GARMSVILLE

My Name Is?

Once classic American style had a name understood by all, and that name was Brooks Brothers, but not the Brooks Brothers you know today.
This was the Brooks Brothers long before the English and later Italian take-overs which were to change the company so much. This was the Brooks Brothers of the Number One natural shouldered undarted Sack Suit and the Number One or Number Ten striped tie with their copyrighted 'Polo' Buttondown collared shirt. A copyright which means that Ralph Lauren to this day can't call his Polo range of buttondowns "Polo Shirts".

Long before the terms "Ivy League" and "Preppy" were ever coined the American look was already set in stone by Brooks in their solitary department store in New York City, and from there and there alone all the rest followed, and all of this around the dawn of the 20th century - the century which was to be THE American century.
The Ivy League Look.

What's in a name? In marketing and branding terms, everything.  

Only in 1933 was the term "Ivy League" invented by the American sports writer Caswell Adams for the elite colleges of the North Eastern U.S. By 1954 the term was officially taken up by the colleges concerned... And in the meantime a lot of buttondown collared shirts had already been marketed and sold under that name. Far many more were to follow. The earliest advert I have seen using the term for shirts is from 1937. Business is business. Brooks thought very little of the term at the time, but had they known what was to follow they might have embraced it more. Today the stylistically correct term for the classic American style is The Ivy League Look. The Natural Shoulder Look also runs a close second. Basically it's Brooks, even when bought from the hundreds of other names who also sold "Ivy League" clothing. They all copied Brooks and made the look a mass-market hit.
Loafers, buttondowns, softly constructed tailoring.

Preppy.

But all booms must be followed by a bust. By at least 1967 the mass-market Ivy League look, paradoxically always sold with 'Elite' associations was, frankly, dead common. The Goddamn mailman was wearing it for Christsakes.  Far too ubiquitous and lacking in all cache. Tom Wolfe at the time equates the look to "wet smacks", not Masters Of The Universe. And so the look fell fallow...

... Until the inspiration of Jonathan Roberts (Gay!) with his editor Lisa Birnbach (Jewish!) created 'Preppy' in 1980 with their "Official Preppy Handbook"  - That jokey American Christmas gift book which stole so much from Peter York's earlier English 'Sloane Ranger' work in Harpers and Queen, but which yet got to publication before "The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook".
And so Ivy was re-invented. Re-imagined. Lightened, brightened and feminised in way which was just right for the times: Another mass-market mall-friendly fashion hit, still sold as being "The Clothes Of The Elite".  To our shame we laughed our heads off in London, but all secretly bought the book. Mine was flown in from Workman Press NYC by Hatchards, Piccadilly, as a special order. I hid it under some porn at home out of embarrassment...

So What?

And so, having made the observations above, you have to ask what it all means. Why does the popular perception of classic American style move from menswear in New York City to college student wear in little off-campus shops to preparatory schoolboy wear? Why the progressive infantilism with each new marketing incarnation?

The cute answer would be to wind this up by saying Search me Guv'nor - always such a good punchline. But the more truthful answer is just to raise your eyebrows and say... Business is business. And then to shrug and go about your own business.

As you were -


Mr Jimmy Frost Mellor.