A HARVARD SHOP, BLACK IVY STYLE & MILES
The birth of the cool ran through a New England men's clothing store
‘Milestones’ is a 1958 album recorded by Miles Davis with his “first great quintet” of John Coltrane on tenor sax, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto sax, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on double bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. In his catalog of albums ‘Milestones’ is notable for employing “modes” aka scale patterns other than major and minor chords. The album consists of six tracks, including two Davis originals (“Sid’s Ahead” and the title cut), and excellent covers of a Thelonious Monk classic (“Straight, No Chaser”) and a Dizzy Gillespie/John Lewis composition (“Two Bass Hit.”)
Musically its definitely worth a listen. In addition ‘Milestones’ has another life as a fashion statement. On the cover Davis sits on a stool holding his trumpet in his left hand while wearing an olive green shirt open at the collar. In 2021, sixty-five years after that album’s release, a cropped version the LP photo graced the cover of the book, ‘Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style,’ written by Jason Jules and designed by Graham Marsh, which describes how black culture figures from Miles to Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X to Sidney Poitier, appropriated the upper class gear of Ivy League and Prep school fashion in the Fifties and early Sixties, turning button down Oxford shirts, hand stitched loafers, and soft shouldered three button jackets as symbols of resistance and the struggle for civil rights. The images collected in ‘Black Ivy’ are a catalog of cool looks that has long influenced me, even though I had no idea that “black ivy” had a name.
Recently my understanding of the black ivy style was deepened when I stumbled upon a book published on a website for a Harvard Square men’s clothing store — ‘Miles, Chet, Ralph & Charlie: An oral history of the Andover Shop.’ It’s the story of a man named Charlie Davidson, who ran the shop for decades and had an immense impact on the style, not just of Davis, but fellow jazz men Chet Baker and Bobby Short, and authors Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, among many. Jazz historian John Szwed says, “In the mid-fifties, Miles took to the ivy league look, having his clothes made at the epicenter, the Andover Shop in Harvard Square, where Charlie Davidson dressed him in jackets of English tweed or madras with narrow lapels and natural shoulders, wool flannels or khaki trousers, broadcloth shirts with button down collars, thin knit or repp ties, and Bass Weejun loafers. It was a look that redefined cool and shook those who thought they were in the know.”
Though Davis would abandon this look in the seventies, under the influence of his wife Betty Davis, the impact of the trumpeter and his peers in popularizing this look as “classic” were enduring. In a sense the rebellious outfits of the psychedelic era and the black power movement were in reaction to black ivy (though the Black Panther’s turtle necks, berets, and leather jackets, in retrospect, look more like an extension of black ivy.)
Circling back to the ‘Milestones’ cover G. Bruce Boyer, who worked as editor of both Town & Country and Esquire, talks about how jazz album covers once served as “fashion editorials, communicating new styles on both sides of the Atlantic” and that Miles “moved from zoot suit to Ivy around 1954 but had his own ideas and aesthetics of what the look should be for him. Miles wanted to stand out. A green button down was slightly rare, just different enough to make a man a bit of a dandy. After seeing that album cover, I remember buying a green striped Oxford button down because it was just that bit different.”
The book was put together by Constantine Valhouli, a fan of the shop, because he wanted to celebrate connection between the worlds of fashion, music, and literature Davidson made by Andover. Moreover, there’s a direct connection between the images found in ‘Black Ivy’ and the fashion advocacy that Davidson manifested on the bodies of so many elegant men. There will be a book party for the book April 16th at the J. Mueser show in the Village in New York. For looking for new spring threads, the Andover Shop is still in business in New England and its website features clothes perfect for yachting and a night at Jazz at Lincoln Center. A link to the shop’s looks, and the book, are below.
https://www.theandovershop.com/?syclid=68d46ef1-55db-4e64-ae6e-fdf8b0bc2758