Rebecca C. Tuite for “Ivy Style”
BOYFRIEND JACKET: THE VASSAR GIRL AND THE IVY LEAGUE LOOK
When Marilyn Monroe steps onto the screen in “Some Like It Hot,” wearing elaborate furs and gowns, her soft blond curls swept into an elegant chignon, she spends much of her time pretending to be a wealthy, well-to-do Vassar student. She is a classic example of Hollywood’s vision of the Vassar Girl: the stereotypical rich, white, smart and attractive debutante. However, the real trends in Vassar style were not being set by a Hollywood costumer. During the 1950s, Vassar students became fashion leaders of everyday campus style for women. Just as Princeton became recognized as the leading school for setting menswear trends, so Vassar quickly became known as the most fashionable college for women, popularizing a look for girls that was the equivalent of the Ivy League Look for boys…
Bicycle Week: The Yale-Vassar Bike Race
The Yale-Vassar bike race found its origins in a drunken wager. At a meeting of Yale’s Trumbull Beer and Bike Society, one student declared he could beat another in a bicycle race all the way to Vassar. However, this valiant duel between two determined Trumbull residents quickly became a popular annual tradition in the early 1950s and a day on which the iconic style of the Seven Sisters and Ivy colleges revealed a sense of humor…
Voice In The Dark: Richard Frede’s Entry E, 1958
“Entry E” is something of a pulp novel, telling a tale of Ivy League life in America that was considered startling on its release in 1958. But for all the adolescent angst and raucous action in this story, there is plenty of mid-century Ivy League style and quiet consideration of the “Ivy Man,” described in knowledgeable detail by the book’s author, Richard Frede, a Yale graduate…
Crashing The Boys Club: The Birth Of The Brooks Brothers Woman
Although Brooks Brothers didn’t officially launch a full women’s department in its flagship store until 1976, young American women had been infiltrating the bastion of sartorial masculinity for quite some time. Since launching its pink shirt for women in 1949, Brooks had begrudgingly acknowledged the large number of females who wanted to wear the brand. But within five years women were no longer satisfied with a tiny customer service desk located in a dark and secluded area of the store…
Dedman, Don’t Wear Plaid: Julien D.’S Satirical Look At Yale
“Yale men everywhere join in one brotherhood at eventide to remember the golden days of yesteryear and the great gothic towers of this university whose flying buttresses and grinning gargoyles symbolize a Yale Spirit that will not die – not even if you beat it with a stick,” wrote Julien Dedman (Yale Class of 1948) in the introduction to his 1950 compendium of cartoons, “Boola Boola! A Satirical Peek at Yale, Its Foundations and Other Unmentionables.” Perhaps it’s just as well that the Yale spirit was so unshakable, as Dedman took aim at everything from boring Whiffenpoof performances to Burberry sportcoats, dastardly Dostoevsky assignments to disappointing dates with Vassar girls in his lampoon of life at Yale in the 1950s…
What A Catch: Vassar Versus Ivies Touch Football
“Vassar College’s touch football team today issued a challenge to the Kennedy family in Washington: play us,” announced The Poughkeepsie Journal in November 1962. The reason for such sporting confidence? In the fall of that year, Vassar students had formed the first all-female college touch football teams. With names like the Joss Jocks, Noyes Nymphs and the Senile Seniors, the good-natured teams started out by playing against each other for fun. However, in typical trailblazing Vassar fashion, football quickly became much more than a casual campus pastime…
The Man In The Brooks Brothers Shirt
There is little doubt that Mary McCarthy’s short story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” is now probably more famous for its punchy title — a dream for the Brooks Brother’s marketing team — than it is for the actual story. But it remains a classic part of the mystique of the Brooks Brothers Look, and indeed, the Brooks Brothers Man. Taken from Mary McCarthy’s 1942 novel “The Company She Keeps,” which is less a straight narrative and more a collection of six short stories, “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” forms the third chapter in the story of Margaret Sargent, a young woman trying to redefine her life following a Reno divorce…
Tied Together: Ivy Guys, Vassar Girls, And The College Scarf
Back in the heyday of the Ivy League Look, when a boy was going steady he’d remove the locker loop on the back of his oxford-cloth buttondown, signalling to other females that he was spoken for. And how did a female student signal she was taken? By wearing her boyfriend’s college scarf. The practice was especially popular at the two schools that most set the style in campus fashion: Princeton and Vassar. Observing the trend from New Haven, the Yale Daily News noted in 1959 that Vassar was a sea of scarf wearers, writing, “Alarmingly enough, orange and black specimens are almost as prevalent as blue and white. As one girl explained, ‘After all, Princeton boys are desperate to give away scarves.'”…
Double Date: Vassar Girls And Their Beaus, 1951
Vassar students and their weekend dates take a stroll around Vassar’s beautiful Sunset Lake. The weekend ‘mass exodus’ of the Vassar campus as students went off in droves to neighboring Ivies is well publicised, but students did enjoy some chaste dates on campus too. Afternoon walks and dinners at the Pub in the Alumnae House were especially popular. It’s entirely likely that these four enjoyed a double date over “Vassar Devils” at the Pub, which were incredibly gooey chocolate sundaes and the toast of Poughkeepsie throughout the 1950s…