Take Ivy: What a Book Can Save

There is a photo book from 1965 that still counts as the reference work for a thoroughly American style. It is called Take Ivy, it shows students at eight American elite universities, and it is Japanese. A Japanese team travelled across the Pacific to photograph how American students dressed, and the result became the benchmark for what Ivy actually is.

The famous summary of this story sits in the subtitle of W. David Marx's book Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. Marx researched it thoroughly, he has lived in Tokyo for years, and I have no intention of contradicting him. What interests me is a different question, and it starts exactly where the rescue narrative ends.

What did this style need saving from in the first place? And what exactly got saved?

My answer in three sentences, and the rest of this text is the evidence. Availability creates styles. Writing things down fixes the form. But only an occasion keeps a practice alive. Take Ivy is such a good example because the book documents all three stages, two of them by accident.

What Take Ivy is

Take Ivy is a photo book, published in late September 1965 by the Japanese publisher Fujingahosha. The photographs are by Teruyoshi Hayashida, the texts by Shosuke Ishizu, Toshiyuki Kurosu and Hajime Hasegawa. The team toured the eight universities of the Ivy League and recorded what students there actually wore. The trip was paid for by Kensuke Ishizu, founder of the Japanese brand VAN Jacket, because his customers simply lacked the knowledge of what American college style looked like in real life. The title is a nod to Dave Brubeck's Take Five. The book became a standard work in Japan, a sought-after collector's item in the US for decades, and was republished in English in 2010.

So much for the facts. The interesting question is why this book had to exist at all.

The wardrobe came out of army surplus

You know the convenient version of how styles are born: people want something, and then it gets made. With Ivy it was the other way round. That is where the whole story starts.

After the Second World War, two things came together. Millions of soldiers were demobbed, and the GI Bill, the 1944 law that paid returning veterans' way through university, sent a good number of them to colleges they would never have attended otherwise. At the same time, the army surplus stores were full of gear the war had left behind. G. Bruce Boyer, one of the few menswear writers I trust blindly, describes the result at Ivy Style:

"With the huge de-mobbing of soldiers after the war, coupled with the GI Bill for higher education, these durable tan cotton trousers became an essential part of the casual campus wardrobe. If a student had a pair or two of khakis, a Shetland sweater, a tweed jacket or blazer, and a few oxford-cloth buttondowns, he was pretty well set."

Read that list again: it is the complete Ivy starter kit, and it sits there as an inventory of what a student simply had. Not as a style decision. No student ever said: "Yo, fashion industry, how about making chinos for the cool kids on campus." That's the wrong way around. The trousers were there, they were cheap, they came in every size, and word gets around. Look, I picked up five good pairs for next to nothing, go get some yourself. Add the hand-me-down Shetland sweaters from your father or your uncle, and suddenly the whole thing adds up.

The best part is that the Americans write exactly this themselves. Christian Chensvold, who founded Ivy Style and is therefore roughly the opposite of someone fouling his own nest, wrote a thought experiment for Ralph Lauren Magazine that never made it into the finished article:

"If World War II hadn't happened, there would have been no GI Bill that sent countless young men to college who might not otherwise have gone. There also wouldn't have been tons of khakis available across the country at army surplus stores. The default pant countless American men have worn for over 60 years might instead have been — well, something else."

That is a pretty radical sentence for a man who loves this style, and that is exactly why I find it convincing. Availability does not hang on the desire to buy. It hangs on entirely different accidents, and when the accidents change, the style changes with them.

What that looks like in practice is told in the same piece by a man named Bill Thomas. As a student he tried on an original wartime khaki in an army-navy store and from then on bought nowhere else. Then this happened:

"So I started buying all my pants at the surplus store. And then one day they ran out. There weren't any more, the supply dried up. Period."

The supply dries up. Only afterwards, in 1990, does Thomas found a company just to make that trouser again. Remember this order of events, it will come back later.

That was the first stage, the only one nobody ever planned: availability creates styles. And Take Ivy records it without noticing, because the wardrobe in its photographs is the one from Boyer's list.

Pictures turned into rules

Now comes the part where I had to correct myself while thinking this through.

