You're Wrong About - Where Have All the Preppies Gone? with Avery Trufelman

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Put on your Docksiders for a stroll through history with Avery Trufelman, who shows us how Ivy style became “preppy,” and how preppy fashion escaped the campus and took over the world. We’re talking about clothing, class, race, and the American dream: you may be through with the polo shirt, but the polo shirt isn’t through with you.Here's where to find Avery:Articles of Interest on SubstackArticles of Interest podcastSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/https://www.articlesofinterest.co/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Tucker Carlson looks like an evil little boy in a horror movie from the 70s, doesn't he? ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we have Avery Truffleman as our special guest. Today we ask the question, where have all the preppies gone?

An extremely topical reference to a polychol song, which I'm sure is on all of your minds. And we were talking today about how an aesthetic that once was or at least seemed to be a hyper-specific marker of class, race, and privilege has now become something we hardly even notice. And it may seem like it's disappeared, but in fact escapes discourse simply

because it has become ubiquitous. I loved having Avery on the show. I've enjoyed her work and podcasting since before I made podcasts. And she's one of my inspirations for getting into doing this at all. And it was so wonderful to talk with her about something that she has clearly become

deeply obsessed with. And there's nothing I love more than being told about somebody's obsession with footnotes. If you wanna support the show, you can do it on Patreon or Apple Plus subscriptions. And we are coming out with a bonus episode where I talk to Carolyn, our wonderful producer, about the making of Fleetwood Max rumors.

And we've got some cute shirts and stuff on T-Public as well. I've heard that people are shopping lately. I don't know why, but if you wanna do that, that's one of your options. Thank you so much for being with us. Here's our episode. Welcome to You're Wrong About,

the podcast where I have a little cold. It's not COVID. I'm gonna be here forever. Don't worry about it. And with me today is Avery Truffleman, podcasting legend, dare I say it. It's such an honor. This is so cool.

This is so fun to have you on here. Tell us about who you are and what you do. And then we'll go on our wonderful cable knit journey together. Yeah, I'm a podcaster for the last year or so. I've been working on this podcast that I make about fashion called Articles of Interest. In the past episodes have each been about one thing,

like what's the history of plaid or what's the history of knockoffs? You know, just like one, that's why it's called Articles of Interest. Like each one's like article of clothing. And I was gonna do one episode about the topic we're gonna talk about today. And then I was like, wait, no,

this requires its own thing. So I've made like a seven episode series about preppy clothes. And I'm convinced it's the great American fashion story. I'm excited. I wanted to start by telling you my perceptions of like preppiness, preppy clothes. Cause when I first heard from you about doing this idea,

I was like, I mean, I really like it. Like I would love to do it, but like, is there enough material there? And then we had a conversation about it. And I was like, oh my God, it's about everything. I have to say on it, like at cocktail parties and people are like, what are you working on? I'm always gonna be like, hear me out.

It's about preppy clothes. And I think they're a style of clothes. Well, first of all, they look boring. They look like there's nothing to them. And also everyone has so much baggage around it. Whether you're like, I hate it or I'm embarrassed that I used to wear it or I don't know, people are like, ugh.

It's kind of a deterrent. What are your associations? I'm gonna start in a place, I bet you were kind of expecting Ted Bundy. And the thing about Ted Bundy I've always thought is not that he was like great looking because like just look at him, but that he was like incredibly white

and that he was like both born very white and then was like inhabiting and enacting this like much greater degree of whiteness in order to make victims trust in him. Because famously he would like, walk around wearing tennis whites. And it's like, you been playing tennis, Ted? That's the insidious power of these clothes.

Like, you know, the members of the back then alt-right marching in Charlottesville, they're all wearing polo shirts with their tiki torches. And they were trying to look approachable. They were trying to be like, come on, join us. We're not that scary, they say, marching with tiki torches. Come on down to the BMW dealership and talk about white supremacy

and how Jews will not replace us. Come on down. We're nice. 100%. We just are, you know, white supremacist and fine with the Holocaust. 100%, but that's the, and that's why like Tucker Carlson is wearing the most impeccable preppy uniform.

Tucker Carlson looks like an evil little boy in a horror movie from the 70s, doesn't he? It didn't occur to me before, but he really does. But that, and that's the thing. It's always like masking the same thing. Like they're saying these wild, bombastic things with this uniform, or like in Ted Bundy's case, doing these awful things with this uniform

of like presentability, looking like a rational, normal, friendly white neighbor. I would also submit that guy in St. Louis who came out onto his porch of his mansion with, I'm gonna get it wrong, I always get guns wrong, with a giant gun, because protesters were going by his yard. Wearing a Brooks Brothers polo.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So we have Ted Bundy, Charlottesville Nazis, say hello to my little husband, and to that I'm going to add James Spader in Pretty in Pink. Yes, yes, yes. The preppy handbook, which is a book whose history

we will get into if you haven't heard of it. And yeah, I think that establishes us pretty well. And to speak of actual clothing, what I think of are like cable knits, pearl earrings, intentionally slightly unraveled hems and edges of things. LL bean of course, especially the bean boot. I would argue puffy vests, down vests even are in there

if you're in like Mayan or something. Totally. The Patagonia, the canon of what preppy is like constantly expanding to, you know, like I would say Patagonia vests are preppy, but that's like a recent addition to the canon. Right. So it's not like old school preppy,

but it's new school preppy. And also that it's an aesthetic, and this is maybe the thing I find most intriguing that like people had such a clear grasp of for a period and was such a socially dominant idea, and that now we don't talk about. Now there's all these other words for like areas of fashion or kind of mood

that intersect with preppiness. Like I think dark academia is one, and I don't know any of the others, but it's like a term that has vanished from the zeitgeist. And yet, as you're already pointing out, clearly like the thing itself has gone nowhere. So that's the interesting thing. In the series I was talking with the writer,

Todd Levin, we were talking about Charlottesville and the preppy look that was used in Charlottesville. And he was saying, you know, that group of people was then called the alt right, and that is not a word you hear anymore because that is what the right has become. Like it was so successful that you don't need the word anymore.

