Some time ago I ran a post praising the combo of light socks and loafers. Since then, marled socks have become my favorite kind for this look. They’ve got a great casual vibe for pairing with chinos and loafers, but I also dig them with trousers, tassels and tie.

I spied these the other day at Old Navy, complete with colorful varsity stripes, reason not to bother hiking them up throughout the day. And at five bucks a pair, they’re good ‘n’ frugal. — CC

North Beach has been an old stomping ground of mine since my early twenties. I recently paid a visit to the neighborhood after years of exile in Los Angeles.

Broadway is home to San Francisco’s famous strip clubs, such as The Condor Club, where Carol Doda first danced topless in 1964. It’s also where you’ll find famous Beat gathering places like Cafe Vesuvio and City Lights Bookstore.

City Lights, founded by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953, was where I’d go for obscure books in the days before Amazon and Bookfinder.

As for Vesuvio, I’d been planning on nursing an espresso there while reading Kerouac’s “Big Sur.” But by the time I got around to my afternoon in North Beach, I’d already abandoned the book. It was, like, hip for a bit, then I got bored and decided to just read “The Red and the Black” again. Whenever I get bored with books, I just read “The Red and the Black” again.

Kerouac is one of the founding members of the Beat movement in literature and hygiene, whose origins go back to Columbia University in 1944. During the Beat heyday, many of its proponents were natural-shouldered; above is poet Michael McClure in 1957, wearing a patch-pocketed 4/3 herringbone similar to the J. Press version we posted about previously.

While I was away in LA, The Beat Museum opened a few years ago. It has a solid collection of memorabilia and cool trinkets for sale. As I was wearing a sportcoat and tassel loafers, the curator/sales clerk asked where I was from.

The museum opens onto the street, where strippers stroll by on their way to work:

I’d already emptied my pocketbook at Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren, so my sole souvenir from North was a postcard from City Lights. It’s a shot of Gerry Mulligan and a Beat chick from the 1960 Beatsploitation flick “The Subterraneans,” starring George Peppard. Been meaning to watch the film and take any applicable screenshots, but it hasn’t been released on DVD, though there are unofficial copies available for sale. If anyone’s seen it, let us know what it’s like (pretty schlocky, according to the Beat Museum’s curator/sales clerk).

Further rambling (very Beat): My father told me that when he was courting my mother in San Francisco in 1965, they went to a Halloween party in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood where Allen Ginsberg showed up naked. Sometimes your parents surprise you.

“But we left before he arrived,” Dad added. Now that’s more like it.

Here’s Ginsberg later in life, looking radically conservative:

The LIFE archives did a photo shoot on San Francisco poets in 1957, which you can find here. It has some great atmospheric shots of that hip combination of poetry, jazz, sportcoats and glasses:

The headline for this post, incidentally, comes from Andre Previn’s song “Like Young,” which captures the pop spirit of the era (lyric by Paul Francis Webster):

I’m out doin’ the usual places,
And I’m livin’ it, like young.
Then I dig me this face of all faces,
She’s the craziest, like young.

She drinks coffee at Cafe Espresso,
She reads Kerouac, like young.
She goes where all the angry young men go,
Recites poetry, like young.

We start blowin’ the pad around ‘leven,
And we’re homin’ it, like now.
We spin records on cloud number seven,
And she’s reaching me, like wow!

I’m all unstrung
‘Cuz man she’s got him feelin’ like young.
If she were to brush me and go,
I’d startin’ to wear my hair again,
Just like a square again.

I keep a getting’ the kookiest notion.
I think maybe it’s like love.
I’ve been feelin’ a crazy emotion,
I think baby, it’s like love.

Now we’re ridin’ a rainbow to Cloudsville,
And we’re makin’ it, like young.
Love, soft as April snow.
Love, warm as candle glow.
Love, love is easy go.

In the late ’90s, several versions of “Like Young,” including ones by Dave Pell and Linda Lawson, appeared on the many reissues of Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. You might also want to check out versions by Ella Fitzgerald and Buddy Greco. Here’s Previn playing the tune with David Rose and his Orchestra, from 1959:

Finally, on my way back to the North Bay I visited Russell Street.

