Whether worn by a model or an industry insider or a chic spectator watching the fall collections come down the runway, Ivy League—also known as “trad,” a precursor to preppy style—is definitely back in vogue. Just look at the lettermen jackets going for a thousand dollars in vintage stores, or the models in J. Crew ads sporting penny loafers without socks. The only thing hidden in this resurgence of a quintessentially American style is a sense of its Jewish roots.

The Jewish influence on menswear in general is well-known, from wholesalers peddling the fabrics that make ties, shirts, and slacks, to the tailors and the retailers and the designers themselves—Marc Jacobs, Isaac Mizrahi, and of course, Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz) continue to define modern fashion. But Jewish designers’ role in creating the Ivy League look has a distinct context, because these designers created the signature style for a world that wouldn’t admit them.

David Weinreich started the tradition in 1896 by opening Weinreich’s, a shop in New Haven, Ct., that sold custom suits. Two years later, Arthur M. Rosenberg opened Rosenberg’s, where “Rosie” would reign as the original Jewish King of the Custom Made Suits in New Haven well into the Roaring Twenties. In 1902, Jacobi Press opened his own store on Yale University’s campus, where he perfected his three-button sack suit jacket and inspired a dozen imitators that catered to the Ivy League’s finest.

Jacobi Press had emigrated from Latvia in 1896 with every intention of continuing his rabbinical studies, but, like many Jews to arrive in America at the time, he put his religious training aside, to work for his uncle’s custom tailoring business in Middletown, Ct. Press’ grandson, Richard Press, carries on his grandfather’s legacy as the preeminent historian of the classic look: He is a contributor at the blog Ivy Style, where he dishes the old gossip and tidbits that would have been otherwise lost to history. Press—who flew the coop for Dartmouth, only to return to New Haven to work for the family company from 1959 to 1991—says his grandfather never forgot his Jewish roots, becoming the first Russian Jew to become a member of the local German Reform temple in 1902, and keeping a collection of Judaica and Talmudic studies in his personal library.

By the 1920s, J. Press had become the choice tailor for everyone from Duke Ellington to Cary Grant. Even though F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have shown up to military training wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, Press says the man responsible for one of America’s greatest novels was, in fact, a customer of his grandfather in the 1920s, and in a 1936 letter to his then-15-year-old daughter, Scotty, Fitzgerald cautioned the teenager to “beware of the wolves in their J. Pressed tweed.”

By the 1950s, the look was inescapable. After Rosenberg retired, two former J. Press employees, Sam Kroop and Mack Dermer, acquired his brand in 1958, shortly after “The Ivy Look” began landing full-page spreads in major magazines, starting with Life magazine’s “The Ivy League Heads Across The U.S.” in 1954.

The Jewish pedigree of this quintessentially American style is undeniable. If you surveyed the Princeton campus on a spring day in 1962 and saw a student from a well-to-do Southern family strolling in a pair of madras shorts with a blue oxford shirt, there was a good chance that shirt was the product of Marty and Elliot Gant: former J. Press stock boys, and the sons of a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant. The real Ivy League alumni Mad Men who ran the advertising world of New York City wore suits with the Chipp logo from Sidney Winston (another former J. Press employee) on the inside of the jacket. President Kennedy supposedly made the switch to exclusively wearing suits made by New Haven custom tailor Fenn-Feinstein because he admired the ones worn by then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff, who would become Connecticut’s first and only Jewish governor.

Yet while Rosenberg, Press, and their ilk were free to measure out fabric, sew together, and create the suits for America’s movers and shakers, Jews were routinely denied admission to the Ivy League schools (especially Yale, the epicenter of the Ivy look) and country clubs frequented by their customers. Schools imposed quotas and restrictions to keep Jewish enrollment low. Richard Press recalls stories about Vic Frank, a Jewish football player in the late 1940s for Yale whom the athletic director tried to kick off the team, and another about a “society fellow” choosing to live in a hotel rather than share his dorm room with a Jewish student.

The quotas are gone, but the influence of those Jewish ateliers still endures today, thanks to modern designers who have once again turned the Ivy League look into a billion-dollar idea.

Ralph Lifshitz, a boy from the Bronx, started out as a salesman for Brooks Brothers (the one brand commonly associated with the Ivy look not founded or owned by Jews) and ended up climbing to the top of the fashion world with Polo Ralph Lauren by perfecting the ultimate symbol of modern trad style: his iconic polo shirt. If you walk into a J. Press store today, you will see that not much has changed since the brand’s inception; there are Yale pennants, pictures of bulldogs (Yale’s mascot), leather couches, and of course, suits. Gant has teamed up with popular young designer Michael Bastain, boosting its brand credibility with the young and chic.

