#Black ivy lingr code#
“One may wonder if there is an unwritten dress code among Ivy Leaguers, businessmen, and executives since they are invariably dressed in the Ivy style.” Though the style matured, going from casual to more formal as students graduated and went on to begin their post-collegiate lives, it all remained Ivy-esque. “In order to entirely understand the spirit of ‘Ivy,’ you must appreciate and master all aspects of American East Coast culture,” the book reads.
Though its roots grow on those eight college campuses in New England, Ivy was the product of East Coast living, in general. The authors of Take Ivy go on to explain that the aesthetic extended far past college campuses, as graduates from Ivy League universities went on to start careers in New York City and Boston. There was an uncouthness about it all, yet students were still considered respectable and sophisticated, which came with attending an Ivy League school. “The university authority does not seem to be impressed with this, but it appeared to us that Ivy Leaguers feel no need to dress up for classes as long as they don’t look too scruffy,” the authors of Take Ivy, who traveled to these campuses from Japan to document Ivy style in its natural environment, explain in the book. Their campuses were a bubble, where the pressures of post-collegiate life didn’t yet exist and socks didn’t need to be worn with loafers. Students didn’t need to dress up too formally or put too much care into how they looked as long as it remained within their university’s unofficial dress code. In many ways, this style of dressing was a true marker of privilege. In Take Ivy, an Ivy style bible of sorts originally released in Japan in 1965, photos taken by Teruyoshi Hayashida on eight different Ivy League campuses display men sporting this hybrid look with the type of ease only someone who’s utterly carefree and unbothered can exude. But it took more than simply wearing Ivy-style pieces to master the look-true Ivyists understood that styling was at the center of the trend. As these institutions were still made up of mostly white students at the time, they became the demographic most often tied to Ivy style, which, in short, combined the effortless class of an Oxford button-down, loafers, and khaki pants (from brands still in operation today like Brooks Brothers and J.Press) with the sportswear associated with collegiate athletics. This stems in large part from its origins, which, as the name alludes to, are Ivy League universities. Such has been the case with Ivy style, an aesthetic that despite outfitting many of the most prominent Black figures in the Civil Rights Movement (within music, entertainment, education, and more in midcentury America) continues to this day to be thought of as a look primarily worn by the well-to-do white communities that settled in New England. This erasure is but a microcosm of the larger issue of racism that’s inherent in our society. Too often in America, however, the narratives surrounding the significance of certain styles derive only from a single lens-particularly, a white lens-thus leaving integral aspects of their lineage redacted or even erased in fashion’s history books and culture as a whole.
No matter the style, material, or silhouette, intentionality and deeper meaning will forever exist behind the guise of the garments we wear. As easy as it is to write off fashion as either frivolous or strictly utilitarian, clothing is and always has been more complicated than it appears.
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