Picture Analysis: Ivy League Style

Figure 8 is a photo of my mom, uncle and grandparents at my uncle’s middle school graduation. This picture was probably taken in the mid 1970s considering my uncle was born two years before my mom. My grandpa is wearing a single breasted navy blazer, with a white button down shirt, plaid trousers, a D ring belt, and a large red bowtie. A brochure on Ivy League style describes the classics of Ivy League style as, “Shetland tweeds, grey flannels, Oxford button-downs, and repp ties, as well as the more casual seersucker, madras, and khaki have been worn for decades” (“Ivy Style”, 2012). Since the fabric of the pants can’t be identified just by looking at the picture, it can be assumed that the trousers are madras or it could be a basic pair of

The Ivy league style was mainly popular from the 40s to the 60s, so for my grandpa to be wearing this in the 70s would mean that he is a little late on this style trend; he is wearing it as it is on its decline. This is the second example of my grandpa wearing a large bowtie, which was not characteristic of this period because most men were wearing wide ties. His choice to routinely wear large bow ties reflects on his sense of fashion individuality, even in the slightest ways. My mom in this picture is wearing a shirtwaist dress with a floral pattern, possibly with some buttons on the upper torso center, and ruffled sleeves. A few examples of shirtwaist dresses can be seen in the underage ‘dances and proms’ section of the mid 1970s Sears catalog, but this was not a widely seen style of the time (Skinner,

This could potentially be where my mom’s limitation of always going to catholic school comes into play. In her interview, when I asked my mom about any styles she really liked she said, “I got deprived because I was a Catholic school girl. Nothing stands out to me even in high school” (Riehl, n.p.). My uncle is wearing a simple blue graduation cap and gown, which is the typical dress for a graduation. My grandma is wearing a simple, sleeveless pink shirt with what looks like a patterned pink and white skirt. From the picture, it appears that she is wearing a pointy shaped bra. Farrell-Beck and Parsons (2007) noted many different bra styles of the 70s and how the pointy shaped look was amongst them (p.203). My grandma also still has a modified bouffant hairstyle, which at this point in time is no longer fashionable. My grandma isn’t wearing anything extremely trendy or innovative in this picture for her to be deemed fashionable at this point in time, which is a different from her earlier choices of the