Chapter 5

Kansuke Shizu had come back to the United States to film Ivy style to capture it and show everyone in Japan what the look was really about.

But from the moment Shizu and his film crew arrived on the Harvard campus in 1965, it was clear something was different.

The expectation was that everyone would be dressed in these Ivy League suits.

W. David Marks, author of Amitura.

And the kids start showing up and they're just wearing dilapidated flip flops and cutoffs.

The most casual version of Ivy League style you can imagine.

The zeitgeist had changed so drastically by the mid-60s that the classic Ivy look was starting to seem like an endangered species.

And they just start melting down because they're like, we can't find any people that dressed the way we thought they would.

Shizu didn't know it, but only a few months later, the hippie would become a fixture on the college campus.

They showed up on campus in May 1965 and by fall 1965, Vivian, more protests are really a full swing and you get a lot of jeans.

So it's really the last gasp of what we now would understand as traditional Ivy League style.

It's just that it's really, really dressed down. And so if you look through take Ivy, there's not really that many photos of people and ties and plays.

I was actually looking at it today and it's mostly people in stadium jackets and cutoffs and t-shirts and tight jeans.

So similarly to how men's clubs sort of like fudge the street style photography to make it look like Ivy was popular in Japan.

Shizu sort of filmed whatever Iveaness was left on American college campuses in 1965 and there was a little bit left.

I think they rolled with it when they were there. So they just tried to find as many people as possible that looked the way that they wanted them to look and then they filmed what the reality was.

There was kind of a big debate about could we even use this because like they don't really dress the way we want.

But over time they start getting some good photos and some good footage. They go to Dartmouth, they go to Brown, they go to Columbia, they go to New York for a couple days and shoot that as well.

They get some footage of the storefront at the flagship Brooks Brothers. They get a couple of Ivy graduates and their gray flannel suits.

You know, they sort of cobble it together and they take some liberties.

In the film there are some scenes that are kind of semi-dramatical where it's like a kid drops all of his books on the way to class and then he goes into class and

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