THE BUTTON DOWN COLLAR The French novelist Gustave Flaubert once wrote ' "Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.' " Miles Davis, the embodiment of hip and the coolest man on the planet from the early 1950s until his death in 1991 certainly subscribed in part to Flaubert's credo. On the cover of his 1958 album Milestones Davis subverted a standard issue garment that Joe College claimed his own by wearing an immaculate green oxford cloth button-down shirt. It was the Ivy look with attitude. A host of new, young Hollywood Method actors such as Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Montgomery Clift and the epitome of the Ivy look, Anthony Perkins, also favoured this comfortable, quintessentially American collared shirt. When starring in the Hitchcock movie Psycho, Perkins took care of business at The Bates Motel wearing a corduroy Ivy League suit, desert boots and a white button-down shirt, he looked as sharp as his mother's knife. The button-down shirt had come a long way from its origins on the Polo fields of England, which is where, in 1900, John Brooks, president of Brooks Brothers first saw that polo players had fastened their collars with buttons to keep them from snapping in their faces. Brooks took the idea back to New York where to this day it is the best use a sewing machine has ever been put to.

George Frazier, the late, great taste master and columnist for The Boston Globe on the subject of the button-down shirt summed it up this way, ' "The roll of the collar, that's the most important thing.' ".