This November, I’ll be sharing four High Noon Fashion Trend Reports. For this first one, I’m turning the lens on an emergent menswear culture where formerly distinct styles, ones that might even be at odds with one another, slide together into an entirely new variation of streetwear/sportswear.
This is a style that eschews nostalgia but is smartly referential, admiring craftsmanship and heritage as much as hype and grails. Introducing our 20s street style.
Please enjoy High Noon. Leave a comment. Tell a friend!
x SCREMES (Shawn)
The Roundup
Links to the stories you should be reading this week
Brooklinen is doing pillows now — both as a product line and as a new stand-alone brand called Marlow. ✺ Downtown Darling Dasha Nekrasova does a bit of method acting for her role as Comfry on Succession. ✺ The Laura Ashley Style (as with literally anything Princess Di touched) is having a resurgence. ✺ As the seasons change, maybe we need to seek out furniture we can cocoon in — literally. ✺ The author Ocean Vuong speaks to Fantastic Man. ✺ And the latest in the media-stoked war between Millennials and Gen-Z.
The Long Read
The week’s keynote story
Only going to read one thing? Read me.
Prep 🤝 Street: A Fashion Love Story | Shawn Cremer | HN Original
What do you get when two seemingly-conflicting iconographies of American (menswear) style intersect?
Long story short, a brand new aesthetic of dressing that ultimately taps into a long history of playful subversion of expectation.
What do I really mean by that? Though on the surface, preppy and streetwear styles may not seem compatible, when the pure visual language is stripped away to get at the underlying aesthetic sensibility of each, we find that prep and street share a delight in a subversive play with notions of propriety and subtle, often tongue-in-cheek boundary-breaking. And this impish élan is what is very old about this new fashion (b)romance.
Media pieces about the hottest new streetwear brands, their designers, and the icons who wear them are all over, but to understand a zeitgeist moment, I find it rather helpful to turn back the clock.
In 1989, Luca Benini, a true club kid of the eighties, founded Slam Jam in Ferrara, Italy. Though the brand name is not as readily known now in the mainstream as streetwear giants that came after such as James Jebbia’s Supreme, or crossover surfwear/skatewear precursors like Stüssy, Slam Jam has become a sort of gatekeeper of streetwear history.
Speaking to Benini, Carlo Antonelli at 032c speculated,
In all likelihood, ten years from now kids will look back on all the excitement around t-shirts, clubbing, jackets, and sneakers that we’ve seen over the last three decades as an incredible error of perspective – a materialist whim disconnected from the urgencies of the real world. But there’s also a distinct possibility that something about this strange whirlwind was instinctively trying to find new ways of expressing the cultural mutation that we have witnessed surrounding the turn of the millennium – and to prepare us, through dress codes and musical sounds, to navigate new speeds of communication and new territories amid the constant, day and night search for self that is urban life in the advanced present.
What Antonelli touches on here — “expressing the cultural mutation” — is the core of the streetwear ethos.
Twenty-four years before Benini launched Slam Jam, Teruyoshi Hayashida published a volume of photographs called Take Ivy. Filled with candid, day-in-the-life, street style-esque photos of students at America’s eight Ivy League universities, the book launched an Ivy Style subculture concentrated in Ginza.
The images feature plenty of short-sleeved Oxfords, Madras Bermuda shorts, sneakers paired with chinos, V-neck Jacquard sweaters and varsity jackets blazoned with the school name — in short, the hallmarks of Preppy style.
One of my favorite pages from the book:
Hayashida not only identifies the key pieces of ‘Ivy Style,’ but also calls attention to the way they are worn. And this is the key; arguably, it’s what made the book an initial success and has kept it relevant for over half a century. The louche, untucked, unexpected way of wearing staples that were meant to convey a sense of buttoned-up propriety is the underlying sensibility of preppy style.
When put this way, I see very clearly why the preppy streetwear style is catching on. The two component parts of the style share an affinity for looking good while playing. After all, “preppy” style is ultimately derived from sportswear — polo, rowing, sailing — as is “street” style — in large part skateboarding and surfing.
So yes, J. Crew closed the doors of its brick & mortar operations earlier this year, while emergent brands simplistically coded as streetwear — Bode, Fear of God, Noah, Aimé Leon Dore — continue to move from the online and pop-up world into storefronts, cropping up in SoHo and LA’s Arts District. But the ‘old style’ of street style is more quietly dying as well.
What we see emerging is a style that is clearly trying to express our current cultural mutation, that knows social expectations intimately and relishes toying with them on so many levels — class, race, occupation, location. Preppy Street Style is a style for the Trickster Gods.
Listen
In this episode of HLG, Chris & Jason interview one of my favorite Indie publishing cool-girl editors, Penny Martin of The Gentlewoman.
Cheers
Though autumn is well and truly here, perhaps sipping on this cocktail (ideally with a pot of steamed clams and corn) will transport you to one final summer evening, a saline breeze wafting warm over the dunes as you gaze out into the falling dusk, the sky dimming to the color of a sports coat with brass buttons.
The Madras
1 ½ ozs vodka
2 ozs unsweetened cranberry juice
1 teaspoon simple
1 ½ ozs fresh-squeezed orange juice
Shake to combine and garnish with a lime wedge