And I would argue that is what's happened with preppy itself because it is so ubiquitous that we don't need the word. And if anything, those kinds of clothes are just considered basics or classics. Like if you go into any Uniqlo and you really like look at it, like really look at what they have on the mannequins, it's preppy.

Like in the 80s, someone would have been like, that's a preppy look. And now it's just like a baseline thing. And I guess to speak of the polo shirt, it's the shirt of say hello to my little husband. It's the shirt of like camp counselors and pool, snack bar staff. And to me, most significantly,

it's the shirt that my mom wore like practically every day of my childhood because she was a doctor in like a sort of like business casual setting. And she didn't feel like dressing particularly feminine. And I think that a polo shirt was like as close as anyone can get to like wearing nothing of any description at all. Yes, yes.

I have no idea where this could begin. I feel like you could say like 1940 or 1552. Really, really, really. I think where the story begins is in 1818 in the United States with the birth of a store that would eventually become known as Brooks Brothers. And it all starts with a merchant named Henry Brooks in downtown New York.

And this is the funny thing. I really thought in researching preppy clothes, I'd be going out to like Kenna Bunkport to interview people named Biffy all the time. But it really, it's like a very New York story. It is a super New York story. Basically, Henry Brooks runs a grocery store in downtown New York on Catherine Street.

He works by the docks. So the British and the US were enemies in the war of 1812. They were still getting over that whole American revolution thing. Tensions were high. And what they functionally do is like a prank. Before America started enslaving people in the South to grow our cotton, we bought all our fabrics from England.

And obviously in the war of 1812, we weren't buying any fabrics from England because they were the enemy. And basically after the war ends, England was functionally like, all right, let's mess with them. Let's just dump all of our unused fabric in the port. And it backfires.

Wow, that's great. I don't know what they would have expected to happen from this, but people like Henry Brooks see all this fabric pile up in the port. And they're like, oh, this is interesting. I mean, it's important to note at this time, you don't go shopping for clothes.

Like that's not something that happens unless you're poor. What people aspire to go shopping for around this time is cloth. Like you go shopping for cloth, and then you sew it up yourself or you take it to a tailor. Like clothes are made for your body. And if you are buying already made clothes,

you're buying them like second hand from like a rag distributor. It's not anything cool. It's not anything to be proud of. They probably are really ill fitting. That's for like the poorest people in society. I love how we think of ourselves as like living in this time of great privilege fashion-wise

and having all these choices. And I bet like people from the 1850s would be like scandalized and embarrassed for us. That like, look, I'm just wearing this rag from an A&M on the freeway. That's just like some cloth. Like, ugh. I have been told that the hallmarks of modern fashion

is that nothing actually fits. We have two modes of fit, which is oversized or stretchy. And that's the only way that clothes actually fit us now. Yeah, which is also like nice to remember when you feel like none of your clothes fit. It's like, yeah, cause they don't.

Yeah, they don't. They're not supposed to. Yeah, so Henry Brooks sees all this fabric pile up. And this is a moment very notoriously in New York where the population of the city, you know, this is the early 1800s, like New York's really getting going. The population is doubling all the time.

There's so much access to labor. He and a bunch of other merchants take advantage of all this cloth that is piled up in the ports of New York. And they're like, what if we got people to just draw patterns and then women can sew this stuff up at home? And this is different from like a tailor used to be sort of a venerated artisan.

And this is like, yeah, we'll just give it to these women and they'll sew it up with their children or whatever. And then you can have new decent quality ready to wear clothes. Is this the moment at which the sweatshop was invented? I mean, I can't, I don't know that definitively, but it is this kind of landmark moment in the mass production and the commodification of labor.

Also is this like deeply American thing. And so at first this is really for like people who work by the docks, people who never thought they'd have a suit and now they can buy one ready made. At this point, the word democracy is sort of a dirty word. It's almost like how socialism is now. People are like, could this even work?

It's not like it was a dirty word in the States. It was more like it was a dirty word in Europe. People are like, oh my God, you know, our petulant colonial children want to go off and start this democracy, this full democratic government. Let's see if they can pull this off. European diplomats were always coming to the US to be like, let's see how this experiment is doing.

And by the 1840s, it was this very famous cliche that they would always write back. Like, oh my God, everybody in America dresses so well. It was this huge advertisement for what democracy was capable of doing. And actually, I mean, an interesting thing is that in New York, it provided a lot of class anxiety because the poor people weren't in rags,

the rich people weren't in jewels and wigs. Everyone was sort of in these ready-made suits. So everyone is sort of wearing this uniform. This like, Benjamin Franklin called it our happy mediocrity. Everyone is sort of, it's a democracy. We're not copying the fashions of a monarch. We're all trying to look like each other.

There's no ready-made clothes for women. That doesn't happen until the late 18th century. Brooks Brothers, again, it was like one of many clothing companies that started making mass-produced clothes in America, but it's the only one that's still around. Over 200 years old, it has clothed 40 out of 46 presidents. But the reason they did it was it was such a powerful statement that like, oh my God, the most powerful man

in the nation dresses the same as like the small town merchants and the con men. And these mass-produced clothes were able to be shipped all over the United States. So you could get people in like small towns also wearing Brooks Brothers suits. So it was this incredible emblem of everything that is wrong and fascinating

and interesting about democracy and our idea of democratic dress. Yeah. And is it fair to say that Brooks Brothers started off as forever 21 for stevedores? I would say so. I love that. They should be proud.

