Southern Frat: The 1979 “Are You a Preppie?” Poster

Ivy-Style has just learned from a top-notch (and top drawer) source, who will be the subject of our next post, the identity of the creator of the late ’70s dorm-room poster “Are You a Preppie?” Long before he went on to helm such films as “Patch Adams,” “Ace Ventura” and “Liar, Liar,” Tom Shadyac created



Out With The Old

… and in with the new. Once again it’s been my pleasure and privilege to inform and entertain you for another year. And special thanks to all the wonderful contributors we’ve featured in 2017. Next year will mark Ivy Style’s 10th year, as we cruise towards 2,000 posts. Let’s all resolve to look, feel and


What A Pain: Anatomy Of The Angry Internet User — Updated

As the year comes to a close, here’s some food for thought from a piece that originally posted in 2012. I’ve spent most of this year doing deep self-work in the effort to become a better person, reading psychology, and watching hundreds of hours of lectures and documentaries, including New Age stuff on the vibrational


Reader Poll: How Ivy Are You?

This post from 2013 is a nice follow-up to yesterday’s essay from a novice who’d recently discovered the style — or at least the name and sources of what he’d long been drawn to. Alas the voting plugin no longer works, but there were nearly 100 comments the first go-round. * * * How Ivy


The Year I Found My Style

This young lawyer was a lost soul until he found his way to Ivy Style, the website and the clothing genre, and joined the online trad brotherhood. * * * Twenty-seventeen is the year I found my style. Prior to this year, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Although I am in a



Crewneck Over Club Tie And Other Forms Of Sacrilege

Over the course of nearly ten years, Ivy Style has received some 45,000 comments. According to a reader yesterday, the following is the best — what’s more, it’s the best comment on the entire Internet. I suppose it depends where your interests lie. Nevertheless, this lengthy comment in response to Charlottesville’s essay on the 500th


Searching For The P In WASP

At some point in the 1980s, I was working in Manhattan and overheard a conversation between two fellows from another borough discussing one of my business associates, whose unlikely given name was Win, possibly short for Winston. “Win? Who knows anybody named Win?” asked the first. The other guy noted that he had discovered this


Complete The Outfit

Here’s an Ivy Style reader busting out his polo coat with, he admitted, “lapels wide enough to land a plane on.” Note the timeless four-ingredient combo of polo coat, blazer, OCBD and Argyll & Sutherland tie, here rendered as a bow. Now how about what’s unseen: namely belt, trouser, sock and shoe? What should the


Dateline 1967: A Veritable Time-Lapse Of Dress And Grooming Change On Campus

A reader sent me these three photos illustrating the rapid change in dress and grooming on campus beginning in 1967. These shots are of our friends up north at the University of Alberta, and feature the same club seen over three academic years. Above is the year ’67-’68. Below, ’68-’69: And finally, with barbers and


Foot Of The Charles: Rowing Blazers Oars Pop-Up Shop Into Boston

As a longtime admirer of Jack Carlson’s “cryptic menswear brand” Rowing Blazers, I felt a pang of injustice when his New York pop-up emerged in October. When would Boston, the seat of the Head of the Charles itself, receive its turn? Turns out I didn’t have to wait too long. At the start of the


Family Guy: The Richard Press Interview

  Today, on the first day of Hanukkah 2017, we revisit one of Ivy Style’s top posts, CC’s 2011 interview with Richard Press, which was reprinted in the book accompanying the MFIT “Ivy Style” exhibit. Chag Sameach! * * * For years Richard Press would leave work at the J. Press store in New York


Festive Footwear

‘Tis the season for holiday parties, culminating in the biggest one of the year: New Year’s Eve. So if you’re the kind of die-hard insouciant prep who wears his everyday white (or pink) oxford buttondown with black tie, and who can’t bear to be shod in anything but penny loafers, Bass might have just the


A Handsome Gift Idea

J. Press just got in a pair of wonderful gifts for the Yalie in your life, with a nifty connection to Ivy Style. The artist — Deborah Fowler Greenwood — is the mother of our very own Millennial Fogey DCG! The prints feature the NYC Yale Club as well as mascot Handsome Dan, are part


The Man Who Brought Ivy To Japan

Since the 1960s, Japan has been an important part of the story of the Ivy League Look, and during a few dark periods the island nation has played an important role in preventing the style from possible extinction. Anyone interested in the Ivy-Japan connection will eventually encounter the name Kensuke Ishizu — perhaps on the


Golden Years: Sayonara To Old Nassau

Yesterday marked the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and so we revisit this relevant column from Richard Press that originally ran in 2012. * * * Jacobi Press opened his Princeton branch on Nassau Street in the mid-1930s and assigned my father regular checkups on the store. Lou Prager, founder of Chipp in 1947 with another


Big Bad John

Tomorrow the TV series “The Crown,” which chronicles the life of England’s Queen Elizabeth II, features JFK and Jackie in its new episode. But the British series will be presenting an image of the former president far less flattering than American audiences are accustomed to, according to media reports. Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A