The Subversive History of Ivy League Style in Black America

We earn a commission for products purchased through some links in this article. Miles Davis not only captured the mood of the times he often directed it. When he began to wearIvy League clothingsomething noted not only by musicians and fans but in the media toohe played one of the most important roles in the

We earn a commission for products purchased through some links in this article.

1black ivyDon Hunstein / Columbia Records

Miles Davis not only captured the mood of the times he often directed it. When he began to wearIvy League clothing–something noted not only by musicians and fans but in the media too–he played one of the most important roles in the birth of the movement.Here he is, pushing the Ivy limits in typical black Ivy style wearing a terry cloth pop-over button shirt and shades.

2black ivyReel Art Press

A still from the 1967 British classic To Sir With Love, Sidney Poitier wears the IvyLook uniform of patch pocket blazer, flannel trousers, military style tie and button down shirt.

3black ivyBill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In 1967, Photographer Bill Ray returns to LA suburb Watts, a year after the violent riots for Life Magazine and in doing so documents one of the city’s gangs wearing Black Ivy in fine style. Playing with proportions, mixing the classic Ivy league wardrobe with workwear is as cool today as it was then.

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1968. Olympic champion Tommie Smith hints at the final days of the Black Ivy look and the civil rights dream. Beneath his classic Ivy jacket with its raised seam and patch pockets he wears beads and a rollneck sweater, stylistic symbols of the BlackPower movement and the next phase of African America’s road to freedom.

5black ivyAP/Shutterstock

Before Barack Obama, there was Channing Phillips. Wearing a three button seersucker jacket and button-down shirt – still essential element of the Ivy League wardrobe – is pictured here during his historic, Democratic presidential nomination

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Activist, poet, playwright and jazz critic Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) takes the classic Ivy combo of chambray shirt, chinos and chukka boots and gives it that all-important Black Ivy twist adding to it a white t-shirt and a fair amount of wear to his chinos. Style is nothing without subversion.

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7black ivyReel Art Press

Ebony Magazine documented the civil rights movement of the time and captured the Black Ivy Style of its leading figures. Martin Luther King (second from the right) wears the typically understated business suit of the Ivy elite and matches them with work boots, in many ways symbolic of the African American poor he represented.

8black ivyCharles 'Teenie' Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art/Getty Images

Black Ivy was synonymous with civil rights activists like Martin LutherKing and Malcolm X. But it was also a street style, a youth style that allowed young black men to imbue classic, essentially conservative clothes with new confidence and cool

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One America’s most important and most influential modern artists Noah Purifoy was the master of found art and assemblage sculpture. His personal style also a case study in Black Ivy chic-wearing a button down shirt, five pocket pants, and Venetian loafers and just in case you had any doubt, the way his socks complement his shirt tells you none of this is by chance.

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