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Harris Tweed is unquestionably one of the most interesting fabrics in the fashion world. Still hand-crafted and hand-woven in the Outer Hebrides, Harris Tweed has been called the “champagne of fabrics,” and for good reason: it’s sturdy, comfortable, natural, and in most cases utterly indestructible. From Yves Saint Laurent to Nike, numerous designers and companies have used Harris Tweed, and it seems like every fabric company in the world has tried (unsuccessfully) to create fabrics that mimic the distinctively perfectly imperfect fabric.

Harris Tweed: From Land to Street is a beautiful book that attempts, through photographic vignettes and small bits of text, to capture the feeling of Harris Tweed. This is no small endeavor: part of the appeal of Harris Tweed is in its texture and feel, something difficult to represent on paper. Nonetheless, Lara Platman’s book does a phenomenal job of capturing a little bit of the essence of Harris Tweed, following it from its wooly beginnings to its finely crafted result.

Harris Tweed begins in the hills of the Outer Hebrides and follows the wool through all of the various production processes it encounters, along the way providing brief biographies of men and women who spend their lives making beautiful fabric. Make no mistake: Harris Tweed: From Land to Street is not about providing endless pictures of tweed blazers or fabric swaths. Rather, it is an adventure through the hills of Scotland, following the relative MacGuffin of tweed as it shows those who work their lives around it. The message, in short, seems to be that Harris Tweed is not just an amazing fabric: it is a lifestyle for many who live in a quaint pocket of the world that most of us will never see.

Of course, the real value in Harris Tweed: From Land to Street is in the photographs. With every photograph, you pick up a little bit of the Scottish tweed culture — the beautiful scenery, the unassuming buildings, the beautiful fabrics, the tough but skilled laborers, and the effects of the sartorial masterminds in Seville Row. One can almost smell the fabric through the pages. The book’s photos are rife with little details that really make the entire book shine — given a magnifying glass and some time, one could undoubtedly find all sorts of interesting details hidden in each photo of the book.

If I had any complaint about Harris Tweed: From Land to Street, it would be that the book fails to have the kind of payoff sartorial geeks like myself enjoy. While we see, in great detail, the crafting of the fabric itself, we rarely see it “in action” quite like we would like. I found myself pondering where some of the fabric followed in the book ended up — I wanted to see the finished product, not independent pieces of the product in making. With that being said, though, that’s simply not the message of this book: Harris Tweed: From Land to Street is about the process, not the product.

Images from the book Harris Tweed: From Land to Street by Lara Platman. Harris Tweed will be availble in October, and you can pre-order the book at Amazon.com for $27.

When I was a young child living in Germany, I excitedly anticipated the latest magazines and news from America — I somewhat obsessively poured over advertisements and articles on new movies, video games, and the like. In reading these little snippits of culture, I always felt as if I was simultaneously connected and not connected to American culture. I was the recipient of culture at the end of a gigantic telephone game, receiving only brief compartmentalized packets of culture in brief bursts. In my distance I created my own sort of understanding of American culture, which was “wrong” in the traditional sense, but nonetheless wonderful in its own way.

This is the kind of sartorial understanding I attribute to Graham Marsh and J.P. Gaul’s The Ivy Look: Classic American Clothing- An Illustrated Pocket Guide, a new book from London about the “Ivy look” as the English authors saw it. The Ivy Look is not about the American experience of the Ivy League look — rather, it is about the English interpretation thereof, and how smatterings of imported American culture (specifically jazz and cinema) crafted that interpretation. Ultimately, while the book seems to place unusual precedent on arbitrary parts of the Ivy League style, it does so in such a refreshing way that the book becomes respectable in its own right.

The Ivy Look is, in one sense, a nostalgic look back at the 1950s and 60s world of Ivy style specifically as it was presented in American culture. The book focuses predominantly on jazz album covers and advertisements with sparse text intertwined, reconstructing within its pages a preppy world of jazz, Bass Weejun loafers, tweed sport coats, and button-down collars. In this veritable religion, Miles Davis, John F. Kennedy and Anthony Perkins are saints, and the wood-paneled stores of J.Press and Brooks are their temples. One can almost smell the smell of old books and cologne off the pages as Graham Marsh and J.P. Gaul describe their own interpretations of the world of the preppy.

"The Ivy Look" is all about flat caps and the traditional indices of 50s prep.

The Ivy Look is, in another sense, a love letter sent by England to a period of American style. The British “Ivy look”, as the book constructs it, is a wonderful world of well tailored suits, beat-up khakis, Sperrys, Levis and Converse, Lacoste polos and desert boots, and everything else that exudes preppy stylishness, where even a “Made in the USA” label excites the buyer. The ads in the book are of the kind that one regularly sees displayed by Brooks Brothers or J.Crew: they are vestigial remains of idealized WASP-y 50s culture, now dead but not forgotten. You can tell that the authors of the book genuinely adore what they write about, and it’s positively addictive. The Ivy Look is the kind of book that makes you want to time warp back into the 50s, enroll in an Ivy, buy out the entire stock of Brooks Brothers, and spend your time being casually cool in a wholly useless major.

Ironically, The Ivy Look‘s biggest flaw is also its most endearing feature. The Ivy Look, as its name may imply, is not about the Ivy League look as much as it is about the “Ivy look”, an offshoot movement that emerged in Britain and Europe generally. The “Ivy look” is about foreign fascination with American styling — it is about those who went from Seville Row tailoring to the sack suit and what encouraged them to do so. To purists looking for traditional America-centric discussion of Ivy League style, The Ivy Look is utter heresy. A sartorially pedantic cynic would grind their teeth as the book dotes upon Jazz culture, focuses far too heavily on movies and album covers for direction, and, perhaps most offensively, seems to happily conflate Ivy League style with other styles with reckless abandon. Nonetheless, there is something youthful and interesting about The Ivy Look. The book has a joyous love for what it discusses, even if the book addresses the topic from an ocean away. Like the clubs of preppy Japanese men in the 1960s that comprised the “Ivyquake”, The Ivy Look‘s new perspective on the uber-prep is a refreshingly new vantage point. Old and somewhat antiquated styles of the 1950s and 1960s feel new and remarkably fresh in the hands of Messrs. Marsh and Gaul, even if their view is from the perspective of an island far, far away from the nearest J.Press.

Ultimately, The Ivy Look is the kind of book that is both a nostalgia trip and (hopefully) a view of things to come. On one hand, The Ivy Look is all about a small cultural movement in Britain that was entranced by 50s-60s American style and culture. On the other hand, The Ivy Look is part of a great revival of the Ivy League look itself, a sort of foreshadowing of things to come. As the sartorial ennui of the ’90s and ’00s is slowly dying off and as companies like Brooks Brothers, J.Crew and Ralph Lauren become ever more pervasive, the power of the Ivy style grows. One can only hope that one day very soon the ratty t-shirt will be replaced with the masculine button-down, and that The Ivy Look ceases to become nostalgic and rather becomes trend-setting.

Images provided by Frances Lincoln, from the book The Ivy Look: Classic American Clothing- An Illustrated Pocket Guide by Graham Marsh and J.P. Gaul. Available to browse on Google Books and to purchase at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble for $14.