The ghost of our recent neighbor and competitor at 346 Madison Avenue lies naked in blessed memory of its once glorious past. I write this confession more in sorrow than misplaced glee.
In 1950, when I was 12 years old my grandfather, the eponymous Jacobi Press, took me to Brooks Brothers for my Bar Mitzvah suit. He took it back to his shop across the street for alterations and the first thing he did was rip off the Brooks Brothers label and replace it with one of his own.
Grandpa Press’ dismemberment of a Brooks Brothers label from my size 14 grey flannel suit followed the protocol first established in New Haven turn of the last century: namely, emulating Brooks Brothers.
All the players alongside the Yale campus — Langrock, Fenn-Feinstein, Arthur Rosenberg, White’s, Isenberg’s, the Yale Coop “followed suit” in mimicking Brooks Brothers. And when LIFE Magazine proclaimed the coast-to-coast explosion of the Ivy League Look, mainstream retailers got into the act by further copying the Brooks Brothers Number One Sack Suit, not to mention exploiting the famous button-down shirt, repp tie, seersuckers, Indian Madras, polo coat—the whole works.
However, in a memoir of his days at Yale, Episcopal Archbishop of New York Paul Moore, Jr. credited Jacobi Press with doing more than anyone else to establish the Ivy Look. “His tweeds were a little softer and flashier than the Brooks Brothers tweeds,” Moore writes, “his ties a little brighter.”
Soon his sons Irving and Paul used the Brooks curriculum to devise their version adapting a flap pocket on their dress shirts, center hook vent on sport coats, blazers, and suit coats and further adding a raised notch on the jacket lapels. I got into the act in the 1960s bringing Brooks’ 6th floor 346 two-button suit model for our modified requirements on 16 East 44th Street.
Manufacturers and retailers together joined in the conspiracy to clone the Golden Fleece including Gant and Sero in New Haven, Hathaway Shirts in Waterville, Maine. Norman Hilton in Princeton, Julie Hertling in Brooklyn, and Haspel Brothers in New Orleans.
Demise of the hallowed ground of 346 Madison brings to mind Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone level sands stretch far away,”
RICHARD PRESS
21 comments
Amen!