"American Trad"

Is this like Ralph Lauren and whatever faux heritage he's ripping off this decade?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Trad

ugh

brooks brothers origin myth bullshit, the imaginary fashion of capitalist privilege, call it what you will

that is a great first line of an essay

exterminate: http://www.askandyaboutclothes.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=41

Ahahah I googled a certain kind of brogues once and was directed to that site, someone posted "I just noticed (x) style of brogue, but the soles were heavier than I expected and blah blah was different from blah blah, what are these?" and the answer was "These are popular with skinheads." End of question.

note that i don't have an issue with the clothes themselves but the attempt to reify these staid traditional staples of ruling class officewear into a timeless cohesive "style" is both fucking retarded and a goddamn lie

and totally creepy!

i know i'm just going off on a peeve here but there's a level of discrimination that goes beyond appraising high quality and clasic styling, that just serves a narcissism of small differences / narcissism of big wallets

you kids and your labels

the crap you wear to job interviews has an entire subculture behind it? The blame for this is squarely on branding agencies. Please destroy.

gabbneb: u trad, doggy?

or, once again, the blame is on subculture dorks. I remember my grandfather telling me about when he worked as a copywriter in the 1950s. He was required to wear these perfectly tailored 3 piece suits made with high end fabric despite him being like ... a 22 year old there for his first year. If he wore a suit with a lesser fabric he'd be reported and written up.

So, he still dresses really sharp to this day and it's something passed down to us. It's important to dress well, of course, but I think people the people who try way too hard look really out of their element.

as in, they study this crap on sites like AskAndy.com and pay attention to the origin story in the Brooks Brother catalog and obsess about all this crap that was invented by a branding agency. Just let it come from natural creativity, maaaaan. American Trad sounds like a real downer.

gabbneb: u trad, doggy?

i'm jewish, tie-dyer

note that i don't have an issue with the clothes themselves but the attempt to reify these staid traditional staples of ruling class officewear into a timeless cohesive "style" is both fucking retarded and a goddamn lie

I'm not sure this is true! I think it's true now that there are huge variations in men's style, but if you go back far enough, this stuff is being distinguished from European and British menswear by smallish issues of cut and clothes-pairing and what constitutes a staple closet, and that sort of does have to start, coherently, somewhere.

There was someone -- an older guy -- who contributed to Sartorialist a long time ago (wish I could find this), outlining in incredible detail what constituted a standard/trad set of menswear for a sort of prep/Ivy guy in his youth: i.e., you have one gray flannel suit with this kind of shoulder and this kind of cut, you have three shirts in these colors, you have one crew sweater of X sort, one navy jacket, etc., etc. It was pretty interesting, really.

nabisco, i think you may be talking about the guy who writes the blog 'a suitable wardrobe' -- and i admit that having a prescribed closet must be a boon to men who want to take all the guesswork out of dressing acceptably for their station. and make no mistake, having a closet full of hand-crafted dress shoes made by only three certain distinguished companies ultimately has very little to do with the quality or style of those shoes, and everything to do with the exclusivity of being able to have $10,000 worth of shoes in one's closet. it's all about dressing for status.

the thing that annoys me most about this "trad" term -- which as far as I can tell is only several years old at most -- is the implied idea that this "classic" "traditional" style emerged sui generis and as fully formed as athena birthed from zeus' head. in order to be "classic" it must forcibly disown any variation from its present norm, which means that any variation over time is ignored.

maybe just i'm saying that "classic" or "timeless" style is a mythical beast.

lol i was all prepared to defend these guys and then while googling "sack fit" i stumbled across an ask andy forum and am now totally with you elmo:

2. I think waist suppression and showing off of the waist is the province of the female of the species, not the male. I don't see exactly what waist suppression "flatters" that I would want flattered. And no, I am not the"pear shaped" archetype that those who dislike the sack continue to portray as the only person who looks good in them...6'0, 170

Another point, Mr. Rogers, is that in my days in the financial district, the sack suit, 3 roll to 2, was almost like a uniform.

Look around the room when the dealmakers were gathered to do a secondary offering, and that's literally all you would see.

i do like this 'look' tho even if its populated by douchebags

on the other hand i have a tremendous amount of shameful affection for WASPy businessmen from the beginning half of this century

Sounds like people who are trying to defend ugly, baggy American clothing, vs. the feminine (aka, homo) European cuts. It seems like people are trying to invent this culture around dressing like slobs.

Listening to stories about working in the corporate and financial world in the 50s, you basically had to wear perfectly tailored 3 piece suits in high quality fabrics. Looking at my grandfather and the people he worked with, nobody wore that baggy sack crap... he'd probably be fired if he wore something so informal and sloppy.

If sloppy looking clothing is "American trad", then count me out.

to be fair a well-fitting sack suit isnt going to be 'baggy' or 'ugly'

and id wager that your grandfather was wearing sack fit jackets

http://hitchcock.tv/mov/north_by_northwest/images/northwest2.gif

cary grant in a sack fit

Nah, none of the stuff he owns looks like that. Sack suits are informal wear with no darting or form... it's "Ivy League style" because the people who wore them didn't have to work. Sack suits in the workplace belong to the overall business casual phenomenon.

your grandfather was a shitty wasp

That side's Catholic and came here from England in the 1920s, so not very WASPy. Maybe he did wear sack suits, who the hell knows. I just imagine sack suits as that baggy crap I see middle managers wearing on the train.

Listen, punk, if all middle-managers wore Brooks Bros the world would be a much more aesthetically pleasing place.

Not that I partic love the sack suit but shut the hell up.

the whole dressing-by-the-book aspect is what really confuses me. i keep seeing grave admonitions against wearing red and pink together. oh yeah? just watch me rock a pink bengal stripe oxford with red cuffed jeans, you fuddy bankrolling bastards.

i think 'trad' is a great jumping-off point for creating a wardrobe (especially for work) but it seems like it gets taken up as a set of commandments that you cant break

Elmo, pretty sure it wasn't the Suitable Wardrobe guy. But it was interesting to think about the extremely small staple wardrobe you might work with as a 50s undergraduate. (It sort of sent me plotting if or how someone today could scale back to that -- I suppose you'd have to save up, have a whole lot of really high-quality staple items tailored at once, and then somehow have the guts to pack away the large amounts of random clothes most of us revolve through. It'd be much tougher to deal with these days, given the whole different pace of style and the way we dress for different environments a whole lot more than might have been the case in the past.)

I'm kind of jealous that men get to have this uniform. Figuring out how to look "professional" as a woman is so much harder because you either look too fem or too manly and are judged either way :/

American Trad sounds awesome, but Japanese Trad is even better.

Monty Clift in this week's New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/09/01/slideshow_080901_avedon?slide=4#showHeader

he looks good