Studied style

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07 Jan

Teruyoshi Hayashida for Take Ivy, 1965.

Avery Trufelman is the host of Articles of Interest, a podcast about what we wear. Its third season was dedicated entirely to the origins of preppy fashion. Here she writes on The Preppy Handbook and the Japanese birth of Ivy style.

This article was originally published on January 12th, 2023 and is unpaywalled for the first time.

I used to be so thoroughly obsessed with What Not to Wear.  I would turn on TLC to watch real-life fairy godparents Stacy and Clinton descend into Heartland USA, administering stern but loving advice to a hapless makeover subject. To me, this was educational programming. When it first emerged in 2003, What Not to Wear was hitting me at the exact right time, in my own ugly duckling adolescence. Stacy and Clinton’s advice was simple, clear, and nearly dogmatic. One must always accentuate the waist! Don’t mix too many statement pieces! Open blazers are flattering! And flattering always meant thinning. I was taking notes. 

Of course, in hindsight (and recently re-watching some clips), I was like damn, Stacy and Clinton are really teaching everyone how to dress boring. Over and over again, they took someone with a weird “quirky” style and taught them how to tone it down. How to look presentable. Accessible. Normal. They taught them to follow the rules for how to dress. 

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between shame and embarrassment. I think embarrassment is knowing the social rules, but failing to follow them. Shame is the realization that there are rules, but only after you’ve broken them.  Like Adam and Eve learning that they had to wear clothes. 

By learning the rules, by watching What Not To Wear, I was attempting to circumvent shame. But now that I’ve lived long enough to see some trend cycles come and go, I’m not sure there are rigid, generally-applicable rules for how to dress.  Like, “don’t mix brown and black?” “Don’t match your shoes with your bag?” Most antiquated “rules” don’t apply. And even if a rule does get established, breaking it becomes a fashion statement. That’s daring. That's art. 

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

  • Rejected Ambient Works Vol. 1 - Young Jesus (Spotify)

  • AMERICAN PIE - POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3 (Spotify)

  • Loverboy - Real Lies (Spotify)

  • MJ Lenderman & The Wind - A Long December (Counting Crows) (YouTube)

  • Mikey Madison in the Criterion Closet

  • “Noise rock frontmen are practically required to holler and scream like they’re losing their minds, and while Moe (whose last name doesn’t appear online) observes this unspoken rule, there’s something else driving his madness.” (Pitchfork)

  • Reuters and Gannett are bundling subscriptions (Axios)

  • “Is this a love story between a Water Buoy and a Satellite?” and other questions in the comments of the Love Me trailer (YouTube)

  • Fubo and Hulu + Live TV are merging (Variety)

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MIXTAPE

  • “If billiards has the reputation of being a pastime for gamblers, hustlers and hangers-on, the female-centric biweekly pool tournament at 4100 Bar offers a friendly, supportive alternative.” (LA Times)

  • An oral history of WIRED’s original website (Wired)

  • Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler have created an interactive Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 (Calculating Empires)

  • The top 50 micro writings of 2024 according to scaffold

  • Greta Rainbow chronicles her year though Glance Back, a net art piece coded by Maya Man (LARB)

  • “Andrea felt as if her mother had found a disease that was almost too convenient, a permanent forgetting.” Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro (The New Yorker)

  • Dr. Rauchberg open sources her DIGITAL MEDIA STUDIES syllabus (Google Docs)

  • Sophie Smith on Gisèle Pelicot (LRB) 

  • “About 21,000 people use the 15 utopias each day. The hope is that by transforming the lives of strategic populations, particularly women who are the backbone of communities, the changes will ripple out across neighbourhoods.” An innovative program in Mexico City. (The Guardian)

  • 40-year-old Teddy Blanks is Hollywood’s go-to typography guy (New York Times) 

  • So many gems in the latest issue of lit mag Neutral Spaces