The Ivy League of Gentlemen
Posted by a Contributor in November's Magazine
Give a bunch of young, attractive, talented, people a lot of money and you can expect trouble. Back in the day, Hollywood was paranoid about reprobate male film stars jeopardising the one thing held most dear in Tinseltown: return on investment. Bad PR (from bar room brawls to sports car speeding) could kill a movie’s prospects. The dream factories managed the stars’ egos and smoothed over the rough edges. On-screen, male stars might play gunslinger baddies or wisecracking gangsters but off-screen the stars had to be uber-respectable – or at least give that impression in their publicity shots.
When it came to respectability there was nothing more unassailable than the exclusive Ivy League universities of the eastern seaboard – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Pennsylvania. This was where New York bankers and Washington diplomats were educated and the universities have long had their own mores, ways of behaving and, most importantly, modes of dress (just think of off-duty JFK).
Woody Allen makeover
Hollywood wasn’t slow in co-opting Ivy League respectability for its own ends – as far back as the 1920s, ‘country club fashion’ graced the covers of the sometimes less than salubrious biographies of the new film stars. Right up to the 60s the look was powerful. Only readers of a certain age will now remember the original cult TV shows like The Man from UNCLE, Mission: Impossible, 77 Sunset Strip (TV’s first hour-long detective series) and The Fugitive. The clean-cut male stars always wore fabulous duds. Nowadays everyone seems content to slob around in trainers and low-rise joggles.
According to Alison Lurie in her classic book The Language of Clothes the Ivy League taste was ‘backward-looking in design and allowed very little scope for personal taste or imagination’. Ideal then for keeping wayward Hollywood stars in check. And two recent books – Hollywood and the Ivy Look and Icons of Men’s Style – look at classics of menswear before the advent of tatty, bumster jeans and ill-fitting hoodies.
The Ivy League style is timeless and seems to have always been with us. This autumn/winter men’s catwalk continues the Ivy tradition. The look – polo shirts, deck shoes, tweed blazers, Fair Isle jumpers, chinos, cable knit, narrow-lapel jackets, Argyll sweaters and socks, rugby and polo shirts (with the collars turned up), loafers worn without socks, button-down collars, flapping shirt tails, cut-off jeans, madras, seersucker and tartan – has been endlessly recycled. The likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren, Gant, Hollister, Jack Wills and Abercrombie and Fitch give classic looks a modern spin. Back in the late 1970s the ‘preppy’ look gave us designer labels partly because to be Ivy League you had to shop in the right stores and wear the right things.
In the decade between 1955 and 1965 a coterie of discerning Hollywood hipsters appropriated the Ivy League clothing. Hollywood elevated the ‘Joe College’ look to the height of cool and redefined a quintessentially American male dress code for a new generation: from the button-down hip of Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman and Anthony Perkins. Even Woody Allen was made over by Ralph Lauren.
Think of Dustin Hoffman’s look in the classic film The Graduate; the understated but carefully selected components of the Ivy League of gentlemen didn’t shout ‘look at me’ but instead gave off an image of approachable correctness and laid back confidence. It all goes to show that wearing the classic cuts and cloth of the Ivy League does not mean you need look like an upper-class twit. If the King of Cool, Steve McQueen, can carry it off ¬– draped over his E-type Jaguar in fetching crewneck and sports jacket – anyone can do it.
Buffed Warren Beatty
In Josh Sims’s exhaustive study Icons of Men’s Style there is a wealth of little-known sartorial information. For example that Ivy League speciality the button-down shirt was once the preserve of polo players.
Hollywood and The Ivy Look is beautifully illustrated with many unpublished photographs of some of the 20th century’s most iconic stars: Clint Eastwood in ribbed woollen sweater; James Coburn in seersucker suit and sunglasses; Robert Redford in black polo-neck and navy blazer; Sidney Poitier in green, striped jacket with red paisley tie and Warren Beatty in chinos and perfectly buffed loafers. All were worn with an ease which made even their Brylcreem quiffs look effortless.
Info: (All images from) Hollywood and the Ivy Look by Tony Nourmand & Graham Marsh published by Reel Art Press. Icons of Men’s Style by Josh Sims is published by Laurence King
Image Copywright: 1978DavidSutton/mptvimages.com