Preppy look returns, replacing understated with louder style

Christina Binkley
Wall Street Journal

Club ties. Lilly Pulitzer. Pants and belts embroidered with little whales or sailboats. Jack Rogers sandals.

Preppy is back in full swing. Not just the understated khakis-and-white-polo kind of preppy. This is a time of loud pink and lime - for men.

The new preppy is much like the style chronicled in 1980s The Official Preppy Handbook, but with twists. Lilly Pulitzer, whose flowered Palm Beach, Fla., shift dresses became famous in the 1960s, now has a collection for men and has broadened her offerings for women and children as well. Ralph Lauren has renewed its famous Polo shirts by enlarging the pony, giving its WASP-y standard an ironic wink. There are new angles - such as pants in horizontal seersucker and corduroy from Cordarounds.com. advertisement




Vineyard Vines now does for men what Lilly Pulitzer has long done for women. It has quickly sold out of this season's colorful patchwork shorts, and another hot seller is four-panel pants in blue, green, pink and yellow - each panel a different color. Launched in 1998, its revenue has risen nearly sixfold over the past three years, and it is now taking its seersucker pants and flowered skorts across the Pacific to the U.K. So very American, the silk ties populated by tiny whales, sailboats or flags are a favorite among politicians; Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton are among the adherents.

The last time we were loving golf shirts and pearls this way, we were entering an era that celebrated wealth, on our way to a time when Gordon Gekko was the king of Wall Street and every aspiring corporate raider had a closet filled with Lacoste alligator shirts and Topsider deck shoes. Then, greed was good.

Now we call it "luxury."

This is a period that lusts for symbols of the good life: $3,000 crocodile handbags, $20,000 tourbillon watches, $250 bottles of olive oil, and big charitable donations that assuage the guilt of driving an SUV. The preppy look is the affordable weekend version of all that. It's what the people who run the nation have always worn at their country homes.

Now, as in the 1980s, people who want to suggest they live that old-money lifestyle are wearing it, too. But now the once-understated look is about flamboyant colors and embroidered whales.

"Things got so multicultural around here that preppy waned," says John Murray, co-owner of Murray's Toggery Shop in Nantucket, Mass., which invented the prepster staple Nantucket Red canvas pants and holds a copyright on them. "But now it's back."

Of course, today's preppy look has new elements - more dress styles, more florals. Some people are even mixing and matching preppy with other looks - Indian skirts, $300 jeans.

A book called A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style, was just published by Assouline Publishing. Susanna Salk, the book's author, says she had trouble getting people to participate in the book because many people feared the term WASP would generate controversy. It was thought to suggest narrow-mindedness or White monoculture. But the book hasn't been controversial.