Seven Sisters Style: The All-American Preppy Look

 

Seven Sisters Style: The All-American Preppy Look by Rebecca C. Tuite

 

Seven Sisters Style: The All-American Preppy Look Hardcover – 14 Mar. 2017

English edition  by Rebecca C. Tuite (Author)

The first beautifully illustrated volume exclusively dedicated to the female side of preppy style by American college girls.

 

Review

"Hold all my calls. I'll be reading Seven Sisters Style: The All-American Preppy Look for the rest of the day...I'm quite certain it will be a classic style title for years to come. The author is a Vassar grad and fashion historian and we have been corresponding for years now on the subject of tomboys, American style, preppy culture, books, and countless other items. I can't say enough great things about Ms. Tuite who came to this project in such an honest and passionate way. The final result of her research is a thorough definition and celebration of a truly iconic American style, from saddle shoes to Shetland sweaters to the inherent spirit of the Seven Sister student. Each page is a journey through time." -Tomboy Style Blog

 

"Billed as a response to Take Ivy — the 1965 Japanese photo book documenting the preppy style of male Ivy Leaguers — Seven Sisters Style celebrates the style evolution of the American college girl, from calico and cardigans to Bermuda shorts and, eventually, jeans. Icons include Katharine Hepburn (Bryn Mawr class of 1928), Jackie Kennedy (who attended Vassar for two years before transferring to George Washington University), and Meryl Streep (Vassar class of 1971)." -New York Magazine

 

"...a beautifully illustrated, intensively researched celebration of the all-American preppy style pioneered by the women of the Seven Sisters Colleges. The Seven Sisters' style changed how all women dressed and it became known the world over as inherently American. A lot of ink has been spilled in the past few years celebrating male Ivy style — Seven Sisters Style is, finally, the companion piece we've been waiting for." -Refinery29

 

"Even those of us who didn't attend Vassar, Wellesley or Smith will fall for Seven Sisters Style: The All-American Preppy Look. After all, it's these Ivey League colleges that spawned the now-classic American sportswear look and introduced such wardrobe staples as the blazer, bermuda shorts, cashmere and kitten heels." -Boston Proper/Style Edit

 

"Seven Sisters Style corrects a massive oversight by finally giving these seven colleges their own Take Ivy." -Flavorwire

 

"...Rebecca Tuite, examines the campus attire that evolved at these schools from the late 1800’s and throughout the 20th century, bringing their style influences full circle to the present day.  Through archival photographs, the author demonstrates how these college women became unintentional fashion trendsetters who laid the foundations of the American Preppy style." -LookOnline.com

 

"Tuite is the author of the sensational book, Seven Sisters Style: The All-American Preppy Look, a nostalgic look at the birth of prep on the prestigious female-only campuses of Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley, where style icons such as Katharine Hepburn, Jacqueline Kennedy and Meryl Streep spent their college days. Herewith, Tuite explains the ABCs of spring semester fashion as seen at the Seven Sisters." -Dujour.com

 

"Seven Sisters Style celebrates the all-American preppy style pioneered by the women of the Seven Sisters Colleges, and its twentieth-century evolution, from its on-campus foundations and creation of a collegiate “uniform,” to its enduring legacy which can be summarized with the phrase “From Barnard to Bergdorf.” Seven Sisters Style celebrates a timeless and internationally ubiquitous look—seen on and off the runway, in Hollywood, and in popular culture—that continues to be a source of fascination and inspiration, forever remaining in style." -Fashion Windows.net

 

"Fashion Titles You Need to Read This Spring: This is a fantastic photo and essay collection on the underappreciated role of women’s college campuses in establishing the codes of preppy fashion." -InStyle.com

The Seven Sisters are a consortium of prestigious, historically women's liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern U.S., founded between 1837 and 1889 to provide education comparable to the all-male Ivy League.

 

The Seven Sisters are a consortium of prestigious, historically women's liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern U.S., founded between 1837 and 1889 to provide education comparable to the all-male Ivy League. The original members are Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley.

 

Key Details About the Seven Sisters:

Current Status: Five remain women's colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley). Vassar became coeducational in 1969, and Radcliffe merged with Harvard University.

Locations: Most are in Massachusetts (Mount Holyoke, Smith, Wellesley, Radcliffe/Harvard) or New York (Barnard, Vassar), with one in Pennsylvania (Bryn Mawr).

Reputation: They are known for high selectivity, strong academic traditions, and producing notable alumni in leadership, politics, and literature.

 

The Seven Member Institutions:

Barnard College (New York, NY): Founded 1889; affiliated with Columbia University.

Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, PA): Founded 1885.

Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA): Founded 1837.

