A Westward Expedition
THE RADAR // ISSUE #27
Welcome back to THE RADAR, The Prep Club’s fortnightly mini-magazine keeping you in the loop of what’s hip in the sphere of collegiate threads. You can attend last week’s meeting here, for a collaborative meeting with Michael B Dougherty, on our obsession with quality.
Here’s what’s on the radar this week:
— The call of the cowboy
— J Press SS26 sucks
— The secret seasonality that comes with wearing green
— A trench coat that lives in a tote bag
A Westward Expedition
It’s always been a little too much, all the embossing on the leather and the metal, the heels on the boots, the studs and the yokes on the shirts. For the longest time I’ve simply not been a Western-wear guy. It’s always been one of those ones that’s sort of “looks great on others, not for me”. It’s the ornamentation which I think causes so much friction, I’d typically consider my dress sense to tend rather minimalist, not in the sense that it’s ultra smooth, but it’s typically not overly gilded, I wear very few accessories, and for a while was rather avoidant of stronger patterns.
That was the first step on this path I imagine, a foray into paisleys and block prints, and now I find myself eyeing up fringe suede jackets— ultimately as an intensely avid Fleetwood Mac listener that desire was likely laying dormant for a while, waiting to be unlocked like a sleeper agent.
Perhaps it’s a sign of having built a strong enough base to explore from, maybe it’s just boredom and this is the logical next step, but I’m digging this Western thing, man. I saw a guy in the city on Valentine’s day in a long coat and full-bore, proper cowboy hat: creased brim with a pull-down, the works, and it seemed pretty damned cool to me. I think there’s a fair chance we’re headed that way a little more, we’ve had a couple brief nods to Western on the runway in recent years but nothing all-out. If we think about fashions as action and reaction, I think recent styles have been, generally, quite slick, and despite the proliferation of gorp-core, quite urban. Even when outdoor wear is being worn, it’s worn in a very clean, streetwear focussed manner. Most things about fashion are pretty clean right now, I’d say, all that crispy, dark indigo denim, and the old money shite. If we were going to look for a reaction to that, one that differs from the sort of lumberjack-ish ruralness of the early twenty-tens, I think Western wear might be a pretty good candidate.
I think reigning over all of this is a certain desire to be new in a fashion world all over again, go find out about the cool brands and stores in a different sector. So, like Lewis and Clark I’m off on a little adventure to the west, to Rocky Mountain down jackets and bolo ties, I’ll see what I fancy bringing back to my East Coast comfort zone.
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On J. Press SS26 and Pastiche
I was wary when Carlson took the helm of J. Press, I find Rowing Blazers much too loud for my tastes, and they’ve never quite had the bite to back up all that bark, whilst their editorial strength was prevalent, the garms were never something to write home about. Carlson himself too, when I’ve heard him speak he’s come across as a pompous ass, the precise picture of everything people assume to be true about wearers of “preppy” fashion: elitist, snooty, pearl-clutching. When he took ahold of Press with an intention to go toe-to-toe with Polo, I struggled to see the vision, now it seems like that suspicion has been pretty well vindicated.
The Press SS26 show that Carlson has presented takes the all time classic Take Ivy as it’s bible, placing a copy on each attendee’s seat and sending models down the runway in precise copies of looks from the pages, when I say precise, it’s hard to believe the book was actually open in the styling room, given what we actually saw in the show. If anything it all feels a little blasphemous. That’s generally the consensus in my circles anyway, it seems like we all hate it, even though— or perhaps because— we like Ivy style, a lot. I think that warrants a line of inquiry.
The styling, for one, is appalling. It feels like, with Take Ivy as the gospel, the looks should all be too simple to cock up, but they’ve found a true smorgasbord of ways. There seems to be no consideration of proportion in this show, the models just look… …bad. Trousers don’t fit well at the waist, tie knots are not tight enough, hats are perched bizarrely atop heads, the shoe choices are strange and cheap-looking, that horrendous oversized orange t-shirt, the colour combinations, awful, plus they’re all wearing massive watches for some reason. They have the vibe of someone in their first year of discovering Ivy style as a concept, of going way too hard before realising they need to tone it down. The ill fits are hard to abide too, it feels like they’ve dressed these models in the samples they had available, or they’ve neglected to hire a fitter, either way it comes across as a little cheap, which is the last thing you want a runway show to be. This is the primary undoing of this show upon initial viewing, it’s what compels one to just break out into laughter, looking at those poor models.
The second, more enduring issue, is that this collection is deeply, deeply, uncool. It runs against this slowly developing new identity for Ivy as something kinda hip, kinda anti-corporate dress, like it was originally, somewhat egged on by the likes of ALD and Drakes (even if they themselves are uncool now, which they are) interweaving those preppier sensibilities with streetwear. These Press looks are all for someone who’d tell you Bing Crosby is the greatest jazz musician of all time, that would describe Basquiat as “urban”. They’re just dorky: if I catch any of y’all in that “Take Ivy” spell out jumper I’m shoving you in a locker. It’s not just in the bright colours or the pulled-up socks either, it’s in the ties worn inside out to show the labels, in having anything at all branded with “J. Press”, in fact— even if Press has a certain IYKYK (yuck) factor, it’s not in a hip way. Most of all though, the total vacuum of cool has to come from all the “cheeky” nods to Take Ivy, the guys with no shoes, the BIC pens in the pockets, the bike, the oars, the books, that one guy with a trumpet.
Ultimately, the failure of this show is pastiche; it is, in every way, far too Ivy League. It pulls on all these comical idiosyncrasies in order to pay tribute to the book, and it’s entirely too bright and bold in its colour choices to ever appear chic or desirable. Perhaps that wasn’t the intention of the collection, fine, but when you commit to putting on a runway show, there’s a certain expectation of an attempt to put a finger on the zeitgeist, and when you openly say you intend to put J. Press up against Ralph Lauren, as Carlson did back in September 2025, you better come out swinging when it comes to styling. The net result of this collection is a reflection of everything which folks perceive to be wrong with Ivy style, that it’s insular, elitist, frumpy, old; it’s a vindication of every Ivy skeptic, and that’s a damned shame, especially when you and I know just how hip these clothes can be if you get them right. Compare that to the overwhelming positive response for the RL menswear show, look at all the things that got right, they’re the precise things that J. Press gets wrong.
When something has such a long lineage and a well-established, well-documented canon, pastiche will forever be the risk when trying to engage with it. To obsess too much with what’s already happened, fail to realise that the artefact you are referencing is a product of it’s time, take only the basic aesthetic qualities without their contextual reasons for being there, and further to produce a poor imitation at that, is the most complete failure that can be made when engaging with any historical form. This is why the J. Press SS26 show feels embarrassing, not just boring, this is why I, as an Ivy style advocate, find this show to be just the worst.
