Home Fashion The Offifcial Preppy Guidebook. How to survive as one…

The Offifcial Preppy Guidebook. How to survive as one…

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The prep in a bygone era...

Polo Ralph Lauren. Ultimate purveyor of preppy fashion. Image source- Guest of a Guest.

Off the back of Vanity Fair’s recent anecdotal article about what it means to be a prep (yes it’s a fun read, it has laughing and so glad we are not preps) we decided what if we could give a true account of what it is like to be a prep and what it takes to survive as one? That said, I had Victor Fanale, who I can assure you is nothing like a prep sit down and ponder what in fact a prep is and how one goes about surviving as one. To those preps out there nothing might surprise you (although we do give your secrets away) and to those of us out there who have innately been beguiled by preps we explain why that is so and what you have fortunately been spared.Scallywag.

The Official Preppy Reboot

We all know what preppy is; that look, the attitude, the Hamptons, the boat shoes. Something about it is so familiar to us (at least those, to those of us in the North East) but yet, what do we really know of them? What exactly makes these sailing and vacationing upper-class white folks tick? “True Prep:It’s a Whole New Old World,” by Lisa Birnbach illuminates exactly this. And while much of it is de classe, there are quite a few quirks that you might find surprising.

We know the style, a hundred thousand times, we know it, but in the style section of this revised handbook (the original was written 30 years ago, yes the trend has been with us for a long time…) are a couple tid bits that might seem kind of hypocritical to the casual style enthusiast.

“We generally underdress. We prefer it to overdressing.” Well that’s news. Of course the prep is the most casual of the high-class, and he imagines himself to be the most laid back, which may or may not be true, but in comparison to the rest of the world he is hardly ‘underdressed’. And then there’s the “High-Heel rule: You must be able to run in them- on cobblestones, on a dock, [the prep’s natural environment] in case of a spontaneous footrace.” I wasn’t aware that foot races were a big part of the prep lifestyle.

But there are some interesting points of advice that has me wondering whether I should burn my blue blazer while you all buy yourselves one. Point in case, Lisa Birnbach’s True Prep makes a big deal about if you are a prep you need to go out and buy yourself a blue blazer. “Every single one of us—no matter the age or gender or sexual preference—owns a blue blazer.”


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