Radcliffe College (Cambridge, MA): Founded 1879; now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Smith College (Northampton, MA): Founded 1871.

Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY): Founded 1861; now coeducational.

Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA): Founded 1870.

 

The name "Seven Sisters" is a reference to the Greek myth of the Pleiades, goddesses immortalized as stars in the sky: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Alcyone, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope.

 

In 1915, Vassar President Henry Noble MacCracken called together Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Mount Holyoke to work together “to deliver women opportunities for higher education that would improve the quality of life for the human family and that would put them on an equal footing with men in a democracy that was about to offer them the vote.”The success of this informal association of colleges led to the decision to establish a larger and more formal group in 1926. That year Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Radcliffe were added and the group gained the name “Seven Sisters” after the Pleiades.Together, their aim was to address financial inequality with elite men’s colleges, in particular, the need to raise endowments so faculty salaries could approach those at top male institutions. The group launched coordinated fundraising and public-awareness efforts to secure better support for women’s higher education. Through 1935, the colleges continued collaborating on fundraising while also using their meetings to exchange ideas on broader academic and student-life issues, such as undergraduate culture, governance, religion, and leisure.

 

The Seven Sisters colleges continue to collaborate through the Seven College Conference, which is hosted annually on a rotating basis by one of the seven original member institutions and brings together senior administrators and faculty around a theme. Recent topics have included the value of the Seven Sisters brand and issues of diversity, equity, and achievement. Although Radcliffe no longer participates and some schools, such as Vassar, have evolved from being primarily women's institutions, they share enough common history and institutional character to make ongoing collaboration meaningful and productive.

 

Four of the original Seven Sisters are in Massachusetts, two are in New York, and one is in Pennsylvania.

 

In Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College and Smith College are part of the Five College Consortium with Amherst College, Hampshire College, and University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wellesley College is part of the Boston Consortium for Higher Education, established in 1995 and now comprising 23 institutions across New England. Wellesley College also allows students to cross-register with MIT, Babson College, Brandeis University, and the Olin College of Engineering. Radcliffe College shared a common and overlapping history with Harvard College from the time it was founded as "the Harvard Annex" in 1879. Harvard and Radcliffe integrated genders in 1977, but Radcliffe continued to be the sponsoring college for women at Harvard until the entities officially merged in 1999.

 

In New York, Vassar College ultimately became co-educational in 1969 and remains independent. Barnard College was Columbia University's women's liberal arts undergraduate college until its all-male coordinate school Columbia College went co-ed in 1983. Barnard continues to be a women's undergraduate college affiliated with (but financially, administratively, and legally separate from) Columbia. At graduation, students attend both a Barnard College commencement ceremony and a commencement ceremony that grants degrees to all students graduating from a Columbia-University-affiliated school. The diploma lists both Barnard College and Columbia University.

 

In Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, along with Haverford College and Swarthmore College, make up the Tri-College Consortium, which belongs to the Quaker Consortium along with nearby University of Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr students may attend classes at Haverford, Swarthmore, and Penn, and vice versa. A merger between Bryn Mawr and Haverford College was considered at one point.

The Scandalous "Party of the Century" That Ended High Society: The 1972 Rothschild Surrealist Ball

This in-depth, full-length documentary explores the legendary 1972 Rothschild Surrealist Ball at Château de Ferrières, where Baron Guy and Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild hosted 150 guests including Audrey Hepburn and Salvador Dalí for the most spectacular private party of the 20th century, featuring mirror-written invitations, burning palace illusions, cobweb labyrinths, and elaborate surrealist costumes that marked the end of an era before wealth taxes, paparazzi culture, and social changes killed the grand private ball forever.

The Surrealist Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli - FASHION HISTORY SESSIONS

 

Artist, impresario, couturier: V&A to stage Schiaparelli retrospective

 

Artist, impresario, couturier: V&A to stage Schiaparelli retrospective

 

Exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates Italian designer’s moment-making approach to fashion

 

Morwenna Ferrier

Morwenna Ferrier

Fri 6 Mar 2026 12.14 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/mar/06/artist-impresario-couturier-v-and-a-to-stage-elsa-schiaparelli-retrospective

 

When Kylie Jenner stood on the marble steps of the Petit Palais in 2023, a fake lion head attached to her off-shoulder dress, even by the standards of the youngest member of the Kardashian clan, the outfit looked a bit much.

 

Hand-painted for lifelike realism, the Schiaparelli head and dress were designed by the Texan Daniel Roseberry. Although already four years in the role of artistic director, the look was transformative – earning Jenner front row seats at the biggest shows and propelling the nearly century-old Paris fashion house, long overshadowed by Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior, into viral ubiquity.