At number 29 there’s a little A-frame house where Jack Kerouac lived for a time. In fact, “lived for a time” is good way to describe his years on Earth: Kerouac died of acute bohemianism in 1969 at the age of 47. — CC

Longtime denizens of Tradsville surely chuckle when their perennial preferences become temporarily trendy. Then again, perhaps the current Atomic Age influence on menswear is not an ephemeral fashion blip, but a veritable Reconstruction of the American Wardrobe.

What we have here is a double-shot endorsement of the trouser cuff, which probably owes a lot to Thom Browne. The image above is from Valetmag.com, which in a post today extols the virtues of cuffs on the buzz-generating LL Bean Town & Field Pant, here paired with Bass penny loafers.

And below is a recent video from the GQ Rules series, in which Michael Bastian endorses cuffs but not socks. — CC

Princeton’s sartorial influence has been dulled by time, but for much of the 20th century it was well acknowledged by both a watchful fashion industry and rival schools.

LIFE magazine’s 1938 article, “Princeton Boys Dress in a Uniform,” confirms that “tailors and haberdashers watch Princeton students closely,” while students at Harvard and Yale call Princetonians “the prototype of Hollywood’s conception of how the well-dressed college boy should look.”

So how did Princeton men become such recognized style leaders?

Like most clotheshorses, they had money and a penchant for both quality and quantity. As one student wrote in a 1931 campus publication, “As every Princeton father knows, his son’s clothes are expensive.” Yearbooks, newspapers and athletic programs were filled with advertisements for Brooks Brothers and Franks Brothers, a top-tier shoe company.

Not only did Princeton men spend big bucks on their own apparel, but their stamp of approval helped manufacturers court other collegiates. The school’s name attached to a garment conferred integrity. EE Taylor Corporation’s “Princetonian” shoe was advertised as direct “from the campus of the country’s collegiate fashion center,” and was one of the company’s best selling models of 1934.

Secondly, Princetonians lived in a self-regulated environment with a well defined social pecking order. Sure, Harvard and Yale had their share of insularity and rich white kids, but they also pioneered financial aid and scholarships, which fostered a more diverse student body than Princeton. In rural New Jersey with little meddling from administrators, Princeton men created a homogenous campus culture that prioritized fitting in.

In “This Side of Paradise,” F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing his protagonist’s first day at Princeton, wrote, “Amory felt unnecessarily stiff and awkward among these white-flannelled, bare-headed youths who must be juniors and seniors, judging by the savoir-faire with which they strolled,” and he “wondered vaguely if there was something the matter with his clothes.”

For the first half of the century, Princeton freshmen and sophomores were banned by tradition from wearing particular garments, such as white flannel pants or striped ties. One had to earn the right to dress like a Princeton man.

While an ample bank account and the need to dress the part allowed Princeton students to assemble a well honed wardrobe, the leisure-based lifestyle of their campus inspired the actual trends. Athletics dominated Priceton’s student culture. Sportswear was worn around the clock. Earlier trends, such as tweed golfing suits or flannel blazers, had an air of formality. Those that came later in the century couldn’t have been more casual, and included sweatshirts, sneakers and t-shirts. Despite such differences, the collective contribution of Princeton students to the modern American wardrobe is undeniable. Whether you’re wearing khakis and a sport coat or jeans and a cardigan, chances are your clothes were first popularized at Princeton. — DEIRDRE CLEMENTE

Deirdre Clemente is a cultural historian who was denied admission to Princeton three times. She is a former fashion writer and currently a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon, where her dissertation dissects the influence of college students on the casualization of the American wardrobe in the first half of the 20th century. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Social History, The New England Quarterly, and Labor Studies Journal.

Do your outfits look stiff and contrived? Do you have a tendency to wear matching pants and saddle shoes?

What you need is a dash of sprezzatura — deliberately calculated nonchalance — to give yourself a more devil-may-care, deshabille appearance.

Here’s a quick fix in three easy steps:

1) When you launder an oxford-cloth buttondown, keep the collar buttoned. As the shirt gets knocked around in the wash, then flutters in the autumn wind as it hangs on the clothesline, the back of the collar will inevitably come out of alignment.