My first thought was: that was not really a style at all, that was just something people lived in. There were no online communities discussing it, no nerds debating preservation and correctness, and almost certainly no university magazine covering fashion trends. People wore what was convenient, grew out of it, and then something new came along. That is how fashion works when nobody engages with it as a nerd.

But that does not hold up, and the counter-argument is fairly hard. If J. Press, Brooks Brothers, the Andover Shop and Chipp made, sold and celebrated these clothes for decades, then of course the style existed. Then it was their style already. You can hardly claim something never existed when it was produced in the same shops in the same form for decades.

You do have to keep two layers apart here, though. The Classic Ivy of those shops, the sack suits from J. Press and Brooks, was never surplus goods. That was tailored ready-to-wear with a price tag. The surplus layer is the campus wardrobe underneath: khakis, OCBDs, Shetlands, the stuff from Boyer's list. And Japanese Ivy is a third thing again: a reconstruction from pictures that pulls both layers together into a single canon.

So, more precisely: what was missing was not the style. What was missing was the text.

And the beautiful thing is that exactly this observation sits in the book itself, written down by the Japanese who had travelled over specially. Looking back on the trip, they note about the American students (quoted from Daniel Covell's review of the book):

"Students do have an unwritten dress code that they faithfully observe, despite the seemingly disorderly manner in which they dress."

The outsiders see the rule that the locals follow without ever having put it into words. And because the Japanese needed rules to sell the style back home, the pictures turned into rules. Take Ivy itself is almost pure photography. The actual codification happened around it, in the scene that took the book as its starting point and then codified everything, with a thoroughness that existed nowhere in the West. VAN did not even hide this. They declared it a mission, as you can read in an excerpt from Marx's Ametora:

"When you buy medicine, the instructions are always included. There is a proper way of taking the medicine, and if you do not take the medicine correctly, there may be adverse effects. Same goes for dressing up—there are rules you cannot ignore. Rules teach you style orthodoxy and help you follow the correct conventions for dress. Starting with Ivy is the fastest way to get you there."

Clothing as medicine, complete with the leaflet. Kurosu, one of the Take Ivy authors, ran a question-and-answer column in the magazine Men's Club and answered questions of detail with a precision you will search for in vain in Western style columns of the period. On the open button-down collar, for instance, he says:

"It has to feel natural. It's the absolute worst if other people think you've left them intentionally unbuttoned."

This is a man in his early twenties who had never lived in the US, and he is ruling on how an open collar should come across. That is precisely the point, and that is why it is not an accusation but an achievement: if these boundaries are not written down, nothing stops a style from evolving beyond recognition.

Writing down is not documentation. Writing down is an anchor against drift. A shop cannot stop the drift. A shop moves with it, because it has to sell whatever currently sells. Only a text freezes the form. That is why Black Tie still exists, and why most subculture fashions simply no longer take place. They are just over.

That is the second stage, the only one of the three that happened on purpose: writing things down fixes the form.

And now the uncomfortable qualification I do not want to hide. The Americans did write something down. Printed inside Take Ivy itself is Yale's 20-article dress code from 1965, a handout for freshers. So there was a written code, and it still saved nothing. Why that is sits in the very same list.

Without an occasion, the best text is useless

Article four of that Yale code reads:

"Article 4: When going on a date or to restaurants, wear a sports jacket and tie."

That is not a style recommendation. That is an assignment of clothing to a situation. And the same logic runs through the whole book. In the closing section, the authors describe what happens after graduation:

"Once the Ivy Leaguer starts working, the way they dress changes dramatically. They are no longer allowed to stroll around in their old cotton trousers and sneakers. Instead, they have to wear dark suits and can no longer act like carefree students."

No longer allowed. Have to. That is not taste speaking, that is obligation. What kept the suit on bodies for decades was not the beauty of the suit but the fact that there were situations in which anything else was not an option. A bad outfit has no social consequences. An inappropriate outfit does. The difference between those two sentences is the entire subject.

That is the third stage, and it too sits in the book only by accident: only an occasion keeps the practice alive.

And exactly here the lovely story of the book that saved a style stops being true. Because the most thoroughly codified Ivy that ever existed was the Japanese one, and it died. VAN Jacket, the company that had translated the style into a rulebook, filed for bankruptcy in 1978. Marx describes the reason unsentimentally:

"Ivy League style fell out of fashion among kids, and the diehard fans refused to bend it to match contemporary tastes. In 1978, VAN declared bankruptcy, and Ishizu faded into obscurity."