 

As the focus of the V&A’s new blockbuster exhibition about Schiaparelli wants to make clear, this moment-making approach to fashion is not simply a reflection of the social media age but entirely in keeping with the spirit of its Italian founder, Elsa Schiaparelli. “I don’t consider Elsa to be a dressmaker”, says Roseberry. “She was an image-maker, a culture creator, and she has been our north star with every red carpet moment since.”

 

The lion dress is sadly not among the 400 objects in the exhibition, which also includes paintings, sculpture and furniture. But surreality abounds, thanks in no small part to Schiaparelli’s many collaborations with artists including Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí, including the skeleton dress, a macabre design with padded black bones, and a hat made to look like an upside-down shoe, both designed with Dali in the late 1930s.

 

Acting as a through-line between the mid-1930s and now, more intimate pieces include a wedding dress worn to a Golders Green synagogue and “some leopard print booties, which Elsa never took off”, says Sonnet Stanfill, the V&A’s senior fashion curator.

 

This is the UK’s first major retrospective dedicated to the designer, and it aims to position the Italian as much as an artist and impresario as a couturier. “She was a good designer but a great self-publicist and promoter,” says Stanfill. “She knew flagging that she worked with Jean Cocteau would get publicity. One of the best ways to get eyeballs on your work was to work with artists and cinema and theatre because of the audiences. It was the social media equivalent of her time.”

 

Stanfill says the idea was first raised by the museum in 2017, but no one predicted the Schiaparelli brand would harness the internet quite so effectively in the years that followed. “The way Roseberry’s work cuts through the culture as Elsa’s did shows just how uncannily they both mastered capturing the attention economy in their own time.”

 

Indeed, if you’ve so much as glanced at a red carpet in the last five years, you’ll have seen one of the so-called “Schiap pack” in action. Take Bella Hadid at Cannes in 2021 wearing a black dress finished with a lung-shaped trompe l’oeil brass necklace. Or Teyana Taylor’s “party in the back” dress replete with crystal thong worn to this year’s Golden Globes. The brand is expected to dress several nominees at next week’s Oscars ceremony.

 

Part of the brand’s success then and now has been its ability to make witty but wearable clothes. “We try to walk a fine line between humour and camp”, says Roseberry, talking about 2024’s hot accessory: a glittery robot baby.

 

Mega-retrospectives, which zero in on household names such as Dior and Balenciaga, have underlined the V&A’s potential for fashion to broaden its audience. Over half a million people visited 2019’s Dior exhibition. The V&A is hoping that Schiaparelli will draw similar crowds.

 

On Thursday evening, the designer showed an autumn/winter collection that met Elsa’s work head on. The whole collection was underpinned by the same trickery and trompe l’oeil, including “impossible knitwear” that paired Aran knits with tulle to create the effect of floating clothes, and leather-look sheaths which were actually made of wool. Anatomical hardware is a key Schiaparelli look, widely copied on the high street. Here it appeared as egret feet dangling off a bag (Elsa also loved monkey fur, but Roseberry prefers to use shearling).

 

“The big question was what is the point of this other than to give some sort of historical context to the house that people know today?”, says Roseberry, of his involvement in the exhibition. “But her contribution has been echoing through other people’s work for years. Whether that’s Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo or Azzedine Alaïa. All these designers have been sort of carrying that torch on her behalf.”

 

Stanfill agrees. “It’s easy to get caught up with the weirdness, but she also made very wearable clothes. They just happened to have a strange button or two.”

 

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London on 28 March

REMEMBERING : Dan Cruickshank's House ... Spitalfields ... More than Architectural History ... a Philosophy of Life

Being myself an architectural historian and very much concerned with restoration issues ... I recognize entirely the "obsessions" of Dan Cruickshank.
It is much more than a "specialisation" ... it is a Way of Life ... it is also the quest for your "secret garden" and the decision to reside or to live "there" ... all your life ... it is real and unreal at the same time ... placed 'somewhere' in the twighlight ...
The name of this Neverland is in my case ... "Tweedland"
Yours ... Jeeves



ALISTAIR DUNCAN
STYLING SIAN WILLIAMS
PHOTOGRAPHS MARK SCOTT
Featured in the January 2011 issue of Period Living


