A Slight Case of Trichotomy

By and large, the day of the split-level personality is over: we're getting divided into thirds now, as becomes our more mathematical age, and this trichotomy has a number of far-reaching effects on how we live.

Drinking, for instance.

Three men enter a bar.

"Manhattan," says the first.

"Dry martini," says number two, "with a twist of lemon."

Number three is brief.

"Bullshot."

There--in a trivial instance and in brief--is an example of the trichotomy facing modern man. Every decision he is called upon to make pulls him in three different directions. Shall he be a Throwback, and order a manhattan, that virtually obsolete potable? Shall he be a Minuteman and make with that still-smart (but oh so familiar) spiel about "very, very dry with a twist"? Or will he jump the field, be a Headstarter, and move out front with that Bullshot (the beef bouillon and vodka thing)?

The trichotomy is pervasive and insidious. And nowhere are its symptoms more apparent than in our choice of clothes.

For our purposes, we can check out the Throwback and his problems rather quickly. Likely as not he's given up his Hoover collar and his spats, but you still may find him donning a too-wide Paisley tie.

But the choice between Minuteman and Headstarter is a very real one for the rest of us.

We take the reasonable position, let us say, that changes in men's fashions--a button moved a quarter of an inch this way or that, or a lapel taking on a life of its own--are hardly true cause for extraordinary sessions of Congress or for sobbing yourself to sleep if you missed out on the new look. But every man is fashion conscious, even if it's a trifle subcutaneous. He may aver that fashion as such is a matter of indifference. It's what isn't fashion--once the matter is brought up--that concerns him.

As an example, ponder the fate of the pink shirt. A few years ago it was the badge of the Madison Avenue executive, the man who shopped at Brooks. But it was confined to that narrow thoroughfare--until suddenly, the imitators reached out and grabbed it. The elegant curl of the Brooks buttondown collar gave way to cheaper and starchier versions, and pink started to blush on the bosoms of sharp Broadway folk. From those glossy purlieus, it moved with reasonable swiftness to the pants shops and the bargain basements, and today the pink shirt survives largely as a useful implement in the hands of a car-washing crew.

Which brings us to our immediate problem, and the pivot of our present fashion trichotomy, and that is to gauge -- possibly by celestial navigation, since fashion for men is an inexact science if there ever was one -- just where that all-pervading influence, Ivy, stands in relation to us all.

The origins of Ivy, which is one of the most positive fashions to come along in many a year, were curiously negative. If you will glance at the accompanying illustrations to this article, and refer to the one entitled Throwback, you'll be looking at certain characteristics which gave Ivy its greatest reverse-twist impetus. Just after World War II, men were acting and talking big, and they wanted their clothes to reflect this. There were the big characteristics: very wide, heavily padded shoulders; the lapels wide and pointed and flared; the jacket double-breasted with lots of room under the arm and in the chest to suggest the ripple of great muscles on the torso; the trousers with a number of pleats across the front to suggest further size, and cut wide all the way down to the cuff; even the hat sported a wide brim and a high crown.

Now, Ivy existed all this time. It had always been on the tables at Brooks Brothers and the wealthy Wall Street broker and his fellows preferred it for its lack of ostentation. There was a whispering campaign at one time that it looked better on middle-aged men with comfortable bay windows, and that that was why the more well-to-do preferred it. But the so-called Ivy college undergraduates -- who respected their elders' money, if nothing else -- also turned this unostentation into a sort of virtuous fashion weapon. Look at me, they seemed to say in their expensive, conservative suits -- note well the clothes worn by a man too intelligent and too wealthy to care a hoot about what hoi polloi wear.

And then this snobbishness turned on them. Their aristocratic disdain for style created an "Ivy" style which at this writing is a staple among night club comics, busboys on their days off, messenger boys from the corner store, and traveling jelly bean salesmen. These lads rejoice in the deliberately narrowed shoulders, the narrow lapels with the high gorge, the simple straight lines and high-button front, the narrow trousers and the cordovan bluchers, which not too long ago were the very insignia of the Ivy crowd that disdained the muscle-bound look we saw in the Throwback. Now, we all, even the Ivy lads wearing Ivy, are Minutemen, for better or worse.