VAN came back in the early eighties and went bankrupt again in 1984. Today's brand has nothing to do with the Ishizu family (Marx on Ishizu and VAN). The rulebook was perfect. The customers were gone. Writing it down saved the form, but it never put a single garment on a single body.

What this looks like today you can read in Yale. For Take Ivy's sixtieth anniversary, the Yale Daily News asked students what the book means to them. One of them, Saketh Sadhanala, says:

"We're far less formal today than the past. 'Ivy style,' to me, isn't 'law' but more of a place to draw inspiration. I balance expressing myself while nodding to tradition."

His fellow student Griffin Santopietro, who models for J. Press, puts it even more briefly: "There's no reason to be didactic about it." So the book lives on, it sits on shelves in New Haven, it gets used, and it is still no longer a law but a source of inspiration. That is exactly the difference between a fixed form and a living practice.

And now the punchline I like least about all of this, because it lands on us. Our bubble is codifying like mad right now. The r/NavyBlazer wiki contains, among other things, a Guide to Collar Roll, a Guide to Chinos, a Guide to the OCBD, a Guide to Color, plus treatises on whether to cuff your trousers and how much break is correct. The reading list of that same wiki includes Take Ivy as a PDF. It has never been easier to get hold of knowledge this precise about classic menswear. And there have never been fewer occasions where any of it makes a difference.

We have perfectly documented knowledge about clothes that hardly anyone still has a reason to wear. If that structure sounds familiar: it is the same mechanism that removed the tie from everyday life. Why the vanished obligation is also the tie's opportunity is something I wrote about in my piece on the tie and the mainstream.

It also explains, by the way, why there are no real movements any more. You can do 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s today, however you like. Nobody bats an eye. That was not possible before. A movement needs something to be current and something else not to be. When everything is available and permitted at once, nothing can flow. Availability selected Ivy back then. Today it selects nothing, because everything is available.

For this part of the text I went looking for occasions that still dictate anything to me. I found exactly one: the funeral. Suit, dark, everything, no question. At the last wedding, on the other hand, I turned up in a restrained, very classic jacket-and-trousers combination, blazer, tie, because it was clear beforehand that nobody would come in a suit. A shirt was already peak performance there, and that made me one of the best-dressed people in the room. That is the condition this whole text is about: the occasion no longer dictates anything. I read the audience. If I knew half the guests were coming in suits, I would come in a suit. The code no longer comes from the situation. It comes from whoever happens to be in the room.

What speaks against this thesis

Three objections I take seriously.

First, the case was not unique. Until recently I was certain something like this would never happen twice. That is wrong, and wrong twice over. Bill Thomas founded a company in Pennsylvania in 1990 to recreate the wartime khaki after the surplus supply had dried up. And the Japanese repro brands to this day reconstruct not the Ivy look but the army original underneath it. Simon Crompton writes at Permanent Style about two of them:

"The Warehouse 1216 chino is based off the same US Army officer model as the Jelado, but uses a more conventional cotton in a nice right-hand twill (often called a Westpoint cloth)."

The same source trouser, two brands, decades later. But that makes the case stronger, not weaker: it is not a coincidence, it is a procedure. Availability ends, somebody misses the piece, and what used to simply be there becomes a deliberately manufactured product with a description.

Second, Ivy never disappeared in America. J. Press existed throughout, Ralph Lauren built an empire out of precisely this look, Boyer and Chensvold have been writing about it for decades. Anyone claiming that America threw its style away and Japan caught it is making things too easy. What actually happened: in America the style survived as an enthusiast's affair, in Japan it was translated into a system. Wardrobes don't travel, books do. That is the whole difference, and it is a difference of medium, not of seriousness.

Third, there is a good counter-position to codification altogether. Tom Hoy, whose piece on Take Ivy will probably sit right next to this one in the search results, sees Ivy not as a rulebook but as an attitude, and writes: "Style never goes out of fashion, but fashion goes out of style." That is the standard Western position, and it is not stupid. It just has one practical problem: an attitude answers no collar questions. A rulebook does. Which is why their book is on the table today and ours is not.

