The Official Preppy Handbook (OPH) does little to dissuade this argument. The book is steeped in specifics, and offers few examples of prep occuring elsewhere.
This is where True Prep (TP), the legacy to OPH, finds its legs. It even broaches racial identity, with a section on the African American love for Oak Bluffs. OPH's Muffy would have choked on her Hermes scarf before discussing something so unseemly. But, that, is exactly why TP was so necessary. The old guard, caricatured in OPH, have had to acknowledge, rather like England's aristocracy post WW2, that "new" people may bring life to an old way of life.
There is still a lot to be done, in terms of prep awareness, internationally. Hence this blog. There are anomalies like the continued popularity of Japanese Take Ivy (photography of US campuses by Japanese photographers/authors, 1965), which was/is hugely popular in Japan and then released in US in 2010. Also, Masafumi Monden discusses the Japanese take on US Ivy league style in Ivy Style (multiple authors, Fashion Institute of Technology New York and Yale University Press, 2012).
However, I am in New Zealand, and there is little to no acknowledgement of prepdom here. NZ is a young country and has a history of self-conscious feet finding. This weightlessness has anchored somewhat in the last decade. However, we are still watching the moves of other cultures, awkwardly copying the dances of elsewhere.
We don't need to be Jackie Kennedy, lying across an Adirondack chair. We can take New England clam chowder and throw a hearty bunch of paua in it. A fusion of faraway and familiar is the only way forward. We don't need to surrender to seersuckered Southampton, we can drink to Boston Brahmins and bathe outside our baches (NZ summer houses) with antipodean abandon. We are enough....and, yes, we can be preppy!
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