2) Remove dry shirt from clothesline. Don’t iron it. Don’t fix the collar.

3) Put the shirt on and continue through your day as normal, completely oblivious — or at least feigning to be — of your messed-up shirt collar.

Image courtesy of the 1988 film “Mystic Pizza,” in which a married Yalie architect seduces his babysitter with wine, Mozart, and charmingly disheveled shirt collar. — CC

On assignment for issue six of the elegant Singapore-based menswear magazine The Rake, Ivy-Style founder Christian Chensvold examines the two decades Miles spent clad in suits, before he got all freaky.

The article’s print layout can be seen online here. American distribution for the magazine is still being worked out, so in the meantime, why not subscribe?

* * *

Miles Ahead: Not just a jazz genius, Miles Davis was also a sartorial chameleon, easily carrying off the Ivy League Look and slim-cut European suits with ass-kicking charm
By Christian Chensvold

Late in his career, Miles Davis stopped playing the stark, haunting ballads that had been one of his trademarks. He loved them too much, he said, to go on playing them when they were no longer in style.

Throughout his four decades in jazz, in which he was at the forefront of every major innovation, Miles Davis always shunned the stale and the hackneyed  — what he called “warmed-over turkey.” This artistic integrity, this determination to be unpredictable, to stand for the new and to take risks, is key to understanding Davis’s chameleon-like role as style icon.

Under “The Warlord of the Weejuns,” the headline for the liner notes for a 1965 greatest hits collection, celebrated Esquire writer George Frazier called Davis “a truly well dressed man,” but someone the average man would be foolish to emulate. “I’m not advocating that all men aspire to dress like Davis,” Frazier writes. “That would be unrealistic, for it is this man’s particular charm that he is unique.”

In fact, Miles Davis should be every man’s sartorial role model, for he achieved what few others do: epitomizing changing eras while crafting an individual style. Davis was no stick-in-the-mud wedded to a lifelong look, but nor was he a malleable fashion follower taking orders from the marketplace. He was perennially a man of his times yet ahead of the pack, wearing, as Down Beat magazine wrote in 1960, “what the well-dressed man will wear next year.”

It wasn’t always that way. When he joined the St. Louis musicians’ union at age 16, he was too poor to be ahead of the curve, and had to settle for secondhand Brooks Brothers suits from the local pawn shop. Miles thought he looked sharp (”clean as a broke-dick dog” was his exact expression), but hipper cats like Dexter Gordon didn’t agree.

Miles writes in his autobiography: “Dexter used to be super hip and dapper, with those big shouldered suits everybody was wearing in those days [1948]. I was wearing my three-piece Brooks Brothers suits that I thought were super hip, too. But Dexter didn’t think my dress style was all that hip. [I said to him], ‘Why, Dexter, these some bad suits I’m wearing. I paid a lot of money for this s***.’ [Dexter replied,], ‘Miles, that ain’t it, ’cause the s*** ain’t hip. See, it ain’t got nothing to do with money; it’s got something to do with hipness.’

“So I saved up forty-seven dollars and bought me a gray, big-shouldered suit that looked like it was too big for me.”

In 1955, Davis signed his first major-label deal, with Columbia Records, and just as the silhouette of his suits changed from broad to natural shoulders, so did Miles begin setting styles rather than following them. “In the mid-’50s, Miles to the Ivy League Look in fashion,” writes jazz historian John Szwed, “having his clothes made at the epicenter of preppy fashion, the Andover Shop in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, where tailor Charlie Davidson dressed him in jackets of English tweed or madras with narrow lapels and natural shoulder, woolen or chino trousers, broadcloth shirts with button-down collars, thin knit or rep ties, and Bass Weejun loafers. It was a look that redefined cool and shook those who thought they were in the know.”

It was during this period — the time of groundbreaking albums as “Round About Midnight,” “Miles Ahead” and “Porgy and Bess” — that Davis became the iconic figure he’s remembered as today. Here was the “evil genius of jazz” hunched over his trumpet, his jackets cut specifically for his slouchy playing posture, his back to the audience, never once addressing the crowd, and frequently leaving the stage while bandmates took their solos.

