Preppy 2.0
They're baaaaack: New Preppy handbook is updated for a new generation
Stubbs & Wootton has designed limited-edition gray flannel “True Prep” slippers,$425
True prep never goes out of style
For some, preppy living comes naturally. If your name’s Muffy, Skip or Pierpont, say, or you refer to your mother as “mummy”—‘nuff said.
For the rest of us, there are guidebooks.
Lisa Birnbach, author of the famed Official Preppy Handbook, has updated that 30-year-old tome with a sequel, True Prep (Knopf, $19.95). The book, written with designer Chip Kidd, explains how preppies survive in what seems a post-prep world of cell phones, reality shows and synthetic fibers (hint—polar fleece finally makes it bearable).
“Thirty years ago, I was no one, with this little paperback,” says Birnbach. That’s before she triggered, like some Typhoid Muffy, an epidemic of prepophilia—a fascination with polos and all things pink and green.
Today, buzz for her new book is sounding like daddy’s heli’ to the Hamptons. Stores like Brooks Brothers, Sperry Top-Sider and Cole-Haan are hosting book parties across the country (Birnbach recently made appearances in Austin and Dallas; she hopes to make a Houston stop on a college tour next spring); Stubbs & Wootton has designed limited-edition gray flannel “True Prep” slippers (“True” on one foot, “Prep” on the other, with the book’s golden lab crest, $425); and the uber-preppy Vineyard Vines (a brand founded on Martha’s Vineyard by brothers Shep and Ian Murray nearly two decades after the Preppy Handbook hit it big) has polos, ties, totes and an embroidered vest, all with the book’s insignia ($65 to $95).
“I don’t feel as evangelical as I felt 30 years ago,” Birnbach admits. “It’s more a book about manners and habits and values and money, then it is ‘Please, be one of us.’"
So you’ll find tips on how to survive rehab, what to do when “mummy’s plastic surgery goes terribly wrong,” and helpful household hints (“NO TEXTING AT THE TABLE, PLEASE”).
And, of course, what to wear. Birnbach’s original book had only a passing mention of Ralph Lauren (whose prepster empire and influence hadn’t been fully formed back in the day). She makes up for that in the sequel, along with hefty dollops of Lilly Pulitzer, Brooks Brothers, Sperry Top-Sider, L.L. Bean, Cole-Haan…and on and on. And, yes, she still endorses pink and green, a vivid combo she stumbled upon herself by accident.
There she was, circa 1978, your average college student, about to dash across the Brown University campus for the squash courts. And late. So she threw on the first things she could grab—including a pink polo, and a bright green Fair Isle sweater.
“I almost got dizzy from these two fabulous, discordant, seemingly misfit shades,” she recalls. “These shades that made such a dramatic and, dare I say, cute impact. So I wore them to squash. I don’t even remember the game or who I was playing—I was so fascinated by the colors I was wearing, I think I must’ve just been looking down at my outfit the whole time.”
She later learned the vivid pairing was de rigueur at country clubs and other places, ahem, that mattered. “That was my moment of discovery,” she says.
For more anecdotes, you can visit trueprep.com, where you’ll find Birnbach blogging (talk about your preppy 2.0) and a playlist for WASP-appropriate listening—including “All That’s Known,” from Spring Awakening, by Duncan Sheik (who attended Andover and Brown), “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” by Mary Chapin Carpenter (Taft, Brown), “What Can I Say?” by Boz (William Royce) Scaggs (St. Mark’s School of Texas, University of Wisconsin) and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” (Chris Martin attended Sherborne School, a boarding school in Dorset founded in 1550, and University College London).
If that’s not enough for you, there’s “Take Ivy” (powerHouse, $24.95), a lush photo book depicting Ivy League campus style, originally published in Japan in 1965, now in its first English translation. Copies of the original, coveted by “trad” fans, go for crazy prices on eBay; this new version can be had on amazon.com—or at J. Crew’s catalog, website and Manhattan men’s stores.
All of which makes the exclusive preppy world…less so.
That’s fine with Birnbach, who’s even “agnostic” these days on the polo collar debate.
“It used to be imperative to wear collars up, but some feel it’s trying too hard,” she says. “Often I split the difference and wear one side up, one down. To each his own.”
