The Yale man dressed impeccably in the preppy uniform of the day, though "preppy" wasn't in wide use then. "Natural shoulder" was what men's magazines called the Yale look, and for decades the clothing stores near campus at Elm and York Streets in New Haven were the natural-shoulder capital of the universe. Its bulwarks were Fenn-Feinstein and J. Press. In New York, not far from the Yale Club, there was Haberdasher's Row, commencing at 44th Street and Madison Avenue: Brooks Brothers, known as just "the Brothers"; J. Press (there was also one in Cambridge, Mass.); and Chipp, which had a retail store but also did big business in custom tailoring. (We have Chipp to thank for, among other innovations, jackets and trousers of patchwork madras.)

In the 1950's and 60's, an experienced observer could tell where a Yale man shopped just by his shirt: plain pocket meant Fenn-Feinstein; pocket with flap, J. Press; and no pocket at all, the Brothers, which in those days didn't believe in shirt pockets, perhaps because almost all their suits still came with vests. Vest aside, to determine the origin of a suit might take closer observation; if it had a lining of bright red silk (like several of the suits of one of my classmates, a guy so Cole Porter-ish that, like Porter, he kept a piano in his room), it was most likely a custom job from Chipp; if it had a button fly, it was probably from the Brothers, which still sold such garments up on the geezers' floor, where you could also get voluminous high-waisted boxers of the kind sometimes on display in the Yale Club locker room. They had three buttons at the top and came up almost to the nipples, as if made with a built-in cummerbund.

All the sartorial niceties of the Yale style began to erode, as I've suggested, with the enrollment of what became the class of 1968 -- my class, as it happens, and also the class of George W. Bush. I seem to recall the president-to-be going sockless and wearing corduroys and cable-knit sweaters, but that could describe any number of us. He did not cut the figure of, say, Strobe Talbott, another classmate, who became deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration. Strobe was a full-fledged intellectual, so he could carry off the affectation of wearing plaid Bermudas well into November.

But the barbarians were already among us -- guys in jeans, with long hair, beads and headbands, guys so brilliant they didn't care what they looked like. Yale in those days still required a coat and tie in the dining halls, but in some Yale colleges a knotted shoelace counted as a tie. There was even a short-lived debate about whether, since the regulations did not specify a shirt, going bare-chested was acceptable. Eventually, even some younger faculty members began dressing like the students, not the other way around. It was much remarked, for example, when Charles Reich, a Yale law professor and the author of "The Greening of America," began showing up for class in jeans. Even he drew the line, however; his jeans, as some freethinkers noted with disdain, were always creased and ironed. He was trying to pass as a hippie, but he was still a Yale man.