But the influence that those Jewish-owned and -operated companies have is most evident when you look at a generation of Jewish undergraduates decked out in wares by Ivy imitators Steven Alan and Band of Outsiders. They don’t worry about being part of a Jewish quota, or whether or not their roommates will vacate because of their heritage; their biggest worry now is whether or not they’ll ever get back that blazer they lent out to a fraternity brother and if he’d even bother to dry clean it first.

This is, obviously, absurd. Yet it would be equally absurd (well, nearly) to deny the young couple the right to marry each other. One solution a source has proposed would be a nice homage to family history: the couple should change the name back to what it was—Lifshitz. Ralph, recall, is a Jewish boy from the Bronx; the name was changed, moreover, not to hide its Jewishness but to hide the expletive within the name. And, really, is Lifshitz more obscene than Lauren Lauren?

All this talk of Ashkenazi heritage, of course, poses yet another question about the impending nuptials. The thought of a Jewish Bush—as in those Bushes—entices.

Laurens in Love [Page Six]

• Larry Ellison (5th, $39.5 billion).

• Sheldon Adelson (16th, $23.3 billion).

• Sergey Brin and Larry Page (24th, $19.8 billion).

• Michael Bloomberg (30th, $18.1 billion).

• Alisher Usmanov (35th, $17.7 billion) (not Jewish, but Muslim and married to a Jew).

• Rinat Akhmetov (39th, $16 billion).

• John Paulson (39th, $16 billion).

• Mikhail Fridman (43rd, $15.1 billion).

• Michael Dell (44th, $14.6 billion).

• Susanne Klatten (44th, $14.6 billion) (not Jewish, but was caught up in crazy Nazi-sex-blackmail scandal with a Jewish guy).

• Steven Ballmer (46th, $14.5 billion)

• George Soros (46th, $14.5 billion).

• Mark Zuckerberg (52nd, $13.5 billion).

• Steve Cohen (114th, $8 billion).

• Ralph Lauren (173rd, $5.8 billion).

The World’s Billionaires [Forbes]
Earlier: Another Year, Another List of Rich People

The question is more complicated than it might seem. For me, fashion used to be inextricably linked to my Jewishness. Mainly this is because the catwalk of my past was the synagogue aisle: As I’ve written, for me, good clothes and shiny hair were the particular trappings of Shabbat and holidays; prettying oneself was a unique form of hidur mitzvah, or glorifying the commandment. (The same principle is responsible for your sterling silver candlesticks, or that nice carved mezuzah from the Old City.) When I got older and started circulating in a wider community, I found that these values were calcified in the term “JAP,” which, despite its arguable historic connotations of misogyny and even anti-Semitism, I reluctantly embraced, because there was no other readily available term that meant something both to me and to the culture at large.

Then, a couple of years ago, a colleague asked me who I consider to be a truly Jewish designer—not as in Ralph Lifshitz, the Jewish boy from the Bronx who created the ultimate sartorial phantasmagoria of the WASP lifestyle, but as in designers who created the fashions that most spoke to the Jewish story of upward mobility, conspicuous consumption, desire for assimilation, and, at some far point, acceptance and even leadership. I offered up Emanuel Ungaro, whose garish prints seemed to me reflective of aspiration, that most feverish of American Jewish traits; at the other end of the spectrum, I said, was Prada, whose aggressive minimalism revealed nothing if not confident insiderdom.

But I’m no longer sure. So I put the question to you: Who’s a Jewish designer? And—perhaps more importantly—does it even matter anymore?

Related: Fashion’s Fascists [Tablet Magazine]
The Jap [Lilith]
Earlier: Golly, Galliano!
Resignation over John Galliano
A Plea on Behalf of John Galliano

“Speak to the children of Israel,” God instructs Moses, “and have them take for Me an offering; from every person whose heart inspires him to generosity, you shall take My offering. And this is the offering that you shall take from them: gold, silver, and copper; blue, purple, and crimson wool; linen and goat hair; ram skins dyed red, tachash skins, and acacia wood; oil for lighting, spices for the anointing oil and for the incense; shoham stones and filling stones for the ephod and for the choshen. And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst.”

If you vaguely remember the Israelite story, you may recall the bit about their 40-year sojourn in the Sinai desert, a patch of earth not celebrated for its abundance of gold, spices, and purple wool. Why not settle for something a bit more Arid Chic? Why not build something a bit easier to transport? Why all the opulence?

