Tailoring style · United States
Ivy style
A campus uniform that became a national one, and is now better preserved in Tokyo than in Boston.
Ivy is the wardrobe that grew around the sack suit at American universities from the 1930s to the 1960s: soft-shouldered jackets, oxford-cloth button-down shirts, flat-front chinos, loafers and repp-striped ties. It has been continuously revived ever since, most seriously in Japan.
What it consists of
- A soft, undarted jacket with a natural shoulder, usually three-roll-two, often a tweed or a grey flannel.
- An oxford-cloth button-down shirt with an unlined collar that rolls rather than sitting flat.
- Flat-front trousers, frequently chinos, without pleats and with a plain hem.
- Penny loafers, or a plain-toe blucher; often worn without socks in summer, which was a genuine scandal at the time.
- A repp-striped or knitted tie, worn or not.
The Japanese preservation
Japanese labels and retailers have kept the idiom continuously in production since the 1960s, at times when American brands had abandoned it entirely, and Japanese scholarship on it is more thorough than anything produced in the United States.
Take Ivy, the 1965 photographic survey of American campus dress, is the canonical document and is a Japanese book.
Preserved abroad
The most careful documentation of Ivy dress is Japanese. Take Ivy, a 1965 photographic survey of American campuses made by a Japanese team, is the reference book, and Japanese labels have kept the idiom continuously in production for sixty years while American brands drifted away from it and back. That is the interesting part of the story: a style whose canonical text is a foreign anthropology project, and whose most faithful practitioners are eleven thousand kilometres from the campuses it records.
Why it survived
Because it was never a fashion in the ordinary sense. The sack suit's proportions do not depend on a fashionable waistline, the oxford button-down is a functional shirt, and the whole wardrobe was assembled from garments that already existed for other reasons. That is also why it recurs. There is no silhouette to date, so a 1962 photograph looks period only in its lapel width and its cloth.
At a glance
Sources
- Take Ivy, powerHouse Books (English edition), 2010.
Where a figure is disputed or a house has not published it, the page says so rather than choosing a number.
Picture credits 1
- Oxford shirt, repp tie, shetland and loafers: Original art · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale original art