How did I, 12 or 13 years old in a Rust Belt small town, even know that there was such a thing as a preppy, much less that I was anti-that? Why would I care enough to plaster my enmity across my chest? The closest thing to an elite preparatory institution in my hometown was the Catholic school. The most coastal element of my experience was Lake Erie. I didn’t know any Muffys or Trips; I doubt I ever met an actual prep-school graduate until I went to college.
What I knew of prepdom was the version that had percolated into the shopping centers and school hallways of the Midwest, thanks to “The Official Preppy Handbook.” The slim, plaid-jacketed guidebook, edited by Lisa Birnbach and written by her, Jonathan Roberts, Carol McD. Wallace and Mason Wiley, promised its reader virtual entree into the squash courts and folk ways of the old-money elite.
It sold more than 1 million copies, swathing a nation of copycats in popped-collar Lacoste alligator shirts and sweaters knotted at the neck. It would create a pop-culture shorthand, launch a thousand trend stories and inspire characters like Alex P. Keaton, the Reaganite Ohio teen of “Family Ties.”
I never owned a copy. I’m not sure I ever saw it outside a mall bookstore. All the same, it was everywhere. I knew it secondhand, through its resonance in news features and on TV and in the pastel-and-khaki transformation of the popular kids. That was all I needed to know that I hated it and everything it stood for.
Like many adolescents before the internet, I cobbled together my sense of the world and my place in it from pop culture affiliations. I watched slobs-versus-snobs movies like “Caddyshack” and “Animal House,” where the villains were country clubbers, frat boys, the rich kids at the camp across the lake. I read “Doonesbury” and “Bloom County.” I watched Hawkeye Pierce prank snooty Charles Emerson Winchester on “M.A.S.H.”
I wore T-shirts from Kmart. Neither of my parents had gone to college. If it was the snobs against the slobs, I knew which side I was on.
But the sides were shifting. The year 1980, when the “Handbook” appeared, was a weird in-between moment in American culture. The decade had arrived on the calendar but not quite in the zeitgeist. Jimmy Carter was still president; the book appeared in stores just a few months after Ronald Reagan was nominated in a Detroit convention hall a short drive from my home.
The book seemed to rise on the updrafts of his election and the pop-culture shift that accompanied it, from the underdog sympathies of the 1970s to overdog fantasies like “Dynasty,” from hating the rich to envying them to loving them.
The “Handbook” was one of the first touchstones of an era that celebrated coveting, from the bubbly home tours of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” to the upscale-aspiration of MTV’s early videos. It was OK to want stuff again. This was a shift with broad social and political implications, even if at the time, I saw those reflected mostly in my classmates with their dumb alligator shirts.
I’ve been thinking about this period a lot over the last couple years, while writing a book that involved diving into the cultural history of the 1980s. For research, I dug up the “Handbook,” no longer an easy feat; the decade-defining icon has been relegated to used-book bins.
The book I read was little like the one I’d let live rent-free in my head. Yes, on the surface, it’s a how-to guide to prep life, with vast, closely observed entries on picking the proper school, the proper clothing, the proper pet (a dog). There’s a page on caring for genuine madras (it needs a 24-hour soak in cold salt water[!] before first washing) and one devoted entirely to ducks (“the most beloved of all totems”).
But it’s also trenchant and hilarious. It can be as cutting as Lucille Bluth on her third martini. Birnbach — no lock-jawed Connecticut Mayflower descendant but a Jewish New Yorker who took on the book project as a 21-year-old Village Voice writer — approached it, she would later say, as an “insider-outsider.”
She’s affectionate but acerbic. One section is titled “Prep sex: A contradiction in terms.” A diagram of preppy college fashion takes a Margaret Mead tone: “For the first time they are in a community of many different types of people, and this very functional uniform helps them to identify one another in a crowd.” The illustrations of athletic, cheerfully boozy white people are archly annotated in what would become the manner of the elites-puncturing Spy magazine (where Birnbach later worked).
Birnbach described her tone as “loving irreverence,” but it’s a cleareyed love that sees its subjects as charmed goofballs with safety nets under their safety nets. It’s not quite celebration and it’s not entirely satire; it’s halfway between roast and toast. Birnbach sees prepdom as enticing, faintly ridiculous and thus essentially harmless. She sees a species anxious about its perpetuation, seeing its place in the world sinking like the evening summer sun off a bayside dock.
This deeply ironic, conflicted work became an unironic hit, much like, say, Madonna’s “Material Girl” would. It was bought as a style bible and gentrified department-store shelves until, in the words of a 1984 article in The New York Times on troubles at alligator-shirt-maker Izod, the youth of America “moved on to the ‘Flashdance’ look.”
In 1980, the “Handbook” was a fun lark. Read today, it’s an ambivalent document of a transitional moment, when the blue-jean populism of the 1970s was giving way to designer-jean materialism, eventually ushering in a capitalism more rapacious and untiring than the blue-blood leisure Birnbach’s prepsters aspired to. It reads especially quaint and wistful now that the cultural markers it delineates have been scrambled, with conservative self-described anti-elitist “deplorables” pledging fealty to a country-club owner.
I didn’t know about any of those nuances at the time, just as I didn’t realize how much of the anti-snob comedy I loved — “Doonesbury,” “Animal House” — was in fact created by alumni of Yale and Harvard universities. I didn’t really understand the American class system that the “Handbook” described and that the mass-market preppy fad elided. I thought of my public-school classmates, buying boat shoes at the mall, as preppies. Had I read chapter six of the “Handbook,” about life in the suburbs, I would have known that “What Preppies don’t need are good public schools and a shopping mall.” (Ouch.)
When it came to prepdom, I didn’t know what the thing was. I just knew that being not that thing was key to being who I was.
And who, I guess, I am. I have no idea what happened to that “ANTI-PREPPIE” T-shirt. In my closet now are several solid-color, basic-dad polo shirts. They’re simple. They’re comfortable. They’re no big deal. None, however, has a little alligator on the chest. Some allegiances you never quite shake.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.