It’s come to this: when I get around to logging into The New York Times website each morning, I look for the latest advertorial/product placement bonanza from fashion writer Alexander Nazaryan (and others). Maybe it’s the six cuckoo clocks that chime (with different tunes; the best is “Oh My Darling, Clementine”) nearly simultaneously—that’s a legitimate and no so far-off conclusion—but I think it’s because of the chuckles that erupt while skimming his latest spread, lots of pictures, which are easy to ignore, just like the I’m-saving-the-Democratic-Party-and-fattening-my-wallet drivel from Ezra Klein, who one might think, but would be wrong, is wearing out his welcome repeating the same shtick every week.
Nazaryan’s article, “Preppy Attire Without the Cultural Baggage,” plumped a new, and probably passing fad, of young (and a few older daredevils) about the retro dress-up in updated preppy couture (if you can call it that, and J. Press and Brooks Brothers, before it changed hands 49 times, did). The headline’s misleading since there isn’t much “baggage” detailed in the article; it’s an exuberant nod to past “fashion” and included an invocation of Lisa Birnbach’s very silly The Official Preppy Handbook (1980). I swear that spawned 1983’s The Big Chill—one of the worst movies of that decade—which wasn’t just a de facto advertisement for Rolaids, but featured a soundtrack of very familiar songs.
Unlike Pretty In Pink (1986), where the songs (The Smiths, Furs, New Order, OMD for example) outpaced the film by 14 country miles, The Big Chill had a bunch of Motown smash hits, the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Frank Sinatra’s horrendous “Strangers In the Night” and Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” One night in late-1983, I returned from a wedding in D.C. and went to a squirrely party back in Baltimore, where most people were dancing to Motown songs, as if they’d just discovered them. Maybe so, and I left after a half hour, beer buzz killed, disgusted by my own generation. I wasn’t yet 30, and perhaps overreacted, but I could’ve left with my pockets filled with fivers after quizzing participants about who had the first hit version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Didn’t these nutty guys and gals listen to the fucking radio in the 1960s?
Nazaryan’s first paragraph is key: “On a recent Friday night in Lower Manhattan, a crowd of fashion journalists [how many are left?], photographers and influencers [I still can’t read that word without scratching my right arm] gathered at the ONS boutique on Mulberry Street to celebrate Dozer magazine’s new issue ‘The New Prep.’ Guests were asked to dress in preppy attire to pay tribute to all things preppy—not the flagrantly misappropriated version on TikTok, but the collegiate look and old-moneyed demeanor of New England prep schools and Ivy League colleges… Many would argue that the chinos, penny loafers and rumpled Oxford button-down shirts that epitomize preppy are timeless.” If the style’s “timeless,” where the “baggage” at, Rutherford?
When I grew up in the 1960s, my four brothers and I had a grabbed-together preppy look, one that didn’t include full-price articles of “preppy clothing” (even though three of my brothers, while public school graduates, went to fancy New England schools), but loafers—never with pennies, that was considered effeminate, to use a euphemism that covered the nasty expressions of the time, such as the “fag tag” on the back of shirts—were bought on sale at Thom McCan, black or brown, and polished from a can of Kiwi every other Sunday before church. In 1971, I did buy a pair of Sperry Top-Siders, which were then cool with jeans and comfortable, and we often loaded up on button-down shirts (usually not all-cotton, but a blend) at rummage sales for a quarter. The annual Cold Spring Harbor Fair in October was the best place for duds—Cold Spring Harbor, as opposed to Huntington, was on the preppy side—and was the first order of business before buying nickel comic books, guzzling a hand-pressed cup of cider, avoiding the yellowjackets and then settling in at the firehouse for a big ham, biscuits and chocolate cake lunch.
There was a small boutique on the main drag of Cold Spring Harbor, and before leaving for college in 1973, I splurged on a mustard-colored pair of corduroys that didn’t wear out for seven years. Arriving at Johns Hopkins that September, I was taken aback that a lot of my new friends—mostly New England private school graduates—had a basic uniform: Lee or Levi’s jeans, Top-Siders, Lacoste polo shirts and boots from L.L. Bean. I was betwixt and between; a combo of those items and hand-me-downs. It didn’t bother me, although I took some ribbing from my Texan roommate, who didn’t have much money and wore knock-off dungarees and J.C. Penney flannel shirts, although his brown hand-made cowboy boots (with green stitching) blew me away. (He sent me a pair in the summer of ’74, along with a $15 lid and Jerry Jeff Walker t-shirt; we’d seen Jerry Jeff at a small Village club when visiting NYC the previous year, which was terrific until Mr. Bojangles fell off his stool.)
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023