The dress shirts in my closet now are not Oxford cloth and have neither box pleats nor locker loops.)įor the next development, the class associations of Ivy League shirts seem to have been important: they were apparently seen by many kids as “snooty” and “fancy”, not “regular-guy” wear, hence potentially as faggy. (I used to have a pile of Ivy League shirts. The locker loop is its only Ivy-League feature: it’s not Oxford cloth, not button-down, not blue, and it lacks the box pleats.) (The shirt in #2 seems to have been sewn by a mother for her son. Introduced by Brooks Brothers in 1896, they were patterned after the shirts of polo players and were used exclusively on sports shirts until the 1950s in America.Īnd so we get the Ivy League shirt of my young adulthood, which then diffused to adolescents (on a path I know little about), where they still carried class associations - possibly the result of mothers buying Ivy League shirts for their sons in middle school and high school, as “nice” and “classy”. From Wikipedia:īutton-down collars have points fastened down by buttons on the front of the shirt. The Oxford weave has a basketweave structure and a lustrous aspect making it a popular fabric for a dress shirt. Oxford is a type of woven dress shirt fabric, employed to make a particular casual-to-formal cloth in Oxford shirts. After all these years, the costume remains as standard casual business dress in many settings I see men so dressed all over the place here in Silicon Valley (except that the shirts and pants are now permanent-press, which they certainly weren’t then). The shirt went along with chinos (jeans were not yet acceptable parts of the costume) and brown loafers. The Ivy League shirt is a button-down collar (not spread collar) shirt made of Oxford cloth, prototypically blue, with a box pleat and a locker loop on the back: I haven’t found a thing about when locker loops first appeared on men’s shirts.īut locker loops are part of a package that I’ll call the Ivy League shirt, since it seems to have appeared as standard dress for college men in the Ivy League (me included) in the 1950s, where it was dressy but also casual (not usually worn with a tie). (Commenters on locker loops sometimes point out that it’s much better for shirts to hang on proper hangers - but many lockers can’t accommodate hangers.)Ī home-sewn dress shirt with a locker loop on the back:

The loop is intended to hang onto the lower piece of a coat hook in a locker, freeing that piece up for hanging other pieces of clothing on it:

A locker loop is a loop at the base of the yoke - a section of fabric in the upper part of the back behind the neck and over the shoulders (hang on, there will be pictures) - on an American dress shirt. On to some chapters in the history of men’s clothing that aren’t so easy to make out. Naut. ‘eccentric, crazy’, with a first cite from 1921. Not in the OED, but Green’s Dictionary of Slang has it (from Scot. Informal crazy or silly: the author comes across as a bit loopy. In combination with an allusion to the slang adjective loopy. North American informal A crazy or foolish person. Origin 1970s: from Froot Loops, trademark for a breakfast cereal.

That discussion will lead tangentially to another informal use of fruit, in fruit machine, BrE corresponding to AmE slot machine.įruit loop ‘a crazy’. Meanwhile, fruit loop came to have at least two slang senses, both distinctly North American and, apparently, neither current before (roughly) 1950: ‘a crazy or foolish person’ and, incorporating the slang slur fruit for a gay man, ‘locker loop’ (a feature of certain men’s shirts, also known slurringly as fag tag or fairy loop). My posting on breakfast cereals for kids and the way they are marketed focused on Kellogg’s Froot Loops, an extraordinarily sweet cereal in the shape of small rings (or loops), whose rhyming name was chosen to suggest, mendaciously, that the rings are made from fruit, or at least fruit juice - but in a spelling that avoids making such a claim explicitly the spelling is not merely orthographically playful (as commercial names often are), but deliberately misleading.

Ua loopy fruit