Her Majesty is most serious about distinctions among sororities, but in her case those sororities reside at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, coloring these explanations in comical shades.
How could anyone have forgotten Lunchy?
6: I certainly didn't, however I didn't recall that she had royal status and so am trying not to indulge in reckless speculation on the significance of this.
10: Did your time machine work and now you are a member of one of these 1970s sororities?
Wow that's misogynist. Just casually laying it all out there, you have to hand it to them, or maybe you don't.
It's interesting that this is so hateful but its distance in time renders it kind of funny and interesting. I too would love more pictures. I'd like outfit layouts, shopping guides, the works.
Also interesting that what I think of as early eighties fashion clearly got its start in the mid-seventies, possibly in the South.
Heebie, I was going to say that if you liked this you should get a copy of the old Preppy Handbook but then I realized that it has gone from being a random secondhand find (as when I got mine) to a hundred dollar collectible. Luckily you can read it here.
The Preppy Handbook is, weirdly, a book that tries not to be racist or more classist than is intrinsic to the subject. One is definitely meant to take away the sense that a preppy need not be snobby, white or especially conservative. This is in sharp, sharp contrast to the incredibly racist and bigoted UK knockoff, The Sloane Ranger Handbook. I tracked it down on eBay (probably costs a gazillion dollars now too) thinking it would be fun, and it's not fun. There's a lot of kidding-on-the-square about inferior races, the yobbos of the lower orders and the right of the British upper class to run the world plus some pretty rapey stuff.
The Fashionable Mind by Kennedy Fraser (available for Kindle for $5.99, another book that I bought at random for a dollar at the thrift store that is now collectible) is a bunch of New Yorker columns about fashion in the seventies and I think that if you like this sorority article you'd probably like that too.
Somewhat inappropriately for a rootin' tootin' anarchist, I love books about fashion, especially the kind where they describe people's outfits in great detail and make lists of social milieux.
I think we have a copy of The Preppy Handbook around the house.
Also The Sloane Ranger Handbook has way, way too little about clothes.
Early in the pandemic, I read Town and Country every day and went through about a million "Princess Diana's most bee-yoo-tiful dresses" slideshows and it was about the only thing that could console me at all.
14: Maybe you should sell that Handbook - it looks like you could get close to a hundred dollars for it if it's not in shreds.
It's probably in good shape but it's not mine.
17: I am actually a lurking presence - I have a newish job that is really, really busy and brain-draining, so I have a few minutes to read the posts but not much time to post. Only my love for style guides of the past motivated me today.
(After long years of accounting-adjacent roles, I am now a full-fledged accountant with a finance title, the crowning ambition of all us left-leaning types. I mean, it's not a fancy accounting job or anything but it is a respectably middle class title.)
19: Would you say that you are now white collar and no longer pink collar? Sorry your brain is drained. Hop the title comes with a respectably comfortable salary too.
Would you say that you are now white collar and no longer pink collar?
How can you tell? Asking for a friend.
You know, the white collar/pink collar distinction is a funny one here, since all the low-level accounting jobs are held by women and all the high-level ones are held by men and I certainly have the lowest level job. So pale pink, maybe? We could call it champagne collar, perhaps.
I don't make much more than I did before - my old job was union and I had a lot of experience, so I made almost as much as an entry level accountant. But my old level job was also slowly being automated away - about 1/6 of my work disappeared in the last three years on top of the pandemic slowdown - and I felt like it was time to try for the next rung on the ladder. So I'm pretty sad that I'm not in the union anymore, but given my employer's hostility to the union (they have eliminated union jobs at every turn and rearranged the roles into new non-union titles) and given that I'm not exactly aging backwards here (which would have its own drawbacks what with the shortening arms and so on) it seemed like my union days might be numbered.
Honestly it's been fun to learn new stuff and I've been able to piggyback on some of my new department's Very Organized administrative system to make some new, better work habits for myself. Also I invested in Target's cheapest all-wood desk/table to supplement my Ikea mini-desk because I now have three monitors. I didn't know that was allowed.
24: 3 monitors! Wow!
Is the 3rd monitor for Unfogged? That's the only way I can understand how you would use this.
After long years of accounting-adjacent roles, I am now a full-fledged accountant with a finance title, the crowning ambition of all us left-leaning types.
Congratulations!
Woohoo for increased job security! As a state government bureaucrat it's what I value most highly for myself, so it's nice to see friends getting in on the action.
I thought the article was poking fun? I tried looking up the author, but no luck.
It's easy to forget that 1976 was at least twenty years ago.
Congratulation on ... rose' collar? No. Congratulations anyway.
As I remember The Preppy Handbook it might have been written in the innocent belief that there was a set of dress and deportment rules that anyone could know and be allowed to play by, which, while annoying, is possibly better than what we've got.
Like Dress for Success without the empiricism.
Bad news, Mobes: 2016 was actually twenty years ago. (I know, right?)
Thames is a river. Thyme is a spice.
I just can't get over the pantyhose with open-toed shoes!
As long as the shoes weren't worn under the hose, it was common back then.
The wasps/Rockefeller republicans that the preppy handbook was about have mostly merged into the PMC class. Drive a volvo, don't buy new clothes often, slum on the LES at cbgbs, go to a good school.
It was a point after new deal/WWII tax rates, but before going to an ivy league was hard. The relaxed attitude toward life should have been what we tried to make for everyone, but instead became a bad 'privilege' and only the very wealthy get it.
I still try to avoid any non-natural fibers in clothing because of their influence.
Heebie, I was going to say that if you liked this you should get a copy of the old Preppy Handbook but then I realized that it has gone from being a random secondhand find (as when I got mine) to a hundred dollar collectible. Luckily you can read it here.
