TAKE MY IVY, PLEASE
by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans
A few years before my excellent state graduate school destroyed the promise of accessible public education and raised tuition to the same levels as the privates, my housemate, complaining that he wanted an experience that I had already had, transferred to Yale. Said experience, one I had never put a name to, was “the Ivy League experience.” I never thought that my undergraduate years at Dirnelli U (known to non-iGents as Brown) amounted to any sort of emblematic experience of the eight universities that compose the Ivies, nor that the sort of experience that expression connotes exists today outside of the imaginations of a few who have closed their eyes to the sartorial realities of college, whether on the campus of an Ivy League or elsewhere.
Certainly by the time I wandered my college town’s streets the idea of an Ivy look that was not the national college outfit of jeans, sweats or even pajamas was ludicrous, even if those wanderings frequently took me past Brown’s last two, soon-to-be-extinct, soon-to-be-unmourned, Ivy outfitters. Despite one of them adding a large wood carving of the Polo logo to its sign, they remained unrelatable enclaves surrounded by the diners with insane hours (midnight to four AM) and smoke shops with Sobranie Black Russians which I remember more sentimentally.
They weren’t welcoming, either, if I ever braved to venture past the window displays with Royall Lyme and defiantly middle-aged Barry Bricken and Tricots Saint-Raphael mufti. Undergraduates were not buying, and that shop, Hillhouse Ltd, closed my senior year. Times had changed to the point that I remember the opening of a Gap on Thayer Street drawing some criticism in the press for that shop’s expected priciness.
Richard Press evokes Hillhouse Ltd.’s predecessor, Langrock, and the other classic outfitters of the Ivy League in his sparkling memoir Threading the Needle, a collection of reminiscences from his posts on the website of J. Press, the ur-classic clothier founded by his grandfather. Even if J. Press is now owned by its Far Eastern licensee Onward Kashiyama, Richard Press remains the face of the firm, and, for all intents and purposes, its breezy, never windy, voice.
Press is ebullient to the point of becoming almost ethereal, a far cry from my memories of the weary heaviness of my local Ivy shops’ atmospheres, their prosaic furnishings and quite mundane merchandise… But then again, my first recollection of Ivy style, recognized in retrospect like a recovered memory, was of my high school English teacher’s tweed jacket, which he opened to lend me a pen that smelt as memorably bad as almost anything I’ve smelt since then, including tanneries and certain institutional wards, suffused as it was not with the Hebridean peat fires that Richard Press insists you could smell in the old Harris Tweeds his father sold, but with decades of spilt coffee and sweat-drenched wool that must have never seen a dry clean, so that his shapeless, indiscriminately patterned tweed jacket bore the pedigree of its soiling. My first experience, then, was of miasma, not Press’s ether.
No wonder Richard Press makes a virtue out of the emptiness of the actual Ivy stores, filling them with ethos and intangible evocations: a sense not just of community but of belonging. Belonging to the New Haven restaurants that only sat university students and staff, not townsfolk; belonging to the boisterous undergraduates who knew that Press’s frequently invoked “Boola boola” is a Yale fight song; belonging to a time when immigrant tailor Jacobi Press and his staff travelled the trails of the carriage trade and visited boarding schools to sell rich adolescents custom suits, the better to lock them in for college and life. Belonging to dangerous road trips between Dartmouth and its sister college in the days before co-education (or good highways) to flirt, or at least hope to loan out a J. Press Shetland wool sweater; belonging to Frank Sinatra’s party one whirlwind evening when the Chairman of the Board sat most of the J. Press New York staff at his table in all the chic watering holes; belonging to the small group of people who have seen Dean Acheson in his underwear… Always, however, the thrill of this inclusion is in its exclusion of others: through codes of language, through the financial means required to pay for custom tailoring (for children who would grow out of it!); through social class. It is a privilege to read Richard Press’ writing, but it would be unwise to forget the privilege his rosy reminiscences required.
Comfort and ease in tailored clothing, then as now, only came at great expense. It does not surprise me that those physical Ivy shops of Providence, untouched by J. Press’s halo, withered and died. Threading the Needle includes Richard Press’s jabs at casualization. He bemoans it as a great swindle on us, depriving us of knowing what to wear, and requiring us to buy cheaper, junkier clothes at much higher margins than what honest traditional merchants like J. Press were and are selling us. But the reason Ivy is dead is because the class that wore this syncretistic American clothing, a dowdy bastardization of Britishness with Puritan formlessness thrown in, reflexively because it was what was done, and what was sold where one shopped, was quite happy to wear lighter, easier, less confining clothing as soon as they could shed the weight of Ivy, the dress code expectations that changed so radically from the 1960s onward, and quite happy to spend less on cheaper casual clothing than on expensive tailored jackets and ties whose silk had to be madder-dyed in England. You may see a few young people wearing a Harris Tweed jacket or seersucker sportcoat on a northeastern college campus, but they are all doing so with intentionality, the intention to recreate something that no longer naturally exists, populating an invented ecosystem with overthought clothing to which they associate a politics that was not at all certain to be associated with it in the days when so-called Ivy clothing was the norm on Ivy campuses.
