Sartorially speaking, it’s a great time to be an Eli. First Gant returns to New Haven and resuscitates the Yale Co-Op label, and now J. Press is collaborating with Old Blue. What’s more, in a move completely out of left field (wait, which way is France?), Press has also unveiled a collaboration with French designer …
A few months ago we annouced the return of the Norman Hilton brand with a great new tweed sportcoat with natural shoulders, soft construction and a three-inch lapel. Now you get to see the jacket in action. I teamed up with Fred Castleberry of Unabashedly Prep and the guys at Prepidemic to create a Norman …
The Wall Street Journal offers a summary of the zeitgeist so far. Prediction: The topic will continue to generate buzz this year, but the buzz will end in 2012. Of course, everything is supposed to end in 2012. — CC
This fall/winter season Ivy and related references have multiplied at both Ralph Lauren and Rugby as vintage university style continues to be rediscovered by the fashion industry. Likewise, Ralph Lauren’s Fall 2010 in-store magazine features the image above, which has a vaguely “Take Ivy” vibe, combined with the car from “La Dolce Vita” and stately …
Erstwhile Ivy Style contributing writer and vintage Ivy collector Zachary DeLuca recently opened an Etsy shop under the name Newton Street Vintage. It’s amusing to think of DeLuca and Giuseppe of An Affordable Wardrobe, who also began selling online recently. Both live in Cambridge and thrift from the same wellsprings. It’s not hard to picture …
Muffy Aldrich of The Daily Prep has just put up a perspicacious analysis of 25 companies on her preppy radar. Included are many of Tradsville’s favorite clothiers: Brooks Brothers, J. Press, Ralph Lauren, Mercer & Sons, LL Bean, Alden and Bills Khakis. Aldrich plots them on a line with small handcrafted startups like Kiel James …
This week is menswear market week in New York, and so I headed over to the Warwick Hotel for the CTDA’s Designer Forum show. Here are some highlights.
Since 1909, Haspel has made its name as the leading purveyor of seersucker. But the company is currently expanding its offerings, some of which were on display at a recent trip to its New York showroom. What most caught my eye were a dozen natty tweed sportcoats that Haspel will be releasing in fall of …
Last month Gant returned to its New Haven birthplace with the new Campus Store at 268 York Street, right next to J. Press and a stone’s throw from Yale University. Gant’s return to New Haven drew much press attention for good reason: The brand, which is now owned by a European company and boasts stores …
Gradually I’ve come to the decision that the two most important characteristics in a sportcoat are natural shoulders and the right lapel width. Everything else — two or three buttons, darted or undarted, patch pockets or not — is negotiable. Things like lapped seams and hook vents are cool Ivy details, but are far outweighed …
GQ has dispatched photographer Gordon von Steiner to capture contemporary Princeton style (for an appreciation of vintage Tiger style, see our post “The Princetonians“). Unabashedly Prep‘s Fred Castleberry is one of the subjects. I recently recruited Fred to shoot for The Rake team and he’ll be heading up to Cambridge soon to take photos for …
The site will be quiet this week while I take my first road trip since moving to New York. I’m renting a car — let’s hope I remember how to operate it — and driving up to Cambridge on assignment for The Rake to profile The Andover Shop and its legendary founder, Charlie Davidson. In …
It’s never too early to plan your office Christmas party outfit. Suggestion: This patchwork tartan sportcoat by Orvis, which is presumably the same DS Dundee jacket we saw at the ENK menswear show back in January. Guaranteed to make you and everyone around you drink too much eggnog. — CC
Here are some news tidbits as well as things that have caught my eye recently. I recently visited the remodeled Ralph Lauren Rhinelander mansion and no surprise the elegance and style are absolutely suffocating (above photo by Michael Williams; check out the rest of his shots here). What a tactile experience: I don’t think there’s …
If you’ve ever wondered where my patronym comes from, the answer is Norway. My paternal grandfather came over in the ’30s and settled in San Francisco, where he married my grandmother, who had about the plainest English name imaginable: Betty Jane Smith. We’re one of only two Chensvold families in the US (the other is …
New video from the Brethren with tour of their Long Island City tie factory, just down the street from Ivy Style headquarters.
During the heyday of the Ivy League Look, Norman Hilton was a leading natural-shoulder brand sold at many campus shops and regional clothiers. Hilton was also Ralph Lauren’s first major investor, and made many of Lauren’s suits and sportcoats in the ’70s. His son Nick Hilton has continued the family tradition, running a clothing shop …
I love the message-in-a-bottle quality of the net. Send a note out and see what comes back. So on day three or so of tweeting — which is actually pretty fun — I hear about this new site Fuck Yeah Menswear, which runs “on point” stream-of-consciousness parodies of fashionable pretension. So on Friday I tweeted …
O’Connell’s is a big place. How big? Big enough for 26 tweed sportcoats to get lost for decades. Owner Ethan Huber recently discovered a stash of two dozen tweed sportcoats made shortly after the store opened in 1959. The jackets have all the Ivy details straight from the heyday: natural shoulders, three-button fronts, narrow lapels, …