When Charlie Davidson of The Andover Shop quips that Brooks Brothers today looks like “an Italian department store,” he knows whereof he speaks. He’s one of the few menswear professionals still around who’s known the brand since the late 1940s. I attended Brooks’ spring 2014 presentation last week. When it came time to craft a …
Last week US News & World Report declared Princeton the best college in the world (alas not for sartorial reasons). Yesterday Slate followed this up with an entertaining article on cocktails of the Ivy League.
Pictured above is a madras surprise from Brooks Brothers, seen last week at the company’s Spring 2014 preview. It’s a nice dark fabric with soft shoulders, partial lining, and a 3/2 button stance. What’s the surprise, besides the fact that it’s mid-September and you were expecting posts about tweed and flannel? Can you guess?
Ivy Style wraps up its recent series of posts on menswear rules with these thoughts from Richard Press, who is pictured at left with his uncle Irving, circa 1984. * * * How did personal taste and idiosyncrasy fit within J. Press offerings and customer consultations when the business was family owned? Here’s a precis …
Today Baracuta, maker of the iconic G9 jacket, announced it has drawn the zipper on a new website with ecommerce features as well as a generous dose of brand heritage. Baracuta was founded in England in 1937 and is currently owned by the Bologna-based company WP Lavori In Corso, which is currently planning a flagship …
As the warm days of the year gradually come to an end, we fondly put away the carefree items of summer. As a way of saying so long to the wild fabrics and whimsical embroideries of summer clothing, I’ve composed a little poem. Well, sort of. Today my Google vanity alert tipped me off to …
Hot on the Wisconsin-made heels of its new apparel collection, Allen Edmonds has just announced a new “webgem” offer. A limited number of shell cordovan shoes are being offered in a handsome shade of dark brown. There are four styles available, all of which are priced at $545. With a shade of brown this good-looking, …
Today Brooks Brothers unveiled a new ultra-high-end capsule collection called Natural Craftsmanship, along with marketing materials to support it. In the video above, posted on Brooks’ YouTube channel, a young man who was born rich models the clothing. How do we know he was born rich? Because he’s clearly not old enough to have graduated …
The concept of rules, which we’ve been exploring lately, is related to other approaches to dressing that certain men gravitate to. Some become obsessed with formulas for how items are coordinated. These formulas could be timeless or they could be trendy. Last month Alexander Aciman wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Succumbing …
In our last post we discussed Japan and the concept of menswear rules. Let’s pick up where we left off. Now I may have been a bit quick on the draw in the previous post, going off on a tirade about close-minded clothes-minded guys obsessed with dressing according to rules and formulas. The concept of …
It’s always fun flipping through the Japanese magazine Free & Easy and seeing all the botched English, such as “Made in trad.” Having spent a summer in Japan, I can assure you that nonsensical English used in advertising and the media provided hearty guffaws on the hour. But sometimes the Japanese are unintentionally perspicacious, as …
This morning we were alerted to a sportcoat made for Cary Grant in “Monkey Business” for the scene in which a youth serum gives the 48-year-old Grant the tastes and behavior of a college student. The jacket, currently for sale from a movie memorabilia company, did not make it into the film. It was made …
The other night I was browsing the streaming Netflix options and ended up watching “Monkey Business,” the 1952 screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe. I hadn’t seen the movie since starting this website, and a very interesting scene caught my attention. Grant plays a chemist who thinks he’s discovered a youth serum (which, …
While performing a Google Image search for some random terminology recently, I came across an illustration that caught my eye. It turned out to be from an artist named Joe Bowler who made his living in the ’50s and ’60s doing advertising and magazine illustrations. Quite a few have details that would interest us here, …
Frequent comment-leaver Old School alerted us to this 1966 Gant ad, which he’d found on the web but didn’t think had been tumblred to death. The ad copy attests to correctness of Gant’s oxford buttondowns, including its “casual roll of the collar.”
This week GH Bass & Co. took a big leap into fashion relevance with a new ecommerce site and Weejun-focused marketing campaign called “Power To The Penny.”
Japanese photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida (林田照慶), who created legendary photo book “Take Ivy” as well as follow-ups “The Ivy” and “Take 8 Ivy,” died on August 8 after a battle with cancer. He was just 15 days shy of his 83rd birthday. Hayashida was born in Tokyo in 1930, studying political economics at Meiji University. After …
Lately we’ve been talking about the year 1954 as an arbitrary starting point for the Ivy heyday. Both LIFE Magazine and Playboy ran big stories on the look that year, and Miles Davis is believed to have first donned Ivy duds about that time, serving as an example of the many guys who would become …
Last week the website Cool Material asked me to contribute to its “Wear This” series and pull together an outfit based on stuff currently on retail shelves. The result is illustrative of how I’ve been dressing lately: a foundation of traditional items spiced with stylish accessories that give off — to me, at least — …