Of course, Ivy is very much with us, and will be for some time. Men's fashions don't really move; they ooze along imperceptibly like a glacier covering a few yards every year. But it must be observed that a great many of what one Manhattan rental agent specializing in swank properties euphemistically calls "sensitive people" are mincing around in a kind of super-Ivy which is definitely comic. The shoulders are so narrow it must pain their owners to squeeze into them. The trousers are so snug and tapered that the lads have a literally self-contained look. They have exaggerated the initial simplicity of Ivy until it is achieving some truly complicated results.

There is bound to be a reaction to this, of course. In some quarters it is already taking place. The strong group instinct of the college crowd will keep it Ivy for a long time to come, but young fellows a few years out are getting a little uneasy over the sleazy parodies inspired by Ivy, and are wondering what the next trend may be.

Right now, as so often happens when fashions in anything are in flux, there are baleful and malign influences at work in men's wear. A raft of so-called Italianate and European garments are screaming -- in cut and color -- for your attention. Most are flamboyant and melodramatic experiments, with small survival value except among a limited coterie of misguided exhibitionists. Some of this garb will inevitably be affected by second-rate Hollywood moguls, or middle-aged magnates from smalltown emporia paying their first visits (complete with wife and kiddies) to Miami or Provincetown. The sapient young sophisticate won't be tempted by such sartorial monstrosities: they play no real part in his trichotomy. But a residue of good from these gaudy attempts to make every man his own walking colorama will probably remain in the form of a growing awareness that a too-slavish adherence to the safely drab can be as unexciting as last night's canapés were this morning, and that a good gentleman's tailor can flatter as well as fit the male figure without distorting it.

We've had a few feelers out for what the Headstarter will be wearing very soon, and from the looks of things, we figure that men are going to like what seems to be coming up. Nobody knows for sure, as yet, but the prognosticators with the best weather eye (and high batting averages) seem to think that the new silhouette will express in clothing much of the elegant Continental mood you've already noticed -- as, for example, in the slimmer shoe styles that are successfully competing with the old, hefty "custom-type" shoe with the thick sole.

In our third sketch, labeled the Head-starter, we've caught something of this Continental air. The shoulders will be natural, without the definite attempt to squeeze, à la extreme Ivy (which too often results in a pear-shaped appearance), and there may even be a bit of padding in them, although never as much as the old swagger type carried. The suit will strive for a casualness, with a touch of the tailored look, which will probably cut a few inches off the long jacket which hangs low -- in stern denial of any desire to suggest following a body line. The new suit will not be quite so deliberately unconscious of styling; the ultra-Ivy lapel will broaden a bit, and the top button of your jacket, which you may have expected to find right under your chin in about one more year, will relax and slide down a bit lower on your chest. The shorter jacket will, of course, give your trousers a longer, leaner look. European clothiers favor tapered trousers; these will undoubtedly stay with us. The more dashing versions will probably go in for fancy pockets or even Edwardian cuffs on the sleeves. The least you can expect is something of a nip-in at the waist.

This is probably what the natural look of a few years ago was going to evolve into -- with the Continental influences slowly coming to bear upon it -- had not Ivy caught the fancy of everyone in sight and temporarily blocked any further evolution in fashion by its strong and youthful individuality. It's a good style, still. But don't let our laboratory problem in trichotomy obscure the fact that a Minuteman who never alters his ideas or his fashions simply suffers a gradual sea change into something strange (but not always rich) and winds up looking suspiciously like a Throwback. We're not trying to push you into being anything: after all, Babe Ruth wore a camel's-hair cap in his heyday, and now they're coming back again. Standing still sometimes has its virtues, if you don't mind just waiting around for the world to catch up with you. But there are gentle seismographic rumblings indicating the first cracking in the Ivy substratum, and we thought we'd let you know about them in these early stages. Fashion creates its own obsolescence; today's fine-feathered friend may well turn out to be tomorrow's dodo. It behooves you -- as the hounds of spring come baying in -- to take a good look around. Like in the pages of Playboy, for instance.

Minuteman

Throwback

Headstarter