Sores like Brooks Brothers and their contemporaries sort of created the modern shopping experience, especially once Brooks Brothers started making high-end mass-produced clothes in 1850. This is the first time you'd like go to a store for entertainment and walk out with something. You know, you used to be like, oh, I guess I gotta get some clothes and you like touch a bunch of fabrics

and you like get measured and you're like, I guess I'll pick these up later. But it was the first time that you could sort of go in and be like, who do I want to be? And you could like try on different clothes and like walk out of the store with something. Yeah. Like shopping as an activity sort of happens around

this time and that's like America. Right. So you're listening to like John Philip's Susan music or something. That crazy new fangirl, sousaphone racket. A lot of people be like, oh, preppy clothes began in the UK. But I think it really, really begins as this like very American thing with the start of Brooks Brothers.

Which I think is just fascinating because it shows, you know, if you buy that argument, which I do, that preppiness has always been about American class mobility that like there's no original that anyone's trying to copy. Yes. We're all just doing copies. Yes, yes, yes.

We're all supposed to like look towards each other. So I couldn't nail an exact date on this, but Brooks Brothers eventually makes the turn to making what we would now call preppy clothes. But back then the style was called Ivy. It was like the Ivy look. And that really came from Princeton University. That really came from the fact that Princeton

is this tiny homogenous, and it has these things called eating clubs here. It's not regulated by the university. So it was like these privileged young Anglican men hanging out together and sort of developing this new style separate from everything else and separate from their parents. And most of what that style entailed was like kind of a version of what you see college students doing

today, which is like wearing their sports clothes all the time. Right, athleisure, invented by Caledon Hawkely. It's kind of arguably a precursor to athleisure. And they're wearing a lot of, like the Oxford button down shirt started as something that polo players in England would wear to like keep their collars from flopping up

while they rode horses. And a lot of these clothes were adapted and manufactured by Brooks Brothers. Students on Princeton were wearing this sort of new sporty look. Magazines were writing about it. It was known as this thing like, oh, the style on the campus of Princeton was very popular

in like the 1930s. And that's very like tweed pants and like a, you know, this like collegiate young man look. The look starts to expand when admission to college starts to expand, which is obviously like the GI Bill. We must know who's really in college. Yeah, this is when khakis get introduced

because khakis are military surplus clothes. This is when like veterans are coming to college campuses and they're wearing elements of their military issued uniforms. And the preppy kids are like, oh, you know, the kids who actually went to preparatory high school are like, oh, those are cool pants. Students at women's colleges were dressing

in this way that was arguably sort of androgynous, but that was kind of okay when you were in school. And then obviously, you know, when you graduated, you had to become a secretary and like get back into dresses. And then at Morehouse and Spelman, people were wearing Ivy clothes too. It was becoming this look of like black students, women's students, the middle class.

It started really, really spreading. And the fascinating thing is like the old boys at Princeton still kept it, which goes against everything we think about trend proliferation. Like if everybody has it, it's no longer distinctive and it's no longer cool. And then the fascinating thing is there are all these

Jewish tailors that make this super waspy, preppy, elitist look. And they've been doing this for a long time. They like started doing it in 1902. Yeah, since like the early 1900s, I talked to this very preppy brand called Jay Press. And they were like, oh yeah, all the tailors, you know, Jewish tailors figured out how to really make this look

something that could extend beyond Brooks Brothers to everyone. So like 1940s to 1950s, the look is sort of everywhere. And why do you think that is like personally? I talked to this author, Jason Jules, who wrote this great book called Black Ivy Revolt and Style.

And what he talked about was the role specifically that black activists and jazz musicians had in helping the look spread. Because if you look at Miles Davis, he's wearing preppy clothes. He's wearing like an Oxford button down collared shirt, like John Coltrane. Like these musicians look impossibly, impossibly cool.

And so there was this version of Black Ivy that was just a variation on what the Princeton students were doing. And these black jazz musicians would tour notoriously around Europe and sort of spread this look around and became sort of the accidental ambassadors. So like, hey, look how awesome, how relevant this American look continues to be.

As it expanded, the style only got more interesting. You know, like middle class veterans brought in the khakis and women brought in this element of androgyny. Every time people took on this look, they kind of only made it more interesting. So while I'm sure there was some grumbling at the Eden Club of like they're stealing our stuff, I want to believe that there was actually some like

interest and intrigue and delight in the way that this is happening, which is kind of fascinating as a fashion trend. And this actually is an example of something succeeding in the marketplace of ideas. And yeah, it feels like it's both like pretty basic. And by I just mean like literally basic and... Nice.

And also very capacious, right? Like it's like very simple rules, but then it's like a grilled cheese sandwich. Like you can make 1000 kinds of grilled cheese sandwich because they'll all be a grilled cheese sandwich. Yes, yes. Obviously the look goes away in the 60s. So you can see this most notably at the 1968 Olympics

in Mexico City when Tommy Smith and John Carlos very famously like raised the black power fist on the podium. You're seeing fashions change in real time because in some photos of them, they're wearing this sort of ivy look. They're wearing like a button down shirt. And then at other moments, they're wearing like leather jackets and beads.

And it's like changes in the air. A lot of historians chalk this up to the deaths of Martin Luther King and JFK and RFK and this sort of disillusionment with the happy mediocrity that Benjamin Franklin once advocated for. This idea that like to do our best in the society in America, we all have to like work really hard to fit in. That's suddenly not working anymore.

Suddenly there's this new era of rebellion. And one of the things that happened in the 50s was this revolution in management theory where this MIT professor realized that the way people were told to go to work was like a system of sticks and carrots. Basically like you should go to work and you're gonna be heavily observed

and rated, assessed for maximum productivity. And he was like, this is clearly making people miserable. Jack Lemon in the apartment. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, there are all these movies about like all the 50s malaise. And so he called that theory X of management. And he was like, what if there was a new form of management?

