The One Year Anniversary Gala
Meeting #26: Commemorating a year of The Prep Club, and exploring personal style developments
Hello! Though it is perhaps improper to begin a celebration with some housekeeping, I’d just like to point out that last week’s Club Chair Bulletin is available here, or on your way out as always. This week, I’d like to take some time to reflect on my first year on Substack, and on personal fashion development within the same year.
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As a point, today’s meeting is going to be rather self referential, I hope you’ll be willing to indulge me this one time. At some point along the way I’m hoping to pull out some useful thoughts on the nature of change, particularly in personal fashion.
Substack as a platform has done more to facilitate my writing than perhaps any other tool. Coming to long form online writing post blog-dominance has always felt like somewhat of an uphill battle, the idea of self-hosting a site and generating an audience without a centralised platform felt like an insurmountable task. Maybe its the case that kids these days have it easy, but I feel very fortunate to have been able to carve out a small corner of this platform for myself.
Part 1: A Voyage of Discovery
The one aspect of this publication which sticks out to me as perhaps most intriguing, is that of letting you into my own process of fashion discovery. I have tried to foreground my inexperience where necessary, whilst still taking charge when I am able to speak from a perspective of information. As such, I’ve tried to keep curiosity and inquiry as major themes in my writing thus far, in simpler terms, I’ve looked to explore the why and how as much as the what.
This is really in reference to the noticeable jump in the quality of my content and writing from the first meeting to now, whilst it would perhaps be expected, I think its poignant to point out that I am now a far more informed individual on matters of fashion, collegiate, heritage or otherwise. I’ll be touching on the language I use to describe the fashion of the Club momentarily. Whether its the excursion I took into rugged Ivy, or figuring out what the devil is going on with vintage Polo chinos, these are things I’ve learned and then brought to the club, and that’s precisely why this publication exists. I probably had a little help from the Dunning-Kruger effect to get started, but its ultimately worked to produce an important narrative across our freshman year. Of course I’m still learning too, and I’m excited to see what else there is to learn.
Part 2: The language landscape
One particularly overreaching discovery is that the fashion discussed within the meetings of the club cannot be neatly defined, which is rather comical when I chose to posit a particular style as a core part of the publication’s identity. The scope of the club has simply expanded to accommodate the various infusions and expressions of heritage fashion.
Heritage Americana is the term I use these days, it seems to be best placed in connoting a combination of Ivy, Heavy-Duty, workwear, and Americana styles. What I am most interested in going forwards is dragging these looks into the 21st century. Can we make modern looks out of vintage clothing? Damn right we can. @aimeleondad is a phenomenal example of this I think, just as an aside. Collegiate wear continues to be a part of wider trend conversations, I think it’s pertinent that we make space for innovation right now.
Whilst on the topic of language, I’ve also grappled with using the term “menswear”, actually I’ve almost entirely avoided it. It’s tricky to navigate when my own dress skews towards masculine traditions yet explicit gendering doesn't really align with principles of inclusivity that I like to keep behind the scenes. “Menswear” is perhaps a useful descriptor, though I’m also aware that it somewhat defines the fashion of the club in the negative more than it aides in constructing better categorisation, that is to say I would be referring to the fashion of the club as menswear mores because it is not womenswear as opposed to it being particularly informed by menswear. Even then, making that distinction enforces an unnecessary binary. Perhaps you can see now why I avoid the terms, I get in my own head about it.
To summarise, I don’t quite have a perfect label to describe the genres of fashion with which the club interacts, not anymore. The infusions of streetwear and high-fashion into my own influences have skewed it in one direction, and my further adventures into the rabbit hole of classic Americana in another. All in, I like to think that we’re painting a pretty good picture of masculine leaning fashion in 2024, with a focus on the slightly more out-there looks. “Prep” is still a core part of this conversation, particularly in its attitudes towards unabashed commitment. If you’ll allow me to make just a slightly pretentious claim, I might suggest that the “Prep” of “The Prep Club” refers to this attitude, unapologetic commitment to over-the-top collegiate fashion. It’s just that these days that looks more like oversized oxfords and less like bright red chinos.
Part 3: On Developing Tastes
It is impossible for me to ignore the fact that the way I dress is almost entirely different now to when I started the club last year. This connects very closely with parts 1 and 2, I am well within my formative years as it stands.
There's been rather too much self reflection up to this point, so this will stay brief before I get to a bigger point, but take a gander at these looks which document the progression.
I’m very happy to say this is a vast improvement, a more informed, refined, experimental, confident, and open engagement with clothing. What I find myself questioning however, is how the hell I got here in the space of one year. Particularly, I find it rather difficult to reconcile in relation to my general anti-consumerist stance, I feel as though I haven’t been practicing what I preach.
There is this idea which we have returned to regularly in the club, that change in one’s wardrobe ought not to happen all at once but rather as a slow process of acquisition and relinquishment. The club remains anti wardrobe overhaul. It is, however, in the nature of engaging with a hobby, and that this is, an expected amount of acquisition of knowledge and subsequent acquisition of items from a new place of information. This is intensified when one is still making sense of said hobby. In relation to my own changes, the progression is visible in increments (if you're willing to ignore the time I bought four jackets in the space of a month), we got here by way of a lot of trial and error and arrived, for now, at a much more mature expression of largely the same desires. A year is both a shockingly short and surprisingly long time for this to happen within, perhaps.
Change is inevitable, there are times when it’ll happen slowly, and others where it sneaks up quick. I think buying secondhand is the most important part if one does find themselves in a period of rapid change. This is fundamentally a consumerist pursuit, as much as I might rail against that fact; excitement will result in purchase, the massive environmental and fiscal savings that can be had from buying vintage and secondhand make this fact a little easier to stomach. So, whilst we all know a wardrobe edit every season is ridiculous, being mindful of the fact one's taste is changing is the simplest way to engage with this development healthily, get some cool new sh*t, let some old sh*t go, compare the way you dress now to one, two, five years ago, map the trends in your own style, go out and set some new ones.
That’s all from me, I sincerely hope this hasn't been too self referential, that its been worthwhile you being here. Thank you very, very kindly for attending The Prep Club, the reception I’ve enjoyed up to this point has far exceeded what I set out to achieve a year ago, and I owe that entirely to you, club members. Here’s to a good start, and to a great sophomore year going forwards.
Prep Club adjourned, thank you ever so much and I’ll hopefully see you at the next one.
Congrats! Off to another year✍️