The Ivy Look, Perfected by People Who Studied It More Carefully

By the mid-1950s, American Ivy League style had codified into a small set of garments that, worn in the right proportions and combinations, communicated a particular set of values: restraint, function, an educated casualness that was the opposite of dress-up. The Oxford cloth button-down. The chino. The navy blazer. The regimental stripe tie. The penny loafer. The Shetland crewneck.

The Japanese discovered this style in the late 1950s through student magazines and the cultural exchange that followed the occupation. Tastemakers like Kensuke Ishizu of VAN Jacket visited the United States in 1959 specifically to study how Ivy League students dressed and brought back a report that shaped an entire generation. Japanese Ivy — or 'trad' as it came to be known — became a cultural movement of unusual intensity.

Beams Plus is the direct inheritor of this tradition. Founded within the Beams group in 1999, it applies to Ivy-derived menswear the combination of historical research and material fastidiousness that characterises Japanese fashion at its best. The Oxford cloth shirts are heavier and woven more tightly than most American equivalents currently in production. The chinos sit more precisely in terms of rise and taper. The knitwear uses wool grades that standard production cannot justify.

This sounds like it should produce something stiff or precious. It does not. Beams Plus clothing is comfortable in the specific way that well-made simple things are comfortable: the proportions work, the materials breathe, the construction allows movement without distortion. A Beams Plus Oxford shirt worn through a summer and washed regularly for several years will look better at the end of that process than it did when purchased.

The brand's research practice — it regularly produces lookbooks that reference specific garments from specific periods of American college life with a precision that most American brands no longer apply to their own heritage — gives the collection a historical grounding that translates into genuine design consistency. The pieces fit together because they originate from a coherent place. This coherence is what most Ivy-influenced brands lack.