And he called it theory Y. This was known as the creative revolution where it's like, what if we encouraged people and like encouraged workers to work because they feel fulfilled, you know, less supervision and more, this is kind of setting the seeds for madmen. Like the creativity of your work should fulfill you. What this means is that as much as we like to think

that the establishment, you know, the men in the gray flannel suits were like upset by the counterculture in the 60s, the creative hip young ad executives were all in on the creative revolution. They love this idea. They were like rock on. This is so, they see the counterculture

and they were like, this is great. Let's lean into this. And this is when you get all these advertisements like the 1960s Pepsi campaign that was like, it's for the Pepsi generation. Like everything I saw was very like groovy and young and cool in this very mainstream way. There's this huge revolution that youth equals cool

in the 1960s. Like if you look at pictures of college students in the 1950s, they just look older. Because looking older and more mature was like the way you were taken seriously. And in the 60s, it flips and people like, I want to look young. So there's this huge advertising revolution.

And then part of that is this fashion revolution called the Peacock revolution. And this is part of why you see people in the 60s and 70s wearing outlandish clothes, just dressing ridiculously, especially men. They're wearing like high heels and they're wearing Nehru collars and frilly collars and poochy patterns.

I think of men wearing like sort of like Jeremiah Johnson outfits, like just like leather and fringe and like full Western Daniel Boone kind of thing. Totally. And this is like the beginning of retro fashion. Basically the fashion industry is like, okay, let's just crank out as many looks as we possibly can. Which is really hard to do.

And so what they do is they go back in time. Like the easiest thing you can do is borrow from the past. So if you look at the 60s, it's just like all eras get revived, all simultaneous. It's like Victorian era, Duartean era, like Western fashion, like bam, bam, bam. It's just all happening all at once. It's so funny to think of that happening then

because I feel like that's what fashion is today in many ways. It's, you know, and we're doing like Y2K stuff and everything. But thinking about being revivalist about fashion at a time when like, you're like, I don't know, let's do the Victorian era. It's like, what? No, if you look at Yellow Submarine, it's like a Duartean, like-

Yeah, and now that you say that, I'm like, yeah, that's what John Lennon kind of looked like for a while there. Totally. All these hippies who want to dress like Bob Cratchit. Yes, yeah. So basically it becomes this confusing flurry. And it comes on sort of so hard and so fast that it makes trends themselves seem like one giant trend.

Like, oh my God, I wasn't like, all this fashion is happening now. And so the easiest return is back to preppy clothes. There we go. They're back. But this time it comes with a twist because most notably in the 1960s, it is revived by a man named Ralph Lauren. Hi, Ralph Lauren.

And so Ralph Lauren, you know, is like this Jewish guy from the Bronx who dropped out of community college or city college, he went to Baruch. Well, he was first and foremost very inspired by the movies. He was very inspired by Fred Astaire and these like Hollywood style icons. And because of that, when he was about 20 years old,

he works for a year at Brooks Brothers. And that's where he learns about this like casual, elegant, ivy style. And functionally, young Ralph Lauren, he was born Ralph Lifshitz, but he changed his name in high school. Like he's been Ralph Lauren for his whole life. I like the idea of doing that,

like before you can do it legally, you're like 16 years old and you're like, I'm Ralph Lauren. I'm not Lauren. And some people speculate it's like because of the movies, like Lauren Bacall or something. I think there's something very dreamy about it, like this little kid who just loves film. First name, boy name, last name, girl name.

In the 1960s, when everything is in fashion all at the same time, and it's this like confusing retro blur, preppy is like this breath of fresh air. People are so amped on it. And so when Ralph Lauren comes out with these preppy clothes, basically what he does is he mixes Hollywood style and Brooks Brothers style.

He's like, what if we took these preppy clothes and made them like tighter and sexier and people love it. People eat it up. They're like, I'm so sick of all these fashions, all these wild retro fashions. I like the simple style. And you can slowly see it ramping up all throughout the 70s.

Like in 1974, Ralph Lauren does the costumes for the movie, The Great Gatsby. And then you have this rash of movies that take place just before Kennedy was assassinated. You have like Animal House and American Graffiti. Yeah, Laverning Shirley, yeah. And so everything that you're saying, this idea of like, oh, wasn't it cool

to be just like a simple young teenager before the world got so complicated? It's like a premise of almost every movie, or not every, but like all these huge movies in the 70s. And of so much fashion, like it's so funny to me that like Y2K fashion is in, cause like, I don't know, it's just funny. Like it made sense to me when we were doing like

fashion waves based on stuff I wasn't already an adolescent for, but now I'm like, oh, but it makes total sense. You're just like, remember when you just had your dealiest catalog and your biggest worry was Y2K? I've been thinking about this a lot because I was just watching this talk that Arun Dadi Roy gave in like 2003.

And it really reminded me what an awful time that was. You know, it's so like fashion is literal nostalgia. When all you look at are like the crop tops and the flip phones, you're like, fun. But then I was like, oh, right. We didn't know why we were in Iraq. Like the government was lying to us. And there was all this enforced nationalism.

And it was like really scary. There was a really awful time. Yeah. Maybe the truth that's hiding behind that is that like times are often equally awful in their own way because people are awful in consistent ways. Like there's a consistent thread or, you know, in terms of what America is like, yeah,

the time around the Iraq war, like the beginning of it and the like weapons of mass destruction, allegedly was like this time of great, either you are actively avoiding the truth that is as clear as, you know, the nose on your face or you're not a patriot and you're actually like a traitor. Yes. And also like there was a great mainstream embrace of that too.

I mean, for all of the like grief that we give the Twitter discourse now, at least there is a discourse. For a little while. Yeah. Our discourse was Alan Jackson's songs. So Ralph Lauren. I had never thought about Ralph Lauren before.

Ralph Lauren is just so ubiquitous. I looked in my closet. I was like, oh, I guess I have Ralph Lauren stuff. I don't even remember buying it. It was never anything I sought out. It was just there. It just wanders in. I know him of course as Rachel Greensboss.

