{"id":1682,"date":"2013-06-26T09:40:15","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T16:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1682"},"modified":"2013-06-26T10:20:49","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T17:20:49","slug":"jeffrey-banks-and-gloria-de-la-chapelle-preppy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1682","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Banks and Doria de la Chapelle: Preppy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Most Americans I know hesitate to embrace all of \u201cAmerican culture.\u201d This makes sense, considering the broadness of any such umbrella, one that would have to cover a population of 300 million with origins across the entire world. So we pick and choose from this country\u2019s bulging social, political, cultural, and aesthetic grab bag, taking what we want and leaving (when not insistently repudiating) the rest. You might follow baseball but dismiss football, dream of your own car but not your own house, or hold one opinion about country music and its polar opposite about rap. This goes as well for the clothing styles we think of as distinctively American. To divide us, just start a debate about the influence of athletic wear on our national dress. The clothes of surfing, skating, and tennis, among other sports, have all since the Second World War greatly influenced everyday wear here\u00a0\u2014 not, I would think, to the approval of every Put This On reader.<\/p>\n

For a richer object of study, consider preppy, as Jeffrey Banks and Doria de la Chapelle do in\u00a0Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style<\/em>, which examines the eponymous style of dress from its origins in the twenties through its adaptive evolution in each subsequent era. But how to define it without pinning it down too squarely? The authors quote Dierdre Clemente in the\u00a0Journal of American Culture\u00a0<\/em>as astutely calling it an \u201cironic blend of rumpled and conservative.\u201d Preppy, at its most viable, strikes me a rakish hybrid of the primly traditional and insouciantly athletic. This sounds like the stuff of mere trend, but the book marshals a quote on the contrary from social critic John Sedgwick arguing that \u201cfashion has no place in the Ivy League wardrobe. The Ivy Leaguer is really buying an ethic in his clothing choices [ \u2026 ] a puritanical anti-fashion conviction that classic garments should continue in the contemporary wardrobe like a college\u2019s well-established and unquestioned curriculum.\u201d The doctrinaire preppy wears the correct navy blazer and khakis, naturally, but only when correctly weatherbeaten.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at Put This On<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most Americans I know hesitate to embrace all of \u201cAmerican culture.\u201d This makes sense, considering the broadness of any such umbrella, one that would have to cover a population of 300 million with origins across the entire world. So we pick and choose from this country\u2019s bulging social, political, cultural, and aesthetic grab bag, taking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-clothes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1682"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1686,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1682\/revisions\/1686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}