Worse, this Bravo mess (which airs Tuesdays at 9) misses the essence of preppy culture. The name “preppy,’’ lest we forget, comes from prep schools. And prep schools are, in the cultural sense I’m talking about, boarding schools - not country day or Upper East Side privates. It was on boarding school campuses that true preppies were spawned. The petri dish in which the culture was created and perpetuated was the prep school dormitory.
It is there that one was introduced at a young age to a “Lord of the Flies’’ insular existence that defies description. Essential friendships were forged and enemies made in prep school dormitories. It is where you were introduced to hall hockey and a particular strain of sarcasm.
Preppies are timeless. Wait long enough, and they’re in vogue again. They have never changed. Everyone else has. This speaks to a sense of security on their part rather than a lack of imagination. They never went through their Dolce & Gabbana phase.
Preppies gave America the sport coat - an advance on par with the wheel - and pioneered the blue blazer. They gave us khakis - and they really are pronounced like “car keys’’ in Southie - along with polo jerseys, the two-button suit, button-down collars, the list goes on. To dismiss this as preppy is to miss the point. We’re talking classic, conservative men’s clothes.
When the Gap started push ing khakis over a decade ago, I’d see billboards with the coolest of the cool - Miles Davis - in khakis. Jazz legends like Davis and Chet Baker, I have on good authority, wore preppy clothes. They didn’t buy them because they were preppy - they had never heard of the word - but they liked the understatement of the clothes after the loud outfits in jazz that had preceded them.
I write about preppies from the remove of decades after my own boarding school experience, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But prep school culture has changed dramatically since then. The robust multiculturalism on today’s boarding school campuses, fueled by institutional wealth unavailable in public schools, has replaced the negativity that used to dominate prep school culture.