Press’s essays even give us, in pieces, the narrative of what actually happened to Ivy Style. Once upon a time it was the norm on rarefied campuses of young gentlemen who might continue using the same tailor who had bench-made their clothes in high school and college once they graduated to Wall Street, like a Fitzgerald protagonist. The aftermath of World War II democratized (to a point) college enrollment through the GI Bill, leading many, many more people, of theretofore-unrepresented social classes, to attend college and adopt a similar wardrobe. (Another prep school teacher once informed us that Columbia University had simply called up his father after the war and asked him to attend, allowing him to climb the social ladder.) Innovations in production allowed factory manufacture of Ivy-style ready-to-wear garments as well, so that the increased number of people who wanted to wear Ivy could also afford to wear the Ivy look without having to pay the prices of artisanal one-off work. Ivy became widespread: Press uses the word “heyday” in the titles of several of his essays from this golden age when Ivy was the look. And every fashionable look has its end. Not only did fashions change, but social changes in the 1960s meant that homogenous dressing on campuses was at an end, particularly dressing like one supposed a white-collar grownup would in coat and tie. The 1970s’ upheaval in prep school dress codes broke the back of coat and tie for kids, dealing another blow to Ivy. The Ivy partisans Press evokes who wore it during those decades, doughty men, men of intelligence like Dick Cavett, of integrity like John Chancellor, were middle-aged men who had started wearing the same style of clothes decades earlier as students. (Even Frank Sinatra, who scooped Richard up to his bosom, only lasted nine months as a customer in the late 1960s before sending an emissary to tell Richard Frank no longer wanted to experiment with the Ivy look.) Ivy as a style worn by current Ivy Leaguers, or by American college students pretty much anywhere, no longer existed.
Decades later I, too, wear tweed jackets, but keep them clean (unlike the original Ivy population), and am not a parafascist reactionary (unlike some of the most visible latter-day Ivy practitioners). Savile Row tailors had to sacralize the concept of tweed for me, washing away all its associations of brown, smelly, shapeless and hegemonic, so that my garments in it, strange alpaca Shetland weaves or unthinkable lavenders, are as far from Ivy as possible. Despite the awful Brown Daily Herald (for which I coined the motto “all the print that fits is news”) carrying a weekly News of the Ivies section, none of us felt any ineffable Ivy-ness. The closest I came to such a feeling may have been reading a cheesy story by Providence’s own H.P. Lovecraft, whose action suddenly shifted to the very room I was sitting in… or perhaps hearing a townie couple at a Spring Weekend concert by the very non-Ivy Violent Femmes mutter about how all the kids in the audience had good teeth.
I do not mourn Ivy, as I do not mourn the shops that died trying to sell it to the college populations that have moved on. I hope my housemate found what he was looking for in New Haven (I did successfully, and evilly, bullshit him into buying two Brigg umbrellas for his move there). Had I been him, no doubt I would have succumbed to some aspect of Richard Press’s winning fantasies, replaying the opening paragraphs of Franny and Zooey in my mind, wool-lined Burberry and all, in search of a possessions-linked romance that reality has no place for in this day and age, if it ever had.
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CatCF Milk Chocolate: Part 1, the kids
About this version: Milk Chocolate was inspired originally by a mix of the book, the vibes of the 1971 movie and the Tim Burton movie aesthetic. A bit more goofier and whimsical than the other versions. In term of era, I thought of it as a mix of 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
In this version seven Golden Tickets are spread throughout the world, and each time one is found the same female reporter (her character is a reference to the musical) goes to interview the children. Another recurring joke is that while the hunt is going on for the Tickets, there are all sorts of ridiculous debates on television such as: do the Golden Tickets really exist, or is this just a hoax ? Do the Golden Tickets give cancer? Can animals go on a tour like humans? What happens if a Golden Ticket winner dies before the tour? Are the Golden Tickets linked to the rise of youht delinquence? Are the Golden Tickets a proof of Wonka's alleagiance to the obscure sect of the Golden Bird?
First Winner: Augustus Gloop
(Based on Augustus Gloop)
This Augustus was actually based on an idea Stained-by-the-sea allowed me to "borrow" a bit. Stained noted that Augustus always made him thought of this section from the movie "North", about Buck and the Texan parents. If you don't know what I am talking about, I'll leave links down there. And this is such a perfect matc I had to dig a bit down there.
