The look was at this point known as Ivy style. Press-in college towns and sections of department stores such as Sears. Campuses as far away as Stanford and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill developed their own variations on the look, driving demand for the “collegiate stores”-not all J. Press catalog became almost an encyclopedia of Ivy style, illustrating its fundamentals and informing readers of small modifications from year to year. Press shops in Ivy League towns, starting with New Haven in 1902. With the fastidiousness of an outsider and an obsessive eye for detail-the placement of a hook vent, the stitch of a lapel seam-Press painstakingly crafted his own version of the Brooks look. Though Brooks Brothers did sell apparel to Ivy League men, it was a Jewish clothier, Latvian immigrant Jacobi Press, who sensed the opportunity to market a distinct collegiate style, on campus and beyond. It was the ideal uniform for a new republic: accessible, respectable, and almost deliberately conformist. As American capitalism took shape and created a middle class, a Brooks Brothers suit-and its imitations-signified belonging therein. His sons took the business to a new level, opening a four-story “mirrored palace” on Broadway in 1857 and standardizing sizes and prices, which they promptly shipped nationwide through a growing wholesale business. Instead of hiring expensive male tailors, he hired women to sew standardized suit patterns cheaply and opened a shop on Catherine Street, where, all of a sudden, middle-class men could afford a smart suit. But when piles of fabric began to show up in New York City ports at a time when labor was in plentiful supply, a grocer named Henry Brooks took notice. Ready-made clothes meant secondhand clothes, which were a mark of poverty. Before then, people shopped for cloth rather than clothes, which they would sew into garments on their own or bring to a tailor. As Trufelman recounts, its story in the United States begins after the War of 1812, when a surfeit of British fabric enabled the rise of ready-made clothing for men. It poses most starkly a question that runs through all three works: Can a style apparently so steeped in elitism ever really serve as an equalizer-the ultimate neutral?įor all its appearance of casual refinement, “prep” comes from scrappy origins. Meanwhile, the documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch goes inside a 2004 discrimination lawsuit at one of the biggest purveyors of prep, examining a fight over who can lay claim to distressed Henley tees or tartan plaid. Like American Ivy, Maggie Bullock’s book The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew reveals the ways in which an unlikely range of figures has tried to expand the meaning of prep, in line with the whitening of American Jews, the growing presence of women in the corporate workforce (including, more slowly, the C-suite), and the dizzying transformations wrought by the rise of online shopping and fast fashion. Why in 2023, on a liberal arts campus in Greenwich Village, was it back?Īmerican Ivy is one of a recent spate of works, as sumptuous as a stack of cable-knit crewnecks, that trace the rise of prep, and attempt to make sense of the shifting aspirations that it has embodied in the past century or so. This apparently effortless style was the subject of diligent exposition, most famously in Lisa Birnbach’s surprise 1980 bestseller, The Official Preppy Handbook, but also in the catalogs that diffused the look and instructed in its attendant lifestyle in the 1980s and ’90s. For women, prep was cable-knit sweaters, rugby shirts, and sail-inspired anoraks. Adulthood didn’t mean aging out of preppiness, but switching between the bespoke blazers and Oxford shirts appropriate for careers in finance and law and the faded khakis and polo shirts suited to a weekend in Nantucket or Newport. Preppy style, or “prep,” was once the domain of affluent, white students, whose natural habitats were the leafy campuses of East Coast private schools until they ascended to the wood-paneled libraries and boathouses of Ivy League universities. “So vintage, so preppy, right?” a classmate with purple hair and a pierced septum affirmed. But in the 1990s, boys a thousand miles away in suburban Boston wore it with their Patagonia fleeces and plaid flannels, signaling a macho insouciance that unsubtly bumped up against new “P.C.” norms in liberal communities like ours. COCKS is the unsubtle phallic short name for the University of South Carolina’s football team, the Gamecocks. This exact cap had been popular 30 years earlier when I was in high school. The brim was frayed and worn, and the word COCKS was stitched in block letters across the front. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a student of mine wore an attention-grabbing baseball cap to class.
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