Because God knows that a people—especially a people stumbling through the wilderness—is in need not only of spiritual solace but also of a physical space where worship can become concrete and where God’s ephemeral greatness can be seen on earthly terms. He may not be fond of icons or graven images, but when it comes to dwellings, the Lord bequeaths his people a simple principle of design: More is more.

How strange, then, that so many of his people—at least those who, millennia later, pursued careers as architects—rejected his command and instead championed the spare and the unadorned. Some, trained in Berlin’s Bauhaus school in the 1920s, became pioneers of the International Style; when the Nazis rose to power, a number of these architects moved to Tel Aviv and worked to reshape a town of old houses tinted with arabesques and tanned by the Mediterranean sun into a modern metropolis of clean, straight lines and functional forms.

Eventually, when the time came to erect Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, it was the spirit of Germany, not of Jerusalem, that triumphed: Joseph Klarwein, trained in Munich’s Polytechnic, designed the low, approachable, modern edifice. The Knesset, some critics complained at the time of the building’s inauguration in 1966, was a thoroughly un-Israeli structure; its striking resemblance to the American embassy in Athens, designed five years earlier by Bauhaus oracle Walter Gropius, didn’t help much to alleviate the charges of foreign influence. The critics, however, were missing the point. If there was such a thing as Jewish architecture, it was, by the 1960s, far more likely to follow Gropius’ commands than God’s.

The biblical tradition of architecture, the one that holds that buildings that matter must be stately and lavish, hasn’t fared much better since then. It is nowhere in evidence in Frank Gehry’s functionless extravaganzas, nor in, say, Daniel Liebeskind’s angular abstractions. Indeed, looking at the past six decades, its safe to say that Jews design buildings either as wild ideas or as austere objects of utility, but rarely in the grand, rich tradition evident everywhere from the holy sanctuary to the palace at Versailles.

Historically, of course, one can find many reasons to explain this trend. No ethnic group removed for centuries from the centers of power and influence could be expected to develop a taste for grandeur. But herein lies the startling power of this week’s parasha: Even at their most powerless, without a state and without a clue, roaming the Egyptian dunes with the bitter taste of slavery still in their mouths, the Israelites, at God’s insistence, had a refuge of great luxury and elegance. Power and influence, the parasha teaches us, splendor and grandeur, all begin at home.

And while manifestations of this architectural logic are still uncommon in Jewish circles, at least one notable example may delight our eyes and hearts; it’s a sanctuary of an altogether different sort, the new Ralph Lauren store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

A new building in the highly decorative Beaux Arts style, this four-story, 22,000-square-foot mansion houses the designer’s collections for women and the home. It is a complement to the Ralph Lauren men’s store across the street on 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, the historic Rhinelander Mansion that the designer purchased in 1986. The new building’s exterior is finished with lovely limestone with hand-carved flourishes, the entrance is a regal archway, the interior a bacchanalia of ornamentation, with wrought-iron railings and Persian rugs and intricate chandeliers everywhere.

Born in the Bronx as Ralph Liftshitz, Mr. Lauren attended a number of Jewish day schools before finding his way into the fashion business. Whether or not he paid particular attention to God’s musings on design is unknown; what is evident is that when it comes to buildings, Lauren is refreshingly unafraid of opulence. Not for him the austere, negative spaces, the glass and the steel, the angles and the emptiness and the big, bold ideas. Those belong to the theorists, to the intellectuals, not to the landed gentry, a class traditionally inclined toward unconflicted declarations of elegance and wealth, a class traditionally bereft of Jews.

Keeping in line with the designer’s general aesthetic of moneyed ease, Lauren’s new store is an important monument to an idea that Jews would do well to reclaim, the idea expressed in this week’s parasha: When you build, build gloriously.

Interior of Ralph Lauren Madison Avenue Mansion, New York.
Ralph Lauren

• Stuxnet: “Nearly as effective as a military strike.” Score one for Israel whoever made the virus. [JPost via Goldblog]

• Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write a pre-emptive obituary for the peace process. [IHT]

• Speaking of obituaries: Can I say that having a regular column (soon-to-be-blog!) on prominent Jews who have just died is a brilliant idea? I am jealous, and can’t wait to RSS. [The Eulogizer]

• Timothy Snyder on Shoah. [NYRB]

• A Jew will enter the Bush clan. Not just any Bush: Lauren! And not just any Jew: A Lauren! (Wait, is her name going to be Lauren Lauren?) [JTA]

• I don’t get the joke in this post—what could possibly be snarky about saying that Neil Diamond rocks?—but congrats to a new entrant in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. [Jewcy]

My favorite Neil Diamond song.

