Thirty years ago, at another moment of recession and national malaise in the United States, Lisa Birnbach, then 23, edited and co-wrote The Official Preppy Handbook, a guide on how to dress and behave like old money, ie those who went to prep schools (the US term for public schools), and then on to Ivy League colleges.
The hangover of the 1970s was coming to an end, Ronald Reagan was about to enter the White House, and small “c” conservatism of the sexually restrained, personal comportment variety was about to enjoy a resurgence every bit as strong as Milton Friedman. Lacoste was back, the collars were turned up and, after 20 years in the fashion wilderness, the establishment had found its groove again. It was hip to be square, or at least to dress that way. Birnbach’s book spent 38 weeks at the top of The New York Times bestseller list in 1980, helping to launch a remarkably enduring trend in US culture: the commodity fetishisation of that etiolated species, the American White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (Wasp).
For most of the nation’s history, male Wasps more or less ran the place, occupying virtually every position of political and financial power in the US. This is no longer the case. There could be no clearer signal of this than the composition of the Supreme Court, the institution traditionally requiring the greatest educational pedigree. It is made up of three Jews and six Catholics, and is one third female. There is a Latina and an African-American but not a single Protestant.
Strangely enough, it was just around the time when this class hegemony began to fade for good in the late 1970s and early 1980s that people became so enamoured of the clothing worn by Wasps, particularly when on summer holiday. From Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger to the revival of Abercrombie & Fitch, the fading old Wasp clothier, via Bruce Weber’s photographs of shirtless young Aryans playing touch football on vast and perfect lawns, mainstream US fashion has for years now been peddling the fantasy of life as an endless Nantucket house party.