Prep and Sweats
THE RADAR // Issue #25
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 The Prep Club’s cold weather survival guide.
Here’s what’s on the radar this week:
- The situationship between prep and sweatpants
- Ralph Lauren F/W 26 Menswear thoughts, except way later than everyone else’s
- Peacoats, and some light snobbery
- A ham fisted attempt at some travel writing
Prep and Sweats
Sweatpants, ever-contentious sweatpants. Sticking a pair in with a bit of ivy has become a favourite for anyone hoping to poke some traditionalists in the ribs a little bit. I will refer briefly to that photograph of Reagan, and move swiftly on before the deep seated fury that fills me upon hearing that man’s name takes hold.
The thing is, the grey sweatpant is every bit as iconic and as classic as the khaki chino, the blue jean, the charcoal flannel. Though you don’t catch them on the pages of Take Ivy, you’d have probably found them somewhere or another on the Princeton campus at that time. Hell, they’re only two decades younger than chinos, they came about in 1920, and saw widespread adoption by the thirties.
This, I think, is what makes them so popular as a slight left-turn. They have this undeniable classic status that you sort of have to respect, even if you disagree with the way they’re styled. There is this sort of knife edge, the perfect balance of being just audacious enough as to arouse attention, without violating the perceived sanctity of the Ivy/ Trad style canon.
Pitti has just finished up as I write this, and that sort of titillation is never more apparent than at that parade, I think. Especially since the institution of menswear tradition can maybe be thought of as a little stuffy, uptight even. The logical thing if one wishes to be perceived as fun and youthful is to poke and prod away at that. I’ve definitely done it in the past, camouflage trousers with navy blazers and leather jackets with black tie. The problem I see though is that it’s very insular, it’s dressing in a way that ignores the outside world, and that’s where I begin to struggle if I’m honest. That’s where you arrive at the dreaded costuminess, it feels a bit like laughing at an in-joke you have with a different group of friends. There’s also a sort of microcosm, there, of our attitudes towards rebellion in other senses, there is a desire for subversion but in a way that still defers to the institution which it resists. There’s a boundary line around the protest, and when you put it that way it just starts to seem a little square.
So, I’ve got a new (to me) pair of grey sweatpants, I’ve not had a pair before, at least not since I was a child, how the hell am I going to wear them? I think kinaestheticsm— meant in the way that we’ve appropriated it to discuss fashion— is fairly worthwhile in this case. It’s worth returning to the practical reasons to wear sweatpants, comfort, flexibility, warmth, the things normal people consider. I’m also going to factor in how they make me feel, that is to say I’m unlikely to wear them to write or paint, I can’t focus in anything that comfortable. I want lean into their comfort in a way that feels stylish: there’s a great look in When Harry Met Sally, worn by Billy Crystal, an aran knit jumper with grey sweatpants, for a spot of reading. That’s it to me, a picture of abject comfort, which manages to retain so much more dignity than the onslaught of athleisure that we’ve fallen into en masse.
It seems that even in my own private little fashion domain, the grey sweatpant manages to be ever-contentious, but I think that’s a part of why it remains so very popular.
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Ralph F/W 26, rugged ivy goes mainstream
So I’ve seen the RL show, just like everyone else, and I think it’s pretty damned good, like most everyone else, and not just because it vindicates a lot of predictions I’ve made in my time writing this rag. I do think the near universal praise has a fair bit to do simply with Ralph finally catching up to the contemporary pant silhouette, if you look back to last year they were very much locked to what I’m going to call an “Italian taper”. I reckon the other major factor is rugged ivy. There are a hell of a lot of looks in this show, seventy-three in fact, but the ones that have found their way onto the banner images and TikTok green-screen backgrounds are the ones with a loud focus on blending old-school outdoor-wear with prep. It’s all deep pile fleece, duck boots, and the colour orange— which I think is doing a lot more heavy lifting here than anyone thus far has given credit for— it is, what we nerds would call, rugged ivy (and there’s a bit of Lo-Life in there too, but that sort of comes naturally whenever Polo pushes the Sport label in a vaguely hip fashion).
I trust that y’all know the playbook pretty well— god knows half of what I talk about on here is mountain parkas and Bean boots— rugged Ivy has pretty much overtaken old-school ivy or “trad” dressing as the predominant style of the menswear obsessive. It sort of follows gorp-core growing in wider culture, its an off-piste way to still fit in, which is what we’re sort of always looking for. It’s really the logical conclusion that Polo would look for a way to ride the outdoor-wear train along with their prepdom. Funnily enough, if anything they’ve gone more retro with it than you might expect Ralph himself to go, he was a bit of a pioneer of wearing Salomons way back when.
My core question is how influential is this really going to be? At the time of writing— which to pull back the veil slightly is about a week before this reaches you, dear club member— you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a ready-packaged fashion revolution. It’s the talk of the town. I think we’ll probably see a coming together of prep and gorp as two of the biggest players in current fashions, but that was likely going to happen anyway, it’s just a logical conclusion. RL isn’t the cultural monolith it was back in the eighties and nineties, at the end of the day it’s still a multinational that stays afloat mostly by selling oxford shirts and quarter zips to finance bros, there’s a metric fuck tonne of their product about secondhand, and thus the obsessives tend not to shop at the boutiques.
Do I think it’s killer? Of course. Do I want that duck patterned half snap? Yes. Am I going to wait until it shows up in a TJ Maxx this time next year because none of their primary consumer base wants it? Probably.
Polo has been trying to push back to a higher standard of quality in their boutique products, they’ve got knitwear made by Harley of Scotland, they brought back a big chino silhouette— though not the right one—, I imagine they might have some selvedge jeans pretty soon. There’s clear evidence of an interest in appealing to the menswear nerd, this show being the most candid thus far, and I think that probably speaks to an increasingly informed consumer. That’s the way things might well go, I think, it’s what hangs in the balance, with total, overwhelming descent into AI designed, petrochemical slop clothing on the other side. At the very least it’s nice to see Ralph put their money on the good ending.
The call of the peacoat
I’m feeling that distant hum, that desire to go after something no-one else is thinking about right now. It’s contrivance, or snobbery, or some combination of the two, but I want to wear something unique in the zeitgeist, and to do that I’m turning, for some reason, to an absolute stalwart of twentieth century fashion.
