Apparently, some were not. There was yearning going on. That preppy world can be appealing. I don't just mean the apparent security that comes with jobs on Wall Street and in white-shoe law firms, or the glamour threaded with nostalgia (thank you, Scott Fitzgerald). It's plain old pretty: tennis courts and Long Island Sound and heirloom silver and people tanned by spending days on their sailboat. The behavior is attractive, too. Nobody pitches a fit over a line call and thank-you notes arrive like clockwork. What's not to like? What's not to aspire to? From time to time I meet someone who tells me that she memorized our guide as a teenager and took it as a literal book of directions. Maybe there was an implicit promise embedded in the humor: this ease, this comfort can be yours if you dare to wear pink and green.

Part of what made the insular preppy world so alluring was its assurance, which was part and parcel of its conservatism. Preppies hung onto not just furniture and names but also customs and especially shares in Exxon bought back when it was called Standard Oil or something equally quaint. The culture was also conservative in the sense of accepting these things without question. Your true preppy, it seemed in 1980, was a stranger to self-doubt: can we think for a minute about the whale as a design motif on clothes intended for grown men?

Today, though, I think the unself-consciousness that used to distinguish the preppy world is gone. When anthropologists study a tribe, however respectfully, they change it. Preppy clothes had been a uniform by which you recognized the guy to sit next to on the train to New Haven. Like all the best uniforms, they were a visual language, instantly not only identifying but also, more subtly, placing the wearer.

Nantucket red pants came from Nantucket. Period. No Nantucket, no pants. The more faded they were, the more hours you'd spent on the water. They were better than an "I'd rather be sailing" bumper sticker because only the right people could read them.

And then, suddenly, in the 1980's, everybody looked like the guy on the train to New Haven. Imagine how they'd feel at West Point if all the tourists were in uniform too: cadets might begin to wonder about uncomfortable things like claims to legitimacy.