Preppy: Cultivating Ivy Style

Today, the idea of preppiness is as malleable as it is ubiquitous. American designers like Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren have made their fortunes on this sartorial sensibility by popularizing it far beyond its origins. 

 Upper class leisure activities -- golf, polo, and tennis, for instance -- were appropriated to created an American archetype.

Yachting and boating are another pasttime of the preppy lifestyle (and now we have the ubiquity of boat shoes to thank for it).

But, my, times have changed. The trend has long since shaken its staid, priggish implications and has been adapted, re-imagined, tweaked, and subverted over and over in popular culture. 

The genesis of the upright, high-minded visual language was born in the 1920s on Ivy League campuses, serving as unspoken language of elitism and scholarly society.

Each generation has forged a new iteration of the classic ideal, at times paying homage to its air of aristocratic exclusivity, or conversely, turning those very connotations on their proverbial head.