Dur­ing the Class of 1950’s 60th reunion week­end, Ed Lawrence ’50 donated a DVD to the Uni­ver­sity Archives that he had made for his for­mer row­ing crew team­mates from old 8mm movie footage. He gave us per­mis­sion to put it on Princeton’s YouTube chan­nel, although he doubted that any­body other than his friends would be inter­ested. Within two months, how­ever, the film (ini­tially posted with accom­pa­ny­ing music) had been watched over 3000 times. It even almost ended up on CBS’ The Early Show. Why all this inter­est? Appar­ently the row­ers looked very fashionable!

“Great chi­nos and sweaters in action at 2:28. Jack­ets and ties for a trip to Cor­nell at 4:28. White bucks and grey flan­nels at 5:51,” wrote a blog­ger about Ivy style dress. By the time it was picked up by another blog about “preppy” clothes we had reposted the film on YouTube with­out the music that Ed Lawrence had used to accom­pany the footage. Although it con­tained only frag­ments from an old Glenn Miller piano record­ing (which gave the film a bit of a slap­stick feel), Sony had imme­di­ately claimed the copy­right to the music, so the film had to return to what it orig­i­nally had been: a silent movie. Later, when CBS con­tacted us about using the footage, we dis­cov­ered why there was this sud­den inter­est: the “preppy look” is back in fash­ion this fall!  We directed them to ask Mr. Lawrence for per­mis­sion, but unfor­tu­nately, he did not return from vaca­tion in time, so CBS used less his­toric footage.