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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy April 20, 2005: Princeton
style, circa 1955 “Frankly, when I’m out with a girl for the first time, the thought always lurks in my mind to try to kiss her good-night,” wrote “Matthew Manners,” a.k.a. John Stearns II ’58, in a short-lived column for Seventeen magazine in 1955. As reported by PAW’s On the Campus columnist, James Lynn ’55, Stearns’ mother was an “advice to the lovelorn” columnist for the magazine, and thought it would be fun to let her readers hear from a real young man. Alas, the experiment lasted only one issue, according to Lynn. “The response to Stearns’ excursion into journalism was so discouraging that he gave it up after the first column, cherishing a check for $100, several derisive letters from friends of both sexes, a few scattered queries from readers, and a broken romance with his own best girl, which he attributes to the column.” Today’s PAW readers are left with a peek into the allegedly simpler, sweeter times of the mid-20th century. A photo essay, “Men at Work,” on the PAW pages before Lynn’s On the Campus column, shows Princeton students studying at Firestone Library, wrapped around chairs, scrunched up in carrels, stockinged feet in the air – but they are all men, of course, and in the 18 photos, only one is wearing less than a dress shirt. Jackets, ties, and V-necked sweaters were the uniform. The formality of the times is driven home by a Brooks Brothers ad in the same April 15 issue. “Casual Clothes for Evening,” the headline announces, “a whole new group of clothing that has never been available before.” “More informal than a dinner jacket, far more appropriate than sportwear, you will feel well-dressed and at ease in them,” the copy promises. (Though with flannel jackets in red, green, yellow or black, it’s hard to imagine why.) Yet in Lynn’s On the Campus column, an item suggests that not everything about the 1950s was formal, constrained, and homogenous. The topic was the senior banquet; the banquet speaker was architect Frank Lloyd Wright, then 87. Wrote Lynn: “The seniors were used to hearing that conformity is undermining the democratic ideal of a society of individuals free to develop to the utmost; that quality is lost in a thirst for quantity; and that creation from within has been displaced by stylization from without. What most of them hadn’t heard was such cheerful contempt from a man who had proved that it didn’t have to happen, and such a genial denunciation of all those who had submitted. Matter-of-fact and detached, the old gentleman in the flowing tie cast a blighting glance at American democracy, waved it aside and asked his audience to do better, as he had.” As with any age, it’s dangerous to generalize. The seniors
angling for a risky first-date kiss in their Brooks Brothers outfits
were also – at least once in awhile – pondering the
implications of their own standards and mores and what it meant
to be growing up in 1950s America. (They were also, as the photo
essay shows, falling asleep over their books on a regular basis.
Some things, certainly, never change.) Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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