ROWING BLAZERS TAKES DEEP DIVE INTO ITS IVY LEAGUE ROOTS FOR FALL COLLECTION

Rowing Blazers has dropped the first installment of its fall/winter 2019 collection.

This season is inspired by the desire to cling to youth and the inevitability of “growing up,” whatever that means: early adulthood’s mix of melancholy and excitement in all its nostalgic forms – Yuppie culture, identity crises, and a longing to go “back to school.”

Films like St. Elmo’s Fire – which takes place at Rowing Blazers founder Jack Carlson’s alma mater, Georgetown – and series like Friends (shout out to “The One With All The Rugby”) capture this spirit, as well as the zeitgeist of a seemingly simpler time, when the stakes were low and the world was young.

The collection – drawing on these ’80s and ’90s cultural moments in both attitude and style – is not just post-Ivy in the sense that it reflects a post-collegiate or post-graduation ethos, however. Post-Ivy is also a play on Take Ivy – the (contrived, idealized) Japanese anthropological study of American campus culture in the late ‘50s that many since then have taken as gospel. But this bygone fantasy world comes with a lot of baggage that is at best stuffy and at worst exclusionary (hey, even Georgetown wasn’t allowed into the Ivy League because of its Catholic, rather than WASP Protestant, affiliation).

In 2019, Rowing Blazers believes that many elements of classic American collegiate style transcend narrow, and in any case artificial, categorizations like “Ivy style,” and reach beyond the connotations that come with these constructs and labels. Collegiate, by definition, is the intersection of traditional and youthful – and youth culture – an honest sense of irony and irreverence – is as important an inspiration for this collection as the photos in books like Take Ivy.

With a healthy dose of irony, the Rowing Blazers fall/winter ‘19 lookbook reimagines Take Ivy for a post-Ivy, post-streetwear, post-rules era, with pieces that work as well in the city as they do on campus. Highlights include wide-leg cotton twill trouser and chore coat separates in a wide range of bright colors; English-made cricket sweaters; graphic tees inspired by Carlson’s academic background; color-blocked and intricately embroidered rugby shirts emblazoned with heraldic and Aztec motifs; and British and Italian tartan and tweed suit separates. The lookbook also teases Rowing Blazers’ forthcoming collaboration with English outerwear brand Barbour and its second footwear capsule with Sperry Top-Sider.

The collection will be released in multiple deliveries beginning today, at rowingblazers.com and the Rowing Blazers shops in New York and Los Angeles.