Oh, right. And he was in that, right? Yeah, at least once. They had a Ralph Lauren cameo, but that was like the great, like the pilgrims progress of Rachel Green ends at Ralph Lauren. Yes. You know, because she like, she comes to New York.

She wants to work in fashion and boy is it a gradual crawl to Ralph Lauren. Yes. Which is like, yes, our girl has made it. I think what Ralph Lauren has done is functionally up there with Steve Jobs. I was talking to a contemporary of Ralph's and other men's wear designer.

And he was saying, you know, at the time we were both coming up, the way that people found out about new designers was through department stores, was through like, functionally in New York, the way you learned about a new designer was Bloomingdale's. And if you were a designer selling your wares at Bloomingdale's, they would put your shirts

in the shirt section and your pants in the pants section and your socks in the socks section. And Ralph was really the first. I was like, can you put all my clothes together? Because this is all like part of a world. And so they carved out a section of the ground floor. Ralph Lauren has this famous quote that was like, I don't do shoulders, I do worlds.

And what he means is like, you don't come to me for the tailoring. It's not about like, oh, check out, I have these buttons and these shoulders. He was inspired first and foremost by the movies. The whole thing is like, come into my world. And he showed it in these ads that looked like film stills and they were everywhere.

These like multi-page spreads and you go into his store and you can see how all the clothes fit together. And even now if you go to his flagship store, it's like Epcot, you know, he's got like the preppy wing and the safari wing and the Western wing. It's like the world of Ralph Lauren. It's this, you know, what we hear now and it's so ubiquitous like lifestyle marketing.

God, yeah. It's FAO shorts for adult men. Yeah. He was a pioneer of lifestyle marketing. Yeah. And you know, also in these ads, he's like showing you the full context. It's not just about the clothes,

but it's about, you know, driving in your car with your beautiful blonde children or, you know, being on a ski lift with your handsome fiancee. Like he shows you the full context of where these clothes supposedly belong. And he sold this image and it was just like, it was ascendant.

So like the seventies into the eighties, there's like the slow boil of all these nostalgic movies and Ralph Lauren is on the ascent. And then the way that I like to say it is like, it had a long fuse and then the match was really lit in 1980 by the preppy handbook. And the word preppy has been around at least since the 1930s,

but that wasn't like a widespread word because most people didn't know like that world of preparatory high schools that look like tiny colleges. That is so elite. How would anybody know that that's a derogatory term? But it was brought into the mainstream consciousness by this movie in 1970 called Love Story. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

What can you say about a 25 year old girl who died? Beautiful. Yes. Love Story. Love Story, which apparently popularized the name Jenny. What? According to this story and I talked to you, and if you look on like whatever, Wikipedia,

it was like, it was a hugely popular movie and it popularized the name Jenny. And there's this moment where Jenny is like, get your own library preppy and is ridiculing, you know, her handsome boyfriend played by Ryan O'Neill. She ridicules him for being a preppy and that catapults the word into common parlance. And also it should be said around 1972

is the moment when Ralph Lauren introduces the polo shirt. Yeah. And this is when preppy style starts to emerge as something different from like collegiate Ivy style. So the actual original polo shirt was invented by Jean-René Lacoste, a tennis player in France in 1927. Oh my God, it's a person. It's a person.

My guy named Lacoste. His nickname was the crocodile. And I forget why, there are like a few reasons. Some were like, cause he had a big nose and others were like, it was his playing style. But whatever, Jean-René Lacoste was called the crocodile. And you used to play tennis in long sleeve dress shirts. And he was like, what if we didn't?

And he invents the short sleeve knit sport shirt. And it was pretty much used for tennis. And it was really rare. It was like hard to get in the States if you were going to Europe. You know, I talked to someone who was like, oh yeah, I remember going in the 1960s, we'll be like, can you bring back a Lacoste shirt?

And then in the 70s, 71, 72, I forget. Ralph Lauren basically makes a version of it. And it's so interesting cause Ralph Lauren's company is called Polo. Like it's named after this sport that you have to be super rich to play cause you need multiple horses. And what the Polo shirt actually is, is a tennis shirt.

It's like a shirt for playing tennis, but we call it the Polo shirt because that's the name of the company. So it's like the wrong sport, but that's what we call it. That never occurred to me. Right, cause like, who even knows what you wear to play Polo? You can't go play Polo at the park on a whim.

Right, right. And so, and now it's just become a brand, you know, it's become like Kleenex, like we call the style basically after this brand. So, but this is all sort of like tacitly brewing throughout the 70s until in 1980, this woman who was working for the Village Voice goes to this publisher

because she has an idea for a joke book. She wants to publish a book of light bulb jokes. Like, you know, how many X does it take to screw in a light bulb? Oh, wow. And they're like, actually we have another idea for you. Do you want to make something called the Preppy Manual? And it almost feels like the discourse around Preppy

is sort of like how early aughts like hipsters were. It's like, ha, ha, we all love to laugh at them. Yeah, like no one will admit to being one, but we all make fun of them, right? Cause like the funny thing about hipsters is that like, I don't really think there have ever been any self-identified hipsters. It's always what some other guy is doing.

There's always a mustache bigger than yours. Totally, totally. Although I have to say, I was like very proud of being a hipster. I was like, we have a movement. Oh, good. I bought something. No, but totally, it was totally like a derogatory thing.

And I think this writer for the Village Voice went to a prep school. She was another Jewish New Yorker, went to an Ivy League school, sort of understood that she was this thing, that she was a preppy. And she thought it was just funny. You know, it was like a joke.

She laughed about it. And when Powerhouse Books was like, do you want to write the preppy manual? They gave her 10 weeks to write it and like $7,000. And she was really young. She had just graduated. And she was like, I'm gonna write the best book I can. Her name's Lisa Bernbach.