But Miles’ arrogance and aloofness only added to his allure. As Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington note in their recent book “Clawing at the Limits of Cool,” while Miles’ coolness and glamor were rooted primarily in his music, “they were more than bolstered by his physical beauty and sartorial elegance, his complicated relationships with beautiful women, and most of all, his take-no-shit attitude.”

This attitude could elevate the most commonplace clothing items to artistic expressions in their own right. Take the simple white buttondown shirt Miles was photographed wearing, sleeves rolled up, during the 1959 “Kind of Blue” sessions. “The shirt is tucked neatly into his pants,” write Griffin and Washington. “He is tight and fit, in full control, in top form… an aesthetic statement.”

Though he admired legendary dressers like Fred Astaire, Cary Grant and the Duke of Windsor, Miles’ true role model was the boxer Jack Johnson, whose fine clothes, fancy cars and beautiful women seemed to unify his lifestyle into a coherent statement. “For Miles,” write Griffin and Washington, “the music is the central component of a larger aesthetic project that includes fashion, painting, boxing and self-creation.”

By 1960 Miles was a GQ fashion plate and on Esquire’s best-dressed list. Ever ahead of the pack, he’d already moved on to slim-cut European suits. Press releases for upcoming concerts detailed the sartorial as well as musical program. A 1961 press release for the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival outlines Miles onstage and backstage outfits, which included  a one-button beige pongee suit, a pink seersucker jacket, and handmade doeskin loafers.

What a man loves often destroys him —  or at least drives him to distraction. In a famous 1971 photo by Anthony Barboza, Davis stands in front of a walk-in closet overflowing with scarves, belts and boots, an avalanche of paralyzing options.

In “The Down Beat Miles Davis Reader,” Keith Jarrett remembers visiting Miles at his apartment, “and he was in his room with all his clothes, and he was looking at this wall-to-wall closet and wall-to-wall shoes. And he’d come out of his room with one thing on, and then he’d go back in, and then he’d come out of his room and he’d have something else on.” When Miles finally left the apartment, he scoffed at his life’s curses, muttering, “Bitches and clothes, bitches and clothes!” He’d finally decided what to wear — if only for a day.

Six months ago we ran a post called “College Miscellany,” comprised of various shots from the LIFE archives. Here’s an encore (click images for hi-res version).

First up are several shots from Bowdoin College in Maine. Above, 1952; below, 1957:

No date on these three Bowdoin shots. The one below looks like a good starting point for a Ralph Lauren Home collection inspired by a ’50s college dorm room:

Moving on, freshman class arriving at Cornell, 1960:

Freshman student from Hungary at Columbia, 1954, covering sports with pinned collar:

And finally, the classic combination of camel coat and football game. In this case, Wisconsin-Marquette, 1939:

However, at certain vivacious moments in the style’s history, discerning collegiate sartorialists have exchanged the reliable for the resplendent, the austere for the ostentatious.

One such moment occurred in the 1920s, when young men threw off their tweedy raglans in favor of a far more flamboyant material: raccoon fur. University of Illinois football star Red Grange (1903-1991) and radio crooner Rudy Vallee are credited with popularizing the wide-collared, ankle-length raccoon coat, a fad which spread quickly across the campuses of the Northeast. The coats were particularly popular among young male jazz enthusiasts who garnered the nickname “collegiates” or Joe College.

The first wave of the fad ended with the dawn of The Great Depression, but the coat saw a brief revival in 1956.  This second coming of the coonskin coat saw voracious demand for secondhand furs in, as the Lord and Taylor College Shop proudly announced at the time, “a state of magnificent disrepair.” An article in the New Yorker from August 17th, 1957 traces the origins of the revival back to a group of three young New Yorkers and a presumably jazz and smoke-filled party at their Greenwich Village apartment.

As legend has it, Sue Salzman was about to buy a used raccoon coat on a whim when it was snatched up by another customer. Bemoaning her loss at a party hosted by herself and her husband Stanley, she was approached by an acquaintence whose relatives were in the boys’ clothing business and just happened to have a warehouse full of old raccoon coats. This crop of furs was leftover from the wave of Davy Crockett Mania, during which time they were chopped and used to make coonskin caps. “Feeling manic” from their good fortune, the Salzmans purchased coats for themselves and for every person who attended their party.

