Lookin’ Good: New Bruce Boyer Video Interview

Recently Pedro Mendes of The Hogtown Rake cohosted an event for G. Bruce Boyer held at LeatherFoot Emporium in Toronto, Canada. If Mendes sounds familiar, that’s because we featured him here on Ivy Style for the high-rise/tapered leg custom trousers he had made, which were inspired by our ill-fated project with Bills Khakis. Mendes has



Vintage Norman Hilton Advertisements

Our recent post called “Pucker Up” featured a vintage ad by Norman Hilton. Always inspiring for showing an elegant and sophisticated take on the natural-shoulder look, here’s a gallery of vintage ads we ran in 2012, with new images added. — CC


Intern Dress Code, 1987

Today Ivy Style Facebook group member and comment-leaver Marc Chevalier, known for his extensive collection of historical menswear images, dug up this shot of Wall Street interns in 1987, the age of Gordon Gekko. The timing was perfect. Those of you who consume a lot of news no doubt saw a story last week that


Pucker Up

Pucker up, and we’re not talking to your oxford cloth. Today is International Kissing Day, and somehow we feel that a kiss in this vintage Norman Hilton ad is inevitable.* — CC * Despite what you may have seen in old movies, always ask permission before kissing someone.



Damned Dapper: The Origins of the Go-To-Hell Look

On this July The Fourth we go back to 2010 to revisit this lengthy dive into the origins and practices of the quintessentially American go-to-hell look. * * * The following article is actually the first one The Rake assigned me, but it was held for several issues while they waited for new spring clothes


Slipping Into Something More Comfortable

Today, on the long Fourth Of July weekend, I went looking for something to repost from Ivy Style’s first summer in 2009. I found this, which seemed apropos for everyone celebrating sockless. * * * This is the second in our efforts to digitize the work of G. Bruce Boyer, whose many fine articles on


Ratio Unveils Longer-Point Buttondown, Club Collar Options

Ratio Clothing, which offers custom-fit shirts made at a certain factory in Garland, North Carolina, yesterday introduced a longer-point buttondown collar option. Named the Fitzgerald model, the collar features points that measure 3.5 inches. Reads the description: We consider ourselves to be OCBD aficionados here at Ratio, and designed our Fitzgerald Button-Down to be the



J. Crew Opens Prep Shoppe For The Season

Is J. Crew testing the summer waters in contemplation of a return to its preppier roots? The brand’s origins lie in a capitalizing on the preppy ’80s by offering a mail-order version of Ralph Lauren at a lower price. And throughout the ’90s and early aughts J. Crew — like those other Js, Press and


Confessions Of An ’80s Europrep

Growing up in 1980s Berlin, then a city with lots of “cool” but very little elegance, I caused quite a stir when I came to school in my new pink Lacoste shirt. What struck people as curious was not only the color of the shirt, unavailable for boys at the time, but also the color


J. Press And The Universal Elegance Of Ivy League Style

J. Press has produced a really cool new catalog for summer 2016. Why cool? Because it was produced in Japan and translated into English. That means it really plays up the heritage of the Ivy League Look, as well as offering that ever-curious glimpse into our national style from the point of view of outsiders


My Kinda Clothes: Al Castiel III

Eight years ago, when I first interviewed Charlie Davidson of The Andover Shop about dressing Miles Davis, he used a simple but delightful phrase “my kinda clothes.” The phrase stuck with me and now, after all these years, I’m finally employing it as a new recurring feature. “My Kinda Clothes” will give Ivy Style readers


Their Favorite Things

When my sister and I were kids, our parents encouraged an appreciation of the great American musicals. They enrolled us in dance classes, and when “The Sound Of Music” would air on TV, it was one of the rare times when they would let us stay up late with school the next day. They also


Hamptons Style, 1959

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


True Prep: Pink Shirts And Pork Rinds

As a follow-up to our birthday post on George HW Bush, we present this 1988 newspaper column by writer Calvin Trillin, who recently caused an uproar of outrage with his New Yorker poem on Chinese cuisine. Here he takes on the peculiarities of the WASP diet. It was sent to Ivy Style by reader CW,


Happy 92nd To Our Preppiest Prez

Funny, both candidates in the current presidential race are Ivy League… Maybe finally we know the difference between Ivy and preppy: you can have an Ivy degree and be anything but prep. Happy birthday to GHWB, a true American sartorial patriot. — CC     


Southern Revival: Can Sid Mashburn Popularize The Undarted Jacket?

GQ has just launched a new magazine called GQ Style, which features an extensive profile on Sid Mashburn. If you don’t know a lot about him, Mashburn worked at Ralph Lauren for a spell and has been considered a tastemaker since opening his eponymous store in Atlanta (it helps that his wife used to work