Thursday, September 23, 2010
We’re all Preppies now
Lisa Birnbach has come out with an update to her “Official Preppy Handbook" of 1980. Some have said the original OPM served as almost an ode to a dying WASP culture in America. But I’ve always maintained – and Birnbach seems to agree -- that OPH merely helped define and spawn new generations of non-WASPs imitating old WASPs, aspiring to get into the same prep schools and colleges, dressing in roughly the same deliberately casual clothes, replacing duck decoys with black Labradors, etc. Hub Blog would even argue that the huge influx of Ivy League grads to Wall Street has something to do with a gentry-like desire to have the right type of job (“finance” sounds so much more dignified than having to explain you’ve taken a job in your father’s plumbing-fixture factory in Ohio).
Anyway, from the Washington Post article:
Lisa Birnbach has come out with an update to her “Official Preppy Handbook" of 1980. Some have said the original OPM served as almost an ode to a dying WASP culture in America. But I’ve always maintained – and Birnbach seems to agree -- that OPH merely helped define and spawn new generations of non-WASPs imitating old WASPs, aspiring to get into the same prep schools and colleges, dressing in roughly the same deliberately casual clothes, replacing duck decoys with black Labradors, etc. Hub Blog would even argue that the huge influx of Ivy League grads to Wall Street has something to do with a gentry-like desire to have the right type of job (“finance” sounds so much more dignified than having to explain you’ve taken a job in your father’s plumbing-fixture factory in Ohio).
Anyway, from the Washington Post article:
Whether you read Birnbach's books seriously or for laughs, you know that prep is central to American pop culture -- rappers wear Top-Siders and Twitter's overcapacity symbol is a whale. Then there's skater-prep: black eyeliner, some plaid and Vans. Thirty years after "OPH," there's a huge preppy blogosphere dominated by 20-somethings obsessed with Lilly Pulitzer, pearls and pink-and-green. …P.S. -- President Obama isn't the only post-OPH preppy to get into the White House. George Bush I and II were born and raised in the culture. Bill Clinton spent much of his early adulthood establishing a preppy pedigree (Rhodes scholar and Yale Law, later vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, etc.). Ditto for Hillary.
Thanks to retailers like Ralph Lauren, anyone can be a preppy. But the look and lifestyle are evolving just as much as they're staying the same. The duck is no longer the most beloved of all prep totems (seeing it on wastebaskets may have been the deal-breaker), and musical tastes have broadened beyond Sinatra and Motown to include Vampire Weekend and Kanye West.