*For inspiration check out this not-quite-haiku from Tablet’s resident rhymester, written circa age 10:

Haiku About Freedom

I like to be free
You can do what you want
You can study Torah

There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for quite some time now. It’s not easy to do. Awkward, really. But I can’t help myself; some things need to be addressed, no matter how painful. This is one such thing. And it can wait no longer.

You see, my fellow Hebrews, we have a problem. Whether by accident or by design, whether throughout the course of human events or just in recent decades, whether knowingly or not, we have become sartorially challenged. And it’s not doing us good.

This textile dysfunction of ours isn’t hard to notice. Walk into a party here in New York, and the various clans that inhabit the city’s social landscape become evident, distinguished by their uniform: just as a Scot could tell a Lumsden apart from a Scrymgeour, a quick glimpse at their garments would help you tell the dons of academia—all faded tweeds and time-chewn mocassins—apart from the lords of Wall Street, with suits by Brooks Brothers and red ties by Satan.

But the Jews? Oy: the Jews, more often than not, are the schleppy ones, the ones with the jacket just a bit too tight or too loose and the pants a tad creased and the shirt slightly stained. More often than not, the Jews are the ones who look like they just don’t care. Which is because, more often than not, they couldn’t care less.

Before you pounce, friends—haven’t I seen Natalie Portman’s stunning Oscar dress? And don’t I know that Ralph Lauren, that icon of all-American elegance, was once Ralphie Reuben Lifshitz?—please bear with me. After all, Lauren may be Jewish, but he made his reputation by abandoning the Bronx and imagining instead the polo fields and yacht clubs, dens of effortless elegance and entitlement. And Calvin Klein may have celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, but only became a man in full when he adopted that clean-line look that owed more to Yves Saint-Laurent than to anything you may see in shul on Saturday morning.

Nothing better illustrates this argument, perhaps, than a quick Google Images search comparing New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose perpetual grayish-blue suits are as monochromatic as his voice and public persona, and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, whose crisp, unbuttoned white shirts and tight-fitting pinstripe suits perfectly capture the reckless charm evident in both his personal and political lives. Put bluntly, the point is this: we Jews, in general, are an unstylish bunch.

There is, of course, a strong philosophical statement behind this common carelessness. Gently broaching the topic with several of my more accomplished and successful friends, men and women whose wardrobes, alas, fall far short of their stature, a similar theme came up repeatedly. A sloppy attire, went the argument, is a sign of a great mind: unlike the beefheaded goyim, who gladly idle away their time with fripperies and ornamentations, we Jews are too busy thinking, addressing life’s fundamental questions, to care about such piffle as lapel width or hem line or cut.

A good argument, this, but not one that our forefathers would’ve embraced. As this week’s parasha goes to great lengths to demonstrate, even the holiest of Hebrews were as concerned with sharp suits as they were with sharp minds: for pages on end, the Bible describes the outfits to be worn by the high priests, from their linen breeches to their silky sashes, displaying the obsessive attention to detail one expects to find in Esquire rather than in the Good Book.

Why do we need to know what the priests wore? Or why, for that matter, did the priests even need such luxurious getups, given that they spent most of their days sequestered in the sanctuary, far from the madding crowd? The answer is simple: it’s because our relation to our clothes has always far transcended our mere utilitarian needs. The Greek philosopher Epictetus got it just right when he said that a man must first know who he is, and then adorn himself accordingly; without the adornment, presumably, we can never be who we truly are, can never feel the true force of our personality.

A less philosophical way to think about this issue may be to imagine how you felt the night before the first day of school, say, or upon starting a new job or going out on a first date. Unless you are severely disinterested in all things corporeal, it is more than likely that you spent at least a few minutes fretting in front of the mirror, picking out the perfect outfit, discarding a few alternatives before settling on the one that made you feel most comfortable, the most desirable, and the most confident.

There’s nothing frivolous about such behavior. On the contrary: we are, all of us, perpetually playing dress up, counting on our clothes to imbue us with that determined sense of purpose that our easily rattled psyches often neglect. It’s why the priests had their linens, why brides have their gowns and soldiers their fatigues and nudists their nakedness: nothing says more about who we are than what we wear (or don’t wear).

And so, brothers and sisters, let’s try a bit harder. Let’s, together, wage war on frumpiness and schlubiness and carelessness. Let’s learn from all of our ancestors—the high priests of God and the high priests of Seventh Avenue—who worked hard to look good, and make this millennium the one in which we Jews become known as much for our bon chic as for our big brains. Instead of wearing our hearts on our sleeves, let’s keep our sleeves on our minds. Let’s dress up.