This Augustus is basically a mix of all the archetypes associated with Texas and Nevada. But more precisely, he is basically "Buck" from North - a boy whose family (and his own mindset) embody the motto "bigger is better".
The Gloop family always thought that they should be "the biggest and the bests" and that "bigger is better". Ironically, the Gloop parents themselves are regular-sized people, but they clearly enforced this mentality on their son. Augustus is a big boy. Literally. He is tall, he is thick, he is fat, he is very, very big. He is probably one of the tallest, and definitively the largest boy on the tour (in fact, he once or twice gets stuck in the doors of Wonka factory). He eats ten meals per day, and we are not talking of regular sized meals. We are talking piles of ribs, kilos of potatoes, entire chickens... His parents also prepared for him a "big" and "best" future - paying the local sportive teams to claim he is a sports champion despite Augustus never setting a foot on a sports field, arranging his marriage with the local beauty queen of the state he lives in, already preparing the three different houses he will live with his fifteen kids... As a result, Augustus isn't just big and fat physically, he also has a massive and bloated ego. He thinks that he is the best at everything, and that he should have absolutely everything he wants.
The Gloops themselves are actually the masters of the state they live in, so to speak. They are the wealthiest and most influential industrials of the area: they built highways, casinos, hotels, private villas, they are cow-farmers, owing a lot of slaughterhouses, and also dig for oil and gold. They want their business to be the "biggest there ever was" and all they do is exaggerately big: their villas are enormous, their hotels are everywhere, their farms hosts several thousands cows, their mines are among the deepest in the world...
Trouble is that, due to their expansion and consumption of everything, they are a threat to the landscape and the environment - destroying forests to build their roads and buildings, drying out the lands to feed their farms... in fact, part of the reason why their state looks like the most desertic parts of Texas and Nevada is due to their actions.
Think... Buck from North. Think Art Land from Mar Attack. Think an evil (and obese) version of Clay Bailey from "Xiaolin Showdown". In fact, if I remember well in one episode Clay turns into a sumo for one of the Showdowns... this would probably be Augustus' appearance in this version: sumo Clay Bailey. (Edit: Yes, I checked out, it is episode 23 of the series).
Second Winner: Clarence Crump
(Based on: Clarence Crump)
Clarence didn't had any kind of personnality in the original drafts outside of a desire to prove he was right. As a result, I decided to have a lot of fun and create my own character.
The idea of vanity has already been touched several times with the other brats, but I wanted to give it its own character and kid. I also wanted to create a polar opposite of Augustus, denouncing the fact that being skinny can be just as bad as being fat when in excess. As a result, Clarence Crump is here a boy obsessed about being thin, and proud of being too skinny for his own good.
Mr. Crump is a pseudo-health guru that keeps writing phony and very dangerous diet books, the kind that will advice you to stop eating altogether to lose weight. As for Mrs. Crump, she is a beauty pageant champion (local and regional, and while she acts as if she was some national beauty champion, she always failed at nationals). From their union was born a child who inherited their vanity, pride and obsession with "health"
Black haired, very pale, very thin, very slender, to the point his bones show, Clarence delights in being skinny, and works as a teenager model promoting the "thin-fashion". He is also the embodiment of fat-shaming, never missing an occasion to insult fat people (in fact he often calls Augustus a big fat cow). He uses however the excuse of health for that (a trick his parents taught him) - promoting extreme thinness by talking about health and fat-shaming people in the name of health allows one to be much more horrible than normally accepted.
A good proof of how Clarence actually is just very vain and obsessed with being thin, and not at all defending health - Clarence condemns sports for being unhealthy, because according to him "muscles are unhealthy because they don't make you look beautiful, they make you look ugly".
He always wears short and black sleeveless tank-tops, the point being that he needs to show as much as his body to the world as possible, to be a "living example". He even wears his black short and tank-top during the tour (despite it being winte - the only thing he wears on top of his clothes to not get cold is a skunk fur coat).
Third Winner: Miranda Grope
(Based on: Miranda Grope)
This character was based on Dahl's own character of "Miranda Grope" from early drafts of the story, the horrible and atrocious girl allowed to do "whatever she wants".
In my version, the Grope parents are hippie-like people, the father having a very long beard and being covered in fleas, while the mother is covered in flowers and oss (plants that grew over her), and both always wearing rose-tinted glasses. They are the kind of parents that refuse authority and orders, seeing these (and social norms as a whole) as a "dictatorship". They prefer to trust their daughter to find her own way in the world, believing that experience is the best teacher in life. The result? They lazily raised her by telling her they would never forbid her anything and that she could do anything she wanted.
