It started with seersucker. I jotted down some innocuous thoughts on how I'm not quite sure what I think of seersucker suits (pros: resilience in tropical conditions; cons: resemblance to pyjamas). Only a few hours later, I stumbled upon the NYT article "Rejoice, Muffy and Biff: A Preppy Primer Revisited": The Preppy Handbook ("a piquant bit of mockery" of prepsterdom, which "ended up being adopted as a kind of guidebook for those who wanted in," thus the NYT) will be updated for the 21st century.
All this got me to thinking that the phenomenon of prepsterdom deserves an in-depth analysis. What is it? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Are there scholarly articles and books on it? Are there non-scholarly articles and books on it?
And thus a project was born. Expect articles on the history of prep, dissections of websites and blogs devoted to preppieness (or is that preppyness?), prepsterdom outside the US, the proliferation of prep - musings that will surely spawn into further entries.
Disclaimer: I imagine that getting ahold of TPH (I'm probably going to be referring to this book a lot, hence the abbreviation) will be difficult after the NYT article (which was a top 10 emailed article yesterday and has been picked up by the Daily Beast with more to follow, surely). But I'll give it a shot.
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