things there (e.g. “a pair of black trousers”). Instead of “khakis”, they simply said “cotton trousers”. Apparently, plain white was the most preferred color.
“Absolutely absurd”? Seems pretty anodyne to me. Plain “tow” is obviously a typo.
I see time-travelling Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater 3000 is visiting mid-60s Princeton in the topmost interior photo. I’m a little bit heartened by how much of the look captured by Take Ivy survived into my time as an undergrad at Durham in the 2000s.
I don’t know what to say. Hmmm, just not sure. Need a minute.
Oh yeah, nope, still got nothing
The plain toe blucher. The most under appreciated item in one’s closet, armoire, or foot-locker. Comfortable. Durable. Handsome. Quiet. Reliable. Sexy. Strong. Supportive. Versatile.
Couldn’t agree more. I have 3-4 pair in various shades and sole thicknesses.