Historian Dan Cruickshank has employed a very sensitive approach to the renovation of his old home that respects and preserves its heritage.
Authenticity has been a constant watchword for Dan Cruickshank as he sets about restoring his Georgian townhouse. While Dan is well known as a TV presenter, the face of cerebral BBC documentaries such as Around the World in 80 Treasures and Adventures in Architecture, first and foremost he’s an academic: an architectural historian who is deeply passionate about the preservation of old houses that showcase the building styles of bygone eras. ‘Old Georgian houses like mine have a very strong, benign presence,’ says Dan. ‘Far too many have been changed too much – modern things have been inserted: heating, lighting, or a ghastly power shower. The atmosphere that is present in these buildings has been destroyed.’
Humble origins
Two local builders, Mr Bunce and Mr Brown, built Dan’s four-storey home in Spitalfields in 1727 for a wealthy silk merchant. Dan bought it more than 30 years ago, and has been painstaking in keeping it faithful to the original spirit of the house ever since. Swathed in 18th-century decorative detail and crammed with interesting – if occasionally rickety – antique furniture, the house is a gem of a time capsule.
‘I bought my house because I was intrigued by Georgian buildings,’ Dan explains. ‘The houses on this terrace weren’t built by great patrons of the arts as conscious works of art, just by humble builders trying to make some money; by chance, they have created buildings of great beauty.
‘However, the house had been empty for many decades when I found it in the late 1970s,’ he continues. ‘It had been completely abandoned, and was full of rotting furniture left by the previous owners.’
Sensitive restoration
In spite of the fact that the house had moved a fair bit on its foundations over the years, and the whole structure was visibly warped, a surveyor confirmed that the skeleton of the building was in good order. The only structural work Dan needed to organise was the rebuilding of the parapet and the relaying of some roof tiles. Inside, however, the ceilings had collapsed throughout – water had poured through the entire house for many years. After it had been allowed to dry out (the old pine floorboards, thankfully, turned out to be ‘just like hardwood – tough and durable; no rot to be found’), Dan took it upon himself to do as much of the work as he could himself, although his approach was always cautious. He went from room to room, renovating each one in as authentic a manner as possible. ‘I set about repairing it as gently as I could,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to yank up all the floorboards just for the sake of checking; I trusted the house.’
Original pine panelling adorns most of the rooms in the house, along with dados, cornicing, doors and architraves. ‘I looked for the old, Georgian paints and kept them wherever possible – the paint was pretty good on the top floor,’ he says. ‘I just cleaned it with white spirit and linseed oil. But when I needed to repaint elsewhere, I’d look for remnants of original colours – behind shutters or in cupboards – then try to copy them.’ He discovered that the ground floor had been green, so bought some pigments and mixed his own eggshell paint – back then, finding an existing shade that matched was tricky, he says. ‘This was the 1980s; it’s a lot easier to buy heritage paints these days.’
Eventually, after agonising over the thought of modernising too much, he decided to have electricity installed. ‘I wanted the wiring to be non-destructive and reversible, rather than chased aggressively into the panelling,’ Dan explains. ‘The electrician I found managed to lodge it discreetly beneath the woodwork.’
Intriguing discoveries
As he opened up the boarded windows he found, to his great delight, original 18th-century Crown glass – an early type of hand-blown window glass with a distinctive blue-green hue and rippled effect. ‘I find it incredible to think that during the Christmas of 1940, when the family that were living here were huddled in the basement and the east end of London was engulfed in a sea of flames, even the glass survived,’ Dan says.
Averse as he was to tampering with the building, he decided upon one major change to the ground floor sitting room – and this was only to return to the original layout. ‘I realised that the room had been altered in the 19th century,’ he explains. ‘A partition had been moved. I put it back to where it was in the 1720s. Curiously, I found a roll of newspaper, crumpled up and put into the corner of the room to stop a draught. It was from 1848 – that dated the alteration.’
There were other discoveries along the way. Dan came upon old visiting cards, children’s playing cards from the first half of the 20th century, old bottles and then, while repairing one fireplace, he uncovered late 18th-century Delft tiles amid the rubble. ‘The English made their own imitations of Dutch Delft,’ says Dan. ‘These were made in either Bristol or Liverpool.’
A passion for history
In addition to the period detail of the house, which Dan has restored as accurately as he can, he has chosen to furnish his home almost exclusively with antiques. Indeed, it is an Aladdin’s Cave of eye-catching, often rather eccentric historical artefacts. Adorning the walls are prints of architectural wonders, porcelain vases and oil paintings; and every room boasts quirky pieces that Dan has acquired on his globetrotting travels. His furniture has been sourced from junk shops and second-hand markets. Oak writing desks and coffee tables bestride Persian rugs, and high-backed 17th-century chairs are dotted around many rooms.
Dan’s determination to maintain the beauty of the past applies to every aspect of his home, be it the building or its contents. ‘This house is full of mystery,’ he says. ‘It’s a living being, with its own identity and past enshrined within its own fabric. I don’t want it to change; I want it to be lived in gently, so it survives.’