A Ralph Lauren polo shirt. A college jacket. Khaki pants and loafers. Is this clothing business casual? Date night outfit? Is this a “preppy” look? As it happens, the answer is pretty much all of the above, and that’s because they share a common fashion ancestor: Ivy.
Based on the mid-century clothing worn on Ivy League campuses, Ivy is a fashion trend that has stood the test of time. In her podcast, “Features: American Ivy,” journalist Avery Trufelman traces the global history of the Ivy look, from its roots at Princeton University to its modern iterations by brands like Uniqlo.
Trufelman spoke with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about Ivy and her current legacy. The following is a transcript of their conversation.
Avery Trufelman: Ivy was a super goofy clothing phenomenon in the mid-20th century. And over time, it evolved into what in the ’70s and ’80s was called “preppy style,” and what I stand for now has almost no name. I mean, as menswear writer Derek Guy says on the show, you know, a button-down collared shirt is just a shirt. Khaki pants are just pants. But once, this was all part of a style known as Ivy.
Kai Ryssdal: Okay, this is going to be a bit meta here, but this whole season is, and like I said before we turned on the mics, I don’t know exactly what this interview was going to be like, so I need to stop here. for a minute and talk about this idea that you talk about in the first episode of this season about trends, because that’s what’s happened here. Ivy was a thing, it became a trend, and now it’s, correct me if I’m wrong, ubiquitous in what we wear.
Trufelman: Yeah, I think if you want to wear something to a job interview, if you want to look good on a date night, this is a standard clothing style. You know, if we really trace back where this comes from, it comes from the Princeton campus, and it comes from Brooks Brothers. And once it was very much about looking white, looking rich and looking masculine. But this is where the study of trends comes in. In the 20th century, we went from wanting to look rich to wanting to look great. And the strange thing about this is that preppy clothing has changed with all these trends. If you follow it through the 20th century, it really says a lot about the state of American desire in this fascinating way.
Ryssdal: Which is really interesting, because the roots of what we see now as Ivy started in Japan.
Trufelman: Oh yeah. Ivy was exported to Japan by this guy named Kensuke Ishizu. And it really kickstarted the contemporary fashion industry in Japan, and Japanese brands started making American clothes better than American companies. And this is seen in very specialized Japanese brands such as Evisu and Kapital, but above all Uniqlo. If you look closely, it’s really doing an iteration of mid-century American preppy, which they then exported and sold to us. And we love it!
Interior of a Uniqlo store in Washington, DC (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Ryssdal: We make. But about this idea that we love it and trends grow and become everything everywhere at the same time, without mixing my media, if you’ve seen the movie, someone in one of your episodes says something about trends that’s so corrosive. it is that they are capitalized so much because all this is a business and you have to earn money. And that’s kind of why and how this happens.
Trufelman: It is why and how this happens. But I really believe that tendencies are, to some extent, innate in human nature. And yes, I think capitalism can corrupt them, just like capitalism can corrupt love, you know, for Hallmark Valentines. And I think at the same time, the Ivy look, the preppy look, the basic look, whatever you want to call it, has been driven by trends over the decades. Oddly enough, it’s also a way to resist trends. And one person I interviewed said, “You know, it’s great, because it’s very, very dumb.” And you look at pictures of how Miles Davis wearing button down shirts looking so cool.
Miles Davis looking good in a button-down collared shirt, as pictured in 1959. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Ryssdal: It looks so good.
Trufelman: I mean, it looks so good. It’s like, the best way to be cool is to wear silly clothes and take them off. I think now we’re seeing a comeback of the Ivy look, you know, I know the pandemic isn’t over, but as we’re getting out of our pods and looking around, the simplest thing you can always come back to is make sure you rock one acceptable baseline is ivy. It is a trend that also resists fashion.
Ryssdal: We’re all going back to mean, right?
Trufelman: Yes, in a way.
Ryssdal: This throws us out of order chronologically, but the kids of the ’70s and ’80s won’t forgive me if I don’t mention Ralph Lauren’s name here.
Trufelman: Oh, Ralph Lauren is a big part of the story. I mean, Ralph Lauren started working at Brooks Brothers. He was a salesman when he was about 20 years old for a year. And he had an idea of what the style was, but he realized [the clothes] they were somewhat square. And he was like, what if I take this look and make it a little bit body conscious, make it a little fancy? And he did that. He made an updated version of Ivy and really called into the preppy era by introducing the polo shirt to the Ivy clothing canon. And one of my favorite fun facts is that what we now call a polo shirt was actually a tennis shirt. He invented it a tennis player. And now we call it after the Ralph Lauren company, we call it after a different sport, which I think is a lot of fun.
Ryssdal: By the end of this podcast, you come clean a little. And you say, you know, you’ve always considered yourself an outsider in this Ivy thing, but you looked around a little bit and found that you were actually in and out of it. And I guess I wonder, can the rest of us, can we walk away from that if we wanted to?
Trufelman: I mean, it’s such an interesting thing, right? Because these clothes are closely linked to notions of class. And, yeah, I really had a reckoning at the end, which is, you know, I went to high school. And I really didn’t like this style, because I didn’t like what the private education system that I was a part of represented. And, you know, my theory that I have on that is that Ivy’s clothing represents everything that Ivy’s own institutions are not: it’s a relatively affordable and accessible look, which is really open to a lot of people. And it’s so powerful. I mean, that’s why, you know, the far right was wearing khakis and polo shirts at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017. It’s because this was a look that communicated openness and kindness and, you know, kind of Somehow they took that power from Ivy’s clothes and perverted it. But that’s the fascinating thing about these clothes. They really do have a power that is open to everyone, including me, and I realized that instead of just denying it or trying to walk away from it, maybe I should accept it.
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