I know of it, but I've never actually read it! Now I'm excited.
And congrats on the job!
13: I'm pretty confident Peter York intended it as a scabrous satire of the phenomenon, and he definitely sold it that way, to the opposing liberal media-yuppie status culture. That was what mattered as he was a fairly horrible, NYT Styles before it was invented, cynical media darling and never wasn't hustling.
Pretty much by definition, a subculture defined by being an Oxford/county Tory wanker isn't accessible by buying a set of fashion tropes - if it were accessible like that, in the way Ivy/preppy/mod dressing is, it would be something completely different, and I'd even suggest it emerged when it did as a reaction against that.
He was the second most cerebral of the Monkees.
One of my friends in college was obsessed with this advice book: https://www.ebay.com/itm/185129568693
Because of the name of the author?
I apologize to anyone who clicks through after my painful joke.
40 primed me to misread 39, baffling me as to why Alex has such a low opinion of sweet, dumb Peter Tork.
They were all kind of dumb, but Nesmith wore a hat. The guy with the hat always comes off as the smart one.
Weirdly I had forgotten the author entirely, and although I'm sure that was the initial reason for the purchase, that wasn't the main part of the obsession. Said friend is gay, but was still closeted at the time.
I guess that was from before Gay Democracy was developed.
Someone wrote a novel where MI-6 sends J.R.R. Tolkien and Ian Fleming into Nazi Germany to prevent Hitler from creating unkillable soldiers. But I'm not going to read it because the authors have boring names and because the library has a wait list.
frowner! so many congratulations!
i also am in a brain-draining employment sitch at the moment, but so delighted to hear from you frowner and so happy at increased job security and also interest. a bummer re the union, maybe there are signs of hope on that front on the wider horizon? is it dangerous to hope? probably. oh well.
Apparently I'm too elitist for The Preppy Handbook. My gut reaction to the article in the OP was amusement at the idea that anyone at the University of Texas would be "born knowing gold from gold-fill" or have "monied backgrounds", or that an "old, established family" with debutantes would send them to public universities in flyover country. It's like they haven't heard of Brown?
Maybe it's a regional thing, maybe there's something I didn't know about mid-20th-century history or culture, or maybe I really was being elitist. For whatever it's worth I suspect it's a regional thing more than anything else. I had personal connections to Dartmouth College growing up even though I never had a connection to it as a college, plus family in Boston, so the Ivy League is probably more prominent to me than to someone in Texas even if they're a debutante.
Honestly, I probably never heard of Brown until I was already in college or maybe later.
Maybe not until they hired Gee away from The University.
My gut reaction to the article in the OP was amusement at the idea that anyone at the University of Texas would be "born knowing gold from gold-fill" or have "monied backgrounds", or that an "old, established family" with debutantes would send them to public universities in flyover country. It's like they haven't heard of Brown?
Wait, what? You are sorely misunderstanding Old Wealthy Houston and Dallas Money. Texas is super insular, and even more so in 1976. Brown is just a color for suits.
Right. The undergrad college market has gotten way, way less regional since the eighties.
Indeed, UVa used to be the highest possible aspiration for elites from the upper South. It was very much a "we're not going to play your game" towards Northeastern elites--you can't reject our scions if they don't even apply.
IIRC Princeton was (is?) long the "Southern" Ivy, the one where some Southern elites would in fact send their kids, not due to proximity (Penn being closer) but tradition of sorts.
And I was pretty rural. As I've mentioned before, it didn't occur to me that I might have trouble finding a book when I only knew the name of the author was "S. Cohen".
Yeah, Princeton has always been the "southern ivy" with all the official racism that goes along with it. See Wilson, Woodrow.
It's hard to overstate the impact of 54. And it's not just since the 80s, there's been a huge change on this since I went to college at the turn of the century. It goes along with a narrowing of the kind of student each college gets. At a state flagship you used to get a decent chunk of the very best students in the state, and now they all go to fancy colleges out of state. That's a big part of what's killing off academic majors at state flagships, the number of students interested in say taking classes where you have to write 25 pages and read 3000 pages during the semester has plummeted (or anything else academically challenging, like math or foreign languages). We have a really cool individualized major program here with famous alums like Will Shortz and Jaime from Mythbusters (both from small towns in-state), but no one is interested in it anymore because those students go out of state now.
51: I didn't know about Brown until just before high school, and I grew up in a suburb of Boston. Harvard and Yale were prominent names. Not sure if I knew about Dartmouth. Wellesley, b/c my Dad had a friend who was a Physics professor there.
And I went to a girls school, so I encountered Smith graduates.
60 to 57.
At a state flagship you used to get a decent chunk of the very best students in the state, and now they all go to fancy colleges out of state. That's a big part of what's killing off academic majors at state flagships, the number of students interested in say taking classes where you have to write 25 pages and read 3000 pages during the semester has plummeted (or anything else academically challenging, like math or foreign languages). At a state flagship you used to get a decent chunk of the very best students in the state, and now they all go to fancy colleges out of state. That's a big part of what's killing off academic majors at state flagships, the number of students interested in say taking classes where you have to write 25 pages and read 3000 pages during the semester has plummeted (or anything else academically challenging, like math or foreign languages).
That sounds super depressing. But the flip side is that there's a lot of poorer students who then get nurtured by faculty members who would otherwise have been distracted by stronger students, and they can develop in a way they would not otherwise have been able to.
FWIW, Texas is still very provincial. Some superstars will go out of state, but a lot of superstars will have their heart set on UT-Austin.
Yeah, the top UCs were probably more like Austin in that way.
Here we don't actually get very many poor students, 6% of our students are from the bottom quintile. I'm not sure how much that's changed and in what direction over time. Again it's a narrowing, the main group is students who got all A's in high school but don't have interests.