Book Review

My last book review for the year - Here's to keeping New Year's Resolutions! I'm not sure if I'll keep these up in 2013 as I have some other goals for the year. Writing them really made me think about what I was reading, which was the whole point!

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Book Review: True Prep by Lisa Birnbach with Chip Kidd

Meant to be an updated version of the “The Official Preppy Handbook” which apparently was a publishing sensation in the 80’s, “True Prep” was published too late to be of use to me. I really could have used it starting in 2005. Still, it was like reading cliff notes of all I learned living in Hanover, NH for 4 years. There is also a fair amount of the non-parody writing that describes the culture in Philadelphia, especially at P.

It took me four years to understand and begin to appreciate the preppy. It really is more of an acquired taste. Really it wasn’t until I went to the preppiest business school of all time, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, that I began to have my eye trained to really appreciate and understand the preppy.  Lisa’s take on preppiness- half mocking half serious – runs along two threads. Looking preppy and being preppy. While my eye will always be more urban than preppy, I was alarmed to learn my core might actually be more preppy then I was willing to admit.

Nina Garcia, fashion maven and judge of “Project Runway” wrote about her first exposure to girls wearing pink cardigans in MA in the introduction to one of her books. She said something like, “what is this…preppy.” It made me laugh, because that was my first reaction upon moving to NH. Nina Garcia is also South American (from Colombia) and many of her style sensibilities are familiar to me. I’ll never forget our first event for Dartmouth Medical School, it was late summer and I wore a denim skirt and platform red Miu Miu sandals (4 inch heels). Everybody else was wearing flip flops. Whatever these New England girls were doing did not come naturally to me.

Preppiness is not an urban phenomenon and I am at my core an urban Emily. Four inch Miu Miu sandals is more the vein of the Hong Kong girl than the preppy girl (Hong Kong is hands down one of my favorite cities). According to Lisa, preppiness is a sensibility born of the country. You can infer from Lisa’s book that preppys don’t really like the city. Mostly it is a place to work from Monday through Thursday (Lisa uses the word “work” loosely) then head to their vacation homes and clubs on the weekend and most of the summer. There’s a lot more mud and less pavement in the country, hence the need for more sensible footwear. In Lisa’s definition, true preppiness is synonymous with sporty.

However, looking beyond the sportswear, pearls and cardigans and there are quite a few of Lisa’s preppy cores I can check off. Private school education K-12: Check. Love of travel (no Vegas): Check.  Book Club Member: Check. Shelves and shelves of books in the house: Check. Willingness to engage in sports like golf: Check. Wearing my mom’s vintage and mending them when necessary: Check. Love of Stationary: Check. Playing an instrument, swimming, speaking a second language, Check Check Check. Extreme Frugality: Double Check Plus Plus. Amusingly, according to her definitions, I am more preppy than my husband (I’m a financial analyst, a very preppy career choice, Birnbach doesn’t think physicians qualify for the moniker.)

In the end, a tongue in cheek read, though this city girl could have used it in 2005. Though I’ll never be one of the girls who can wear a tie as a belt and pull it off still, it was amusing to read and at least help put the forces I was exposed to for that time into an amusing and proper perspective. The reading list she lays out alone was worth a perusal, but really I’m glad this book was a borrow and not a purchase.