Collars of the Rainbow

What do you think of "popped" collars? Not to influence your opinion, but examples galore.

Dear Preppy Curious,

I’m going to tell you a history of the popped collar: Once upon a time in the late 1970s, there lived a young boy in a swanky Miami apartment, which was a pastel predictor of Tony Montana’s home in Scarface (1983). The walls were smothered in textured mauve wallpaper, the white pleather couches resembled Beluga whales and the glass and brass tables were graced with dusty arrangements of blue plastic roses. The boy’s mother and father were neglectful at best, frequently occupied with inhaling another kind of dust off the tables while the boy sat curled up in his Papasan Chair dreaming of parents without DUIs or STDs baking apple pie and chocolate chip cookies and teaching him how to bow hunt on the weekends. Every morning, the boy would shrug on his private school uniform and wander off to school after waving goodbye to his mother who was already sucking down Moscow Mules barely dressed in fur mules and a flammable polyester dressing gown that was a little too short for the apartment balcony. The parental neglect in the Getting Dressed Department also translated to the collar of the boy’s private school uniform remaining flipped up (popped) when he went to school. As the boy got older and his father’s septum disintegrated and his mother swam further into the bottom of a bottle, he found that the popped collar not only made him look a little like Count Dracula, which appealed to the girls (and boys), but was a fantastic hickey hider that had the bonus of gaining him the leering admiration of his schoolmates. With the help of a drab tutor (who wouldn’t have known a hickey if it leaped up and hit him on the head with a squeaky dog toy shaped like a bee), the boy somehow graduated from high school and a family friend who felt sorry for him got him a job on the set of Miami Vice as Junior Assistant to the Associate Costume Designer. The