What I take away from this

Culture cannot be forced into being by something written down. Culture comes from voluntariness, and creating culture is probably one of the most complex things a person can attempt. Writing things down can preserve a form so that later you still know what was being talked about. It makes nobody put anything on in the morning.

For me this has a fairly direct consequence, and I do not want to make it bigger than it is. In this story I am neither an inventor nor a museum. I am a curator. I catch enthusiasm and pass it on, and while doing that I stubbornly hold on to a few quality standards. That comes from living with vintage: if you have to buy what happens to be there, you inevitably develop a sieve. The piece that fits one hundred per cent, in exactly the right configuration, you will never find. The ninety per cent piece you will. A few things the sieve sorts out without compromise; on design details and configurations it leaves room. Good enough is the criterion, not perfect.

And because this would otherwise sound like a sermon, the uncomfortable part belongs here too: exactly this sieve sometimes makes me too quick. I reject things because I do not know them, or because they are codified so differently that they do not fit my learned patterns. The sieve that makes you good also makes you blind to what it does not know.

So what I offer is not an occasion. What remains, when no dress code demands anything any more, is at first just one reason: wanting to. That sounds thin, but it is the only drive that still works today. And it carries surprisingly far, because it does not take millions. A few hundred people who see the same thing are enough, and today you can find them, which would have been impossible twenty years ago.

I can tell you exactly what that looks like. I work in a menswear shop and I am the only person there who wears a tie. I walk into the backyard in the morning and spend ninety per cent of the day down in the basement. There is not a single person I would have to wear the tie for. I wear it because I want to. That is all the occasion that is left. And it is enough.

And whoever wants a real one now makes their own. On the sartorial Discord run by Philipp and Philip, people arrange community meet-ups, sometimes six of them, sometimes ten, sometimes fifteen. Somebody puts thought into it and says: this is the event we need in order to do what we want to do. For that one evening the code exists again, made from the only material culture has ever been made of: voluntariness. My favourite examples come from Dortmund: the team at House of Mercury around Felix and Pablo regularly puts on events like these. Entirely selfless it is not, of course, but the two of them would not do it if their hearts were not in it.

Take Ivy is therefore not a monument to a rescued style. It is proof that you can preserve a form if you take the trouble to describe it. Whether anyone wears it afterwards is not the book's decision.

Frequently asked questions

What is Take Ivy? A Japanese photo book from 1965 about the clothing at the eight universities of the Ivy League. Photographs by Teruyoshi Hayashida, texts by Shosuke Ishizu, Toshiyuki Kurosu and Hajime Hasegawa, published by Fujingahosha. The trip was financed by Kensuke Ishizu, founder of the Japanese fashion brand VAN Jacket, as a guide for his customers.

Why is Take Ivy so famous? Because it was the first systematic record of a style that nobody had written down before. The Americans followed an unwritten code; the Japanese needed a written one and therefore created it. The book became a standard work in Japan and remains the most-cited source for what Ivy actually looked like in the mid-sixties.

What does Ametora mean? Ametora is short for American Traditional and describes the Japanese interpretation of classic American clothing. The term became widely known through W. David Marx's 2015 book Ametora, which describes how American style came to Japan and was developed further there.

Is the book still worth it today? As a reference work, yes. As a rulebook, no. You can see very precisely how clothes were actually worn on campus in 1965, untidy details included. Anyone reading it as a binding manual turns it into something it never wanted to be. Today's students at Yale themselves treat it as a source of inspiration, not as law.

Did Japan save Ivy style? Japan saved the form, by writing it down and developing it further. It did not save the practice: VAN Jacket, the brand behind Take Ivy, went bankrupt in 1978 and again in 1984 when Japanese youth moved on. In the US the style survived in parallel as an enthusiast's affair, at J. Press and Ralph Lauren among others.

Who was Kensuke Ishizu? The founder of VAN Jacket, born in 1911, died in 2005. He came to know the term Ivy League after the war in China through an American lieutenant who had studied at Princeton, founded his brand in Japan in 1951 and built Ivy style into a youth movement there from the late fifties onwards. He paid for the 1965 Take Ivy expedition.