When J. Crew The executive team announced the appointment of its new menswear designer, Brendon Babenzien, who is now heroically tasked with rescuing the brand from irrelevance, the company borrowing from the lingo of innovation-obsessed Silicon Valley. “We have to disrupt the business,” one CEO told the Wall Street Journal. His choice of words could imply that if they failed, a second bankruptcy could quickly wipe them out.
There was a time when J. Crew was king. When millions of devoted customers fished out of their letterboxes their monthly catalogs carefully sketched in an aspirational and approachable way, how to dress – relaxed and casual, with an Oxford shirt always at hand – and how to live – on the East Coast, preferably by the sea . He sold a life and a style originally based on the school fashions of the British aristocracy. Now it was hiring the former head of billion-dollar skate brand Supreme, of all things, to revamp its lost factor. That might seem like bad business for an American prep purveyor (a culture better characterized by rowers in cashmere sweaters than skateboarders in five-panel hats) if it weren’t for how dramatically the style has strayed from its roots of late. of the 19th century.
Brendon Babenzien was recently hired by J. Crew.Hand-out/Handout
The preparation was old and insular and, it must be said, surprisingly white, full of the buttoned-down tastes of an old-fashioned WASP high society concerned with keeping it uniform. But its latest revival – on the runways of Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Grace Wales Bonner, store shelves at Nordstrom and Uniqlo and its relaunches gossip Girl – is now a glorious free-for-all. Anyone can wear it however they want.
However, an elegant order preceded today’s chaos. “The rules were not explicitly codified,” said Lisa Birnbach, who codified them in 1980 with The Official Preppy Handbook“but it was how our fathers dressed, how our older brothers dressed and how our parents dressed us, because no one had imagination.”
Birnbach was born on New York’s leafy Upper East Side, the city’s most affluent neighborhood, to a father who imported diamonds and a mother who worked at the Jewish Museum. She grew up wearing Brooks Brothers, Shetland sweaters, pink pearl necklaces – clothes that showed a benign, conservative attitude and an ambivalence towards loud displays of wealth. “It’s a look that got you through doors that might otherwise be locked,” he said, “because you look like you’re not a troublemaker.”
Not looking like a “troublemaker” (a loaded euphemism in the tradition of “civic” and “thinker”) was actually integral to the design. The whole point was to show that you belonged to an upwardly mobile class of citizens for whom Ivy League admissions were a kind of fundamental right. And that birthright also gave you the ability to dress like you don’t care. On a 1947 visit to Vassar College, where young women were taking cues from Ivy League boys, Simone de Beauvoir noted the “studied carelessness” of style—how shirt sleeves were left undone, jeans were cuffed, and jeans, Letterman jackets were paired with skirts.
Andy Warhol with his paintings on December 15, 1980. Hulton Archive/iStockPhoto/Getty Images
“There has always been the inherent contradiction that American colleges adopted the style to show off their independence, individuality, and achievement, but that basically everyone dressed the same on campus,” says Rebecca C. Tuite, a Vassar graduate and the author of Seven Sisters style. Prep tended to level any gesture toward personal style with a full-body expression of collective identity.
By the time Birnbach published The Official Preppy Handbookwhich sold more than a million copies and featured a single black face over the course of 114 illustrated pages, the preppy began to merge into a national American character, having an ambition that led Ralph Lauren to sew a polo player on a shirt, then say , “I don’t design clothes, I design dreams.”
And the dream for many gay men at that time was, by the way, not to appear gay at all. Newspaper headlines in the 1980s roared with the death toll from an AIDS epidemic, and homophobia was state-sanctioned, with violence rising against queer people as the Reagan administration gloated about a “gay plague.”
