Prep Life
There are a few garments that defined my prep school life. Many are obvious… the polo shirt, the oxford, the blazer… all requirements of various stages of the school dress code. For my first two years, I remained confined to the rules. Always a collar. Never jeans. (Junior and senior year I wore either a Fat Beats hooded sweatshirt or Rawkus Records t-shirt. A faculty member once high-fived me for these choices. Why I got away with it, I will never know).
At Loomis Chaffee (yes, I’m being bold enough to tell you all where I attended high school), dress was less stringent than my middle school. Ties were required then. High School allowed some breathing room. In that, our hallways and the quad were awash with the usual prep trappings. Those items mentioned above were the norm for most students. Come winter, flannels joined the mix. Some of the others wore a single pair of khakis through fall and winter, cutting their tattered trousers to shorts at first sign of spring.
We wore plain wool sweaters, often sourced from LL Bean. Most kids held religiously to flip flops.
Despite the typical sartorial leanings of the school, the garment I remember most, and believe best represents Prep Life, is the tab t-shirt.
Ubiquitous in all prep bookstores and the object of much thieving on athletic travels to other schools, the tab t-shirt has little favor in the “real world.” Above and beyond the average ringer, the tab tee has a certain formality. They eschew carefully designed graphics for the most basic screen printing. School name. Nothing more, nothing less.
I played water polo in fall. And, I dove 1-meter spring board in winter. Neither sport required more than a speedo for actual competition, but on deck attire required a certain cool. We were forced into school spirit (here oddly, the one place my Fat Beats hoody was deemed totally inappropriate by staff) and gravitated to the tab t-shirt as uniform. Better than a grey champion shirt. More refined than the hastily thought up team-specific kit. Tab t-shirts were it.
T-Shirts, being so universal, rarely have regional affiliation. Yet, I can’t see a tab tee without dreaming of New England. And, as I wasn’t a boarding student, the t-shirt certainly separated our “sort” from lesser institutions.
These are not the shirts that fill preppy dreams, but the garments that filled our prep realities. Something we all owned. Something we all probably took totally for granted.
I’ve been spending some time this week looking for tab tee blanks. My search hasn’t been overly successful. But, what it has done is reminded me that despite what I often consider an awful four years, my prep school life had some very positive points.
Funny how one garment can bring it all back.