After they began receiving inquiries about the coats, the Salzmans and their friend Benjy Bejan decided to go into business and let the fur fly. When Glamour magazine published a photo of a raccoon coat and credited them as the supplier, the trio received over 300 letters, phone calls and an urgent inquiry from Lord and Taylor. The department store was a collegiate style heavyweight at the time, and, as Mr. Salzman admits, “anything that Lord and Taylor does in college fashions is copied.”  Once Lord and Taylor became involved, demand outweighed supply, and a trend was born.

It is no coincidence that the craze for fur coats arose during periods of unprecedented prosperity in which youths actively sought to redefine their own morality. In this age of traditionalism imbued with conservative nostalgia it is sometimes all too easy to forget that collegiate style once represented liberation from the dress of prior generations, a way to dress freely for those who lived freely.

Below are images from 1928, 1959, and from the Fall ‘09 collection by Brooks Brothers (courtesy of Mister Mort), suggesting another raccoon coat revival might be just around the corner. Of course, that would negate the prosperity theory. — ZACHARY DELUCA

Video clip about Brooks Brothers’ store on Newbury Street in Boston. Fans of puckered oxford-cloth will no doubt cringe at the store manager’s remark that non-iron shirts are “one of the greatest innovations in fashion.”

Update and Winners Announcement:

LL Bean was thrilled by the response to the giveaway — so much so that they generously decided to pick three winners. They thank everyone for their great answers, and it was a tough decision. But a few stood out. In no particular order:

Zubaid managed to pair the sweater with not just a time and place, but with one of the most memorable moments in a man’s life:

I would wear out in the evening, modestly kneel down, and finally propose to my girlfriend.

Congrats on winning a sweater, Zubaid. We’ll congratulate you on your engagement after she says yes.

Ramon is actually willing to starve for style. Give that boy a sweater:

There’s 2 types of college students: Students who can afford Norwegians and students who would gladly trade it for a week’s food. I’m the latter.

Finally, after all the acrostics, haiku and rhyming couplets came in, we amended the rules to allow for more than 25 words for anyone who could write a sonnet. One man rose to the challenge, and while Daniel S.’s sonnet doesn’t quite scan iambic, it’s pretty consistent pentameter:

Dreaming of Norway

Dreams of white birds-eye on a field of blue
Fishing outside the mighty riffs of Stadt
For two decades I have wished to hold you
But for so long my desires were for naught

Now my heart beats fast in my naked chest
Soon to be enveloped in your embrace
What blind soul ever put you to rest?
The mere sight of your wool makes my heart race

The cold winters will come and chill my bones
But my Norwegian sweater hugs my arms
In a bitter world of endless unknowns

It protects me from all possible harms.
A future heirloom from old L.L. Bean
For my true love in Norway, I do dream.

Thanks again to everyone who played. Let’s do it again.

* * *

Feeling lucky? Better yet, feeling clever?

Ivy-Style herein introduces its first reader giveaway. LL Bean has kindly donated a brand-new Norwegian Sweater to one lucky reader. In your size, of course.

Here’s how the contest will work. Leave a comment with your answer — 25 words or less — to the following question: What would you do in your brand-new LL Bean Norwegian Sweater?

Sample answers: Introduce the people of Norway to the sport of gatoring. Have a beach bonfire and burn all available copies of “The Official Preppy Handbook.” Wear the sweater on a commercial fishing vessel off the coast of Maine to better understand what it takes to put a lobster on a plate.

LL Bean will decide the winner based on wit, humor, originality, or insight into the human condition. Let’s give the contest 48 hours. That should hopefully give us more than 10 entries but less than 500.

Every contest must have rules, so lemme think of a few. OK, how about:

1) Open to US residents only.

2) Your comment must include a valid email address. One entry per household. You’re on the honor code here guys, and there’s a special ring in hell for people who lie on the Internet.

3) Not open to Ivy-Style contributors. Give the readers a chance, fellas.

The contest will close at 5 PM Pacific Time, Wednesday, October 21.

Photo courtesy of A Restless Transplant.