Brian Laird on WNYC.

Now I'll end today's show with our second 100 Years of 100 Thing segment of the day.

It's thing number 81.

A hundred years of preppies, the polo shirt, khaki wearing, low-for-footed crowd.

You typically find it elite schools and country clubs in the Northeast, particularly preppy fashion.

Why, hid it in the clothes is a story of class, democracy, and the politics of, quote,

Americans' notion of taste.

That's according to Avery Truffleman.

She's the host of the podcast, Articles of Interest, a show about what we wear.

A few years ago, she put out a season called American Ivy.

After falling down the rabbit hole of preppiness while researching for her show,

she joins us now to cover the history of this style of clothing now, and as cultural criticism,

not just as a fashionista. Hi, Avery. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

So we'll start in the 20s and 30s, 100 years ago, on a specific elite campus, Princeton.

Why is this the genesis of preppy clothing and its infiltration into our classic dress code?

So, yeah, that's the interesting thing.

I feel like, you know, next time you look around at what's in all the shop windows,

it's a lot of collared shirts. It's a lot of

blazers. Like the style we call preppy or once called preppy is now sort of ubiquitous. And there

are a lot of early, early sort of hints and origins about where this style that we've come to

call classics or normal came from. But all signs really point back to Princeton, which, you know, is of all the Ivy League schools,

...