And she went on to do an anthropological study of what her friends in prep school and in her Ivy League school, and not only what they wore, but really like the underlying philosophies of how preppy people think and shop and learn. Like she really, her whole thing was she was like, well, this is mostly gonna be read

by my peers and my contemporaries who go to Loomis Chafee and all these prep schools. So I have to make it right. I have to be like really, really, really, really accurate. She turned in the book two weeks late. So it was like a 12 week dash. She wrote this book. And they really didn't think it was gonna be any,

they thought it was like a coffee table book. And their big hit that year was supposed to be this book that they were writing called How to Make, what is it, How to Make Funny Noises with Your Mouth or something to that effect. They were not expecting this to be anything. And then it sells 2.3 million copies. It's like this runaway, runaway, runaway success.

I had no idea it was that successful. That's incredible. It was huge. It launched all these other copycats. There was like the Jewish American Princess Ham book, the Valley Girl Ham, but like all these handbooks. And it also launched all of these books like Paul Fussell's class about like,

what is social class in America, right? This thing that we had been ignoring since the Brooks Brothers Democratic Revolution. I'm like, no, no, no, we're all the same. And if you look at ads in the 80s, all of them are like, you have the privilege to use this credit card, you know? In the 80s, there's suddenly this idea,

like in the 60s when you were told to buy things to prove how youthful and rebellious and free you are, in the 80s it was like, prove that you are high class and that you have moral worth. My like kind of example of what the 80s or at least early 90s felt like in advertising is the fancy fees commercials that Lauren Bacall did. No.

And it was also important in helping to de-stigmatize like commercial voiceover work for celebrities. So that's exciting. And the voiceover was always good taste is easy to recognize. Oh my God. You know, it's like even your cat, you know, I'm being a little bit silly by saying this, but it's true. Even your cat is a class signifier.

No, no, no, it is, it is, it is, no, Sarah, you nailed it. Like the subtext of the preppy handbook is it was this reveal to mainstream America. They were like suddenly getting all these, these glimpses at how the elite or at least the upper middle class, you know, not the astronomically gajillionaire, gajillionaire, what Paul Fussell calls out of sight wealth,

but what the upper middle class, how they live. And it pulled back the curtain on this world of class signifiers that like, oh my God, people are noticing what brand of shoes I wear or like how I tie my tie or whether I not, where a belt or like what watch brand I have that this is all saying something and that it all matters. You know, the funny thing is like the preppy handbook

is ostensibly a joke. It's like a joke book and class by Paul Fussell is also supposed to be like a joke book because America's like, ha ha ha, we don't really have class, but like if we did, or like, you know, it's like this dry look because if you actually talk about it seriously, it's quite upsetting.

But Paul Fussell has all these things that's like not smoking at all is very upper middle class, but if you call attention to it, that drops one to middle class immediately. And that like upper middle class people name their cats like Clitamnestra or like Doseevsky, that everything you do, even including your cat and your cat food,

like everything is this marker of class. And we see that at the same year that the preppy handbook comes out, we see that manifested also in the election of one of the two presidents who don't wear Brooks Brothers, which is Ronald Reagan. Whoa, I would not have guessed that.

I would have guessed Carter. He was the other one, Sarah. He was the other one. But as you can imagine, they do it for opposite reasons because Brooks Brothers is supposed to be like, traditionally like the mass produced cloth of the people. And Carter is like almost too modest, even for Brooks Brothers.

His whole thing is he's like, he doesn't wear Brooks Brothers. He wears flannel shirts and he wears, just started off the rack suit, even for his inauguration, for like the time you're supposed to be fanciest. He's like almost too humble. Yeah, very Mr. Smith goes to Washington.

Totally. And like America isn't having it. He's like, well, we should all close gas stations on Sundays and America's like, no, absolutely not. Like we don't want this level of humility. And so the next president they elect, he's like the closest America gets to aristocracy, which is a celebrity.

And he does not wear Brooks Brothers because he is above Brooks Brothers. He has like custom suits from Hollywood. Of course. You need a custom suit when you're crushing unions. Off the rack won't do. Exactly. And so it all ties up with this idea

like Reagan's whole idea of trickle down economics is like, well, if you're a wealthy person, you're a moral person, you know? Like you've worked hard and you don't need to be regulated with taxes. Like you can be counted on to share it by letting it trickle down. And so this idea of class and money

gets really equated with like, yeah, moral worth. And how do you prove that you have moral worth, that you're dependable and that you're trustworthy? It's like through these class signifiers. And all of this just makes preppy stuff take off. And at the same time, so many people are getting into business school and trying to enter the professional sphere.

And this gets back to your mom. Like women are sort of entering the professions for the first time. There's this really significant thing that happens in the 80s where like women start wearing modest professional clothes in part because they're following the rules set by John T. Maloy in Dress for Success

and his companion book that he wrote for women. Oh my. So they go adopt like a practical uniform. And so they do that and preppy clothes sort of fit right into that. And then there's this really interesting thing that happens in the 80s where the fashion machine keeps chugging.

They're like, oh cool, that like preppy androgyny thing that we were trying, that was like a fun thing. But let's do, they call it fru fru, like mini skirts and like big shoulder pads and corsets. They're like, yeah. And you can see it, they're like pushing it on TV. In ads, all the manufacturers like Liz Claiborne paused production on some skirts to have them shortened.

Everyone gets on board with this fru fru thing and the consumer for the first time ever is like, no. Absolutely not. Like, I'm not gonna do that. They just didn't buy it. They're like Miranda being invited to do Adelingus. I'm not gonna do that. I don't wanna do that.

No, exactly. They're like, no, they had jobs, they had lives. They're like, fuck you. I'm not gonna wear like a mini skirt. I'm a professional now. Well, I feel like there's like in that kind of design and culture, there's this like tacit concept of like, don't dress sexy or the boss will grab you.