Birnbach had written the manual as an affectionate satire, but many gay men took it as advice on how to pass as straight. (“Sex roles for men and women are well-defined,” the book says, “and while a little eccentricity may be frowned upon in matters of comedy, deviation from the sexual norm is absolutely taboo.”) Even Andy Warhol, a great appreciative of how he constructs and manipulates himself, he used conditioning to erase his femininity, covering Breton striped shirts, Brooks Brothers knits tied around his shoulders, and a crew cut he groomed daily—a kind of meticulously accomplished straight drag.
Miles Davis.Michael Cuscuna/Mosaic Records
“But what’s not convenient for people to recognize today is that the style only looks cool because it was adopted by black radicals in the 1940s,” says British menswear critic Jason Jules. In Black Ivy: A Revolt in Stylecharts a visual history of how black civil rights leaders, intellectuals, jazz musicians, and visual artists all took the style and enchanted it, at the height of the civil rights movement.
Thelonious Monk wore it with fur hats, cone hats, madras hats. James Baldwin in glasses and a fur coat. Miles Davis in a “hip, almost black English look”, with Brooks Brothers suits, high collars and sunglasses. (Amiri Baraka’s 1964 Obie Award-winning play Dutch features a white woman who, before stabbing him twice in the heart, asks a well-dressed black man on a train: “What right do you have to wear a three-button suit and a striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard.)
The black avant-garde sought to define itself, rather than be defined by racist stereotypes, with an ostentatious, intellectual sophistication. “It is often wrongly argued that black men appropriated this style out of a desire to be white, stemming from a deep sense of inferiority,” writes Jules. “In fact, the urge to wear these clothes was largely due to a desire to show that equality that had been so cruelly denied them in other ways. … Getting society to treat them differently meant getting the mainstream to see them differently first. And they did.”
Tyler, The Creator attends the Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2022/2023 show during Paris Fashion Week on January 20. Pascal Le Segretain/iStockPhoto/Getty Images
It’s hard to understand the enduring relevance of the style today without considering the influence of the black aesthetic. Ivy’s style didn’t “disrupt” until she emerged on the other side of a century defined by a map of dynamic subcultures, from jazz, punk and grunge to skate and hip hop. It didn’t become cool, in other words, until the “rioters” wore it. Tommy Hilfiger, like preppy style in general, wasn’t originally intended for black American musicians, but it wasn’t until Snoop Dogg, Destiny’s Child and Aaliyah hung up their Tommy Jeans that the brand began its cultural rise.
More recently, consider Kanye West’s well-documented love affair with the Polo shirt or Tyler the Creator in a cricket sweater and tweed suit. “There are people realizing today that these supposed rules are not really rules, but ideas and limitations that people follow when they don’t know how to express their personal style,” says Jules. “Ivy’s style was once an expression of the status quo. But now we have people taking a classically aristocratic language and making it their own.”
As prepping makes its umpteenth renaissance in fashion, there is an effort on the part of brands to interpret it with more flexibility than once offered. That’s why Ralph Lauren released a collection earlier this spring that honored the style at Morehouse and Spelman colleges, institutions known as part of the Black Ivy League. This is why Lisa Birnbach revised the manual in the 2010s Real preparation, to repudiate statements about “sex roles” and correct the whiteness of the pages and explain the 30 years of “disruption” that bridged the old and new worlds. That’s why J. Crew hired as its new menswear designer the former creative director of a skate brand that ushered in a new generation of stylish teenage prepsters.
Basically, preparation is dead.
In other words: long live the future of preparation.
3 ways to prepare your library
Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style by Jason Jules: A visual feast documenting how Black culture discovered and subverted the Ivy League look True Prep by Lisa Birnbach: The author of the cult style guide of the 1980s, The Official Preppy Handbookit evolves the original narrative and embraces the new disruption of world preparation. Seven Sisters Style by Rebecca C. Tuite: The Vassar graduate and fashion historian reveals how women and women’s colleges shaped the evolution of the prep look for themselves. The Globe has five arts and lifestyle newsletters: Health & Wellness, Parenting & Relationships, Sightseer, Nestruck on Theater and What to Watch. Sign up today.