Miranda is a devilish little girl who does only what she wants, and becomes extremely violent when prevented from doing something. Or when people say something she doesn't want to hear. Or just when people she dislikes are near her. She shouts, the screams, she insult, she kicks, she hit, she throw enormous and terrifying tantrums. She has a very wide range of insults, and a truly evil mind : most of the things she wants to do are borderline crimes. It seems for her only chaos and destruction is "fun", a true little punk.
Miranda has a disastrous haircut because she cuts her hair herself, and she is always wearing the same clothes that she rarely washes): a white shirt, a blue sweater with long sleeves, and a plaid tiles skirt. An outfit that looks strikingly like a school uniform - but it is pure irony, because Miranda hates more than anything in the world school. She doesn't go to school, and the only time she went near one was to try to burn it down. (Her appearance is in fact based on Lauren Child's illustrations for Miranda, if you are wondering).
Fourth Winner: Veruca Salt
(Based on: Veruca Salt)
For this Veruca, I wanted to do something slightly different... here, Veruca doesn't want everything just because she is a spoiled rich brat. She is still one, but she is also the product of post-WW2 consumerism.
This Veruca was born surrounded by advertisements, logos, slogans and product placements. On television, in the streets, in shops, in journals, at the radio... She grew up with them and was influenced, brainwashed by them. As a result, she is obsessed with obtaining everything that was advertised, and she herelf looks like a walking billboard since she is covered in big, flashy logo and keeps reciting different brands' slogans and mottos. As soon as she sees something she saw publicity of before, she needs to obtain it at once. She is a true zombie, only hearing the call of the shopping mall and of the television advertisements.
One idea I had was that the Salt parents actually worked for (or where at the head of) a wealthy advertisement company, known to produce, design and create all kinds of famous publicities and slogans - and that they used their daughter as a guinea pig for their tests, and delighted in Veruca being so addicted to consumerism. In fact, they may have named her Veruca because at the moment of her birth they were working on advertisements for an anti-wart product, so that's all they had in mind.
Fifth winner: Herpes Trout
(Based on: Mike Teavee)
I went with this version of Mikee Teavee with the focus on "violence" already present in the original work, but also heavily used in the opera (and touched a bit in the 2005 movie).
This Herpes Trout is the embodiment of the fear of kids becoming violent upon watching television and playing video games (his only two passions in life). He has a true fascination with guns and firearms - US soldiers shooting aliens, gangs shooting each other, cowboys shooting at bandits, it's all he ever plays and watches. Herpes worships violence, and is absolutely obsessed with war (here I am thinking of all the wars present from the 60s to the 80s, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars...). War propaganda and the fight being glorifyed heavily influenced him - as a result his biggest dream is to go at war in some foreign country to kill everyone there and come home a hero.
Herpes comes from a family of rednecks and hillbillies from the deep country. They are not poor however, they are wealthy enough to have television and several video games, but they are uneducated people full of stereotypes, discrimination and hate. They named their son Herpes because they ignored what it meant but just thought of it as an "intelligent" name. Herpes has everal brothers and sisters, and all have a disease name.
Herpes himself is a big and strong kid, who followed body-buildings process a la Charles Atlas and military training, becoming impressively muscular. However, he retained a soft, childish and chubby "baby face", which kind of ruins the effect of this massive, muscular, almost adult body. Always dressed in a military outfit, he carries everywhere with him guns and firearms, the question being: are they real? Or are they not?
Sixth Winner: Violet Glockenberry
(Based on Violet Beauregarde)
I wanted with this version to take back the idea of a competitive and "sportive" girl obsessed with contesting and winning - introduced in the Tim Burton movie.
This Violet is a tall, muscular and strong girl. She won numerous sportive competitions, but this doesn't make her just arrogant and prideful like in the Tim Burton version. In my version she is also very aggressive and violent (a bit like in the original novel). She is a nasty and rude bully easily prone to anger (in fact, if she keeps chewing gum it is mostly to calm her down sot hat she doesn't punch everyone around). Her parents originally pushed her towards competitions to manage her anger issues, but sports only gave her more strength and destructive power. In fact, they became terrified of her, while she considers them losers here to serve her - she basically thinks of herself as self-made, literaly.
Seventh Winner: Charlie Bucket
(Based on: Charlie Bucket)
For this Charlie, I wanted to go with a Charlie similar to the original illustrations of the character: blond hair, blue eyes, a white boy...
Basically, he is the original Charlie. Very sweet, very innocent, a gentle kid, the best of the group.
However I changed slightly his background. Charlie in this version is not the grandson of four grandparents, but rather the big brother of four younger siblings - and his family here struggles with trying to feed five children (and a total of seven mouths) despite having very humble and low-paid jobs. I think Charlie has taken the role of a parentive figure for the siblings, but at the same time him spending so much time with young children helped him keep in touch with his "childish" side.
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