And like in reality, your boss will kind of grab you no matter how you look. If they're the grabbing kind, I would submit. And we should all be able to dress as sexy or not as we wish to. Totally. But I feel like that's part of the like unspoken contract of that fashion as well.

Well, really, it's this moment where the consumer is like, no, you give me what I want. Like the designer is not gonna dictate to me anymore. Like I want to choose to follow fashion as much or as little as I want. And this is when brands start flipping out. And this is when like the trend forecasting industry really grows in the 80s.

Cause brands are like, oh my God, like how do we give the consumers what they want? And then from that point on in the 80s, the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky says that modern fashion has these three phases. One is up until the 1960s when it becomes about being youthful. And then the next change is in the 80s

when the consumer sort of decides what they want. And it means they're like multiple competing trends all at once, starting in the 80s. And it also means that the easiest, safest bet for clothing manufacturers, for like mainstream clothing manufacturers is just to make boring stuff. Is just make like simple conservative clothes.

And some version of preppy fit right into that so much so that like 1983 is the year that a company called Popular Merchandise Inc. rebrands and becomes J Crew. It just becomes like a very safe bedrock for any company to pin themselves to. It's like, oh, this preppy stuff. Yeah.

It's so hard to figure out who is and isn't a person because I would have said that J Crew was like some kind of oil magnate safari guy from Connecticut who got into clothes in the 1920s and started off making think hunting gear. Right. But no. Right.

Yeah. So the 80s really becomes this moment where like we get multiple trends. The consumer is fully in control. And so preppiness becomes standard. And the interesting thing is then like into the 90s we see preppy fork off in two distinct directions which one is like business casual.

You know, people start just wearing this like Bill Gates is wearing a polo shirt and khakis all the time. And then the other thing we see is Ralph Lauren is on the ascent forever and ever. And you see this rival emerge in the form of Tommy Hilfiger. And there was this movement of foot

where kids in Brooklyn would take the train into Manhattan and go to boutiques and like steal stuff and develop this incredible sense of style like started putting clothes together in a totally new way. And it was sort of the origins of what we would eventually call street style like pairing something expensive with something cheap.

There were these groups of these like shoplifter societies called like Ralphies kids or the low lives like named low like Ralph Lauren who like loved Ralph Lauren. They thought Ralph was so cool. And they were functionally wearing preppy clothes in a really different way. Like in the preppy handbook,

the stuff was all sort of like falling apart and like rolled up and disheveled but they were wearing it in this like clean, fresh. Like that's the whole thing is like in hip hop style it has to be like really, really, really clean and like different sizing. Like it's a bit baggier. And it's this whole new way of wearing preppy clothes

that Tommy Hilfiger leaned all the way into. He was like, yes, this is the move and started making like street wear based off of preppy clothes. And so for a while there's this like toe to toe rivalry with Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren. And the interesting thing is that like Tommy Hilfiger embraces in a very active way hip hop artists way before its mainstream in his shows

like Sean Combs is modeling in his shows. He's really embracing. And it should be said that like Tommy Hilfiger grows up as like this working class guy. He grew up around people with a lot of different races. This is like he hired people of color at all levels of his company. He wasn't just like throwing this on.

Like he really believed in this and his brother worked in lighting in music. And so their marketing campaign is they would like give away Tommy Hilfiger clothes to artists. And they were like, sure enough, someday someone famous is gonna wear one of our stuff, one of our things. And it happens in 1994 Snoop Dogg performs on SNL

wearing a shirt that says Tommy on it. And they blow up like that's their big moment. Wow. And there's this interesting parallel here between like the jazz musicians doing their version of Ivy and like hip hop artists doing their version of preppy. Again, it's not like they're trying to look white. They're like taking a sample, they're changing it.

And again, they just like make this look so cool. If Ralph Lauren took like updated Brooks Brothers street wear updates Ralph Lauren and Fat Farm, you know, all these brands, all these street wear brands start by looking at Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. You know, like this is a huge Genesis point for this movement. And then also in the nineties,

Abercrombie and Fitch gets its rebrand in 1992 and like Vineyard Vine starts in 1998. Like it just grows and grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. And then there's this whole other thread happening this whole time that we haven't even talked about. This whole time while this whole American saga has been going on, Japan has been observing it

and functionally imitate it and deliver it back to us in the form of Uniqlo. Which starts in 1985. The look was mass manufactured by Jewish people. It was made relevant by black musicians and it was perfected and modernized by Japanese companies. I mean, it's like pasta. Like you can just put anything on it.

It's so accessible and legible. Like you don't have to explain whatever. If you're wearing like a button-down shirt and a blazer, it's like a very friendly look. And that's exactly why it gets exploited by like the fascists in Charlottesville and Tucker Carlson. And that's the insidious part of its power,

but it also has something beautiful about it. But like it is sort of accessible to anyone. And it's one of the kind of like magic talismans in American life where like it's as close as you can come to being nondescript. You're not necessarily claiming to have greater class status than you do. But you're also not being marked as like low class

or untrustworthy by anything you have on. Yes, that is so well put. And like the more we pretend that we don't have, you know, those beliefs in this country, like I feel like the stronger they get. Yes. Right. And then like the other,

like the question that I still have in all of this is like do the clothes actually matter, right? Like if clothes are semiotic, if clothes mean something, but this style of clothing has really become so like available and so everywhere. Yeah, as you said, sort of like nondescript while actual inequity,

an actual class difference is like this gaping chasm. Then like what does it mean anymore? I don't know. Yeah. One of the things, the fashion things that I've enjoyed in the past couple of years is that, okay, so like typically, if you're a late night host, you wear a suit.

It's just always been that way. It's like kind of been grandfathered at that point. It's kind of weird when you think about it, whatever. And then we have these lockdown shows and Seth Meyers never wore a suit again. Like came back to the studio, I think has audiences now, and just like gave up on the suit.

He wears a blue chambray shirt a lot of the time. Like he's running a grocery store in Nantucket. Yes, yes. Why the suits? And it's just like a little like corner that got peeled away and it feels like, are we now in the era of the late night show host in the chambray shirt?

Like I would like that. And that's also a very preppy moment. It's casual, but it's preppy. It's not like disrespectful towards your audience. It's not like- But like, no, but I feel like that's the key. Like that is the thing that preppy did. Like preppy is sort of the seed

that eventually killed the suit, you know? Like the men on the campus of Princeton developed this so they wouldn't have to wear a suit, you know? And then like people wearing business casual in the 90s turned to this look so they wouldn't have to wear a suit. And we're now like finally, finally, finally seeing it come to full fruition,

but it's been brewing for a very long time. I think that when this episode comes out, we need to like get pictures of ourselves in polo shirts to celebrate it. Do you have, do you engage with the look now? I historically loathe polo shirts because I went to a school that had uniforms when I was in elementary school and middle school

and it was a polo shirt every day for five years. And I guess associate polo shirts with wearing a school uniform as I assume a lot of people do if they ever had to wear one because that's also like such a classic school uniform component for all the reasons we've been talking about this whole time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I feel like this intersects also with the concept of norm core. Oh, a thousand percent. And I feel like from the beginning, it's been exemplified by like, you know, what Jerry Seinfeld wore on Seinfeld just the whole time, just all of Seinfeld. Very sexually confident guy wearing, you know,

that really baggy, yeah. Because, you know, like an aqua mock turtleneck and like really high cut light wash jeans and giant sneakers, just like, yep, gonna have some sex today. One of the things I find most intriguing about all this is that when we started talking about kind of preppy fashion and the concept of preppiness,

it felt to me like that was a term that you don't hear anymore really. Like you don't hear people really self-describe as preppy, at least not young people. I feel like the last reference to preppiness I heard in like a major media franchise was when Noel on Felicity self-describes as preppy in like 1999. But like, it feels like the term didn't survive

into the new millennium, but I feel like possibly what you're saying is that it didn't need to because the aesthetic itself had become so ubiquitous that we didn't need to like point it out anymore. 100%, I feel like, you know, especially in the early to mid aughts, you know, if something is established enough as a symbol,

you don't need to say it. And like my pet theory is that as we've talked about, it's come back in style over and over and over and over again so many times that almost every generation has grown up with a version of it. Like Andre 3000 has this quote that he was like, yeah, I wear these preppy clothes

because I grew up in Atlanta in the 80s where everyone was wearing two polo shirts on top of each other and popping the collars. And so he's referencing that. It's always sort of an option. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of like how there was a viral video of like a guy skateboarding to dreams by Fleetwood Mac

and like dreams had a moment. But it's like, dreams is like kind of never not having a moment, right? It's like always on the radio. There's always people jamming out to it. There's always someone having a breakup or something who's like, ah, dreams. But like there are little moments in the culture

where like all of us at once will be like, oh my God, dreams. Yes. I mean, the key thing about it is if you think about fashion as not only being something that only young trendy people engage in, people turn to this look as they age because it like looks good on an aging body.

You don't have to be young to wear it, you know? Yeah, and then there's, sure. And I'm sure there's like, you know, that you can look at demographics and like millennials are getting older. We're having kids. We don't wanna be like synching our wastes all the time. Our sort of baggy jumpsuits having a moment

because we want to be kinder to our bodies, you know, to pay them back for the mid to late 2000s. I don't know. I wanna close by asking you, like why is this your magnificent obsession? Cause I think this is such an interesting topic, but the world is full of interesting topics. So like, why do you feel like this has drawn you

so much over time? Well, in the same way that you can't have a conversation about race without talking about whiteness and you can't have a conversation about gender without talking about masculinity. I feel like you cannot have a discussion about clothing without this. Like I didn't even realize this was like,

I felt like a fish learning about what water is. Like, oh yeah, this is the mainstream. When people talk about dressing mainstream or reacting to the mainstream, they're functionally talking about preppy clothes. And so like, what is this? Like, let's name it. Where did it come from?

How did it get here? And you just can learn, I've learned so much about the course of 20th century fashion, just by tracking where this comes in and out. Okay, wait, but can I like give a little tease for the series? Yes.

There were people who got arrested for dressing preppy. What? It was like a huge problem. Yeah, that's the Japan story. It's really interesting. All right, this is like a cliffhanger. Where can people listen to your series, Avery Truffleman?

Thanks. It's called Articles of Interest and you can find it wherever you get your podcast. Thank you so much for coming on. This was so delightful. And I don't know, this feels like kind of a continuation of the Miranda Priestly lesson of like, it's never just a sweater from a box of stuff.

Yeah. You know, there's always the story of like our whole civilization in there. Yes, yes, yes. It's just funny. I don't know if fashion is like uniquely that way or not, you know what I mean? I don't know if fashion does it more so

or less so than any other mass produced product. But it is the one that we have the most control. Like we can choose more readily and more quickly what we wear than like the buildings we live in or the cars we drive. Like the time scale is just quicker. Yeah.

And I think we're more prone to feel like we're expressing our personality in the clothes we wear than in like, you know, how our cabinets look or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can see it. You can touch it.

You can understand it. You were invested in it because it affects how people perceive you. It's like, effectively part of your body because how much time do you really get to spend in the world naked? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yet it's like connected to like giant forces

way beyond our control that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years. Yeah. Kind of creepy. Kind of crazy. Kind of beautiful. Thank you so much to Avery Truffleman, our guest. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing help.

Thank you, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick, without whom I would be sitting alone in my closet talking to no one. Thank you for being here. We'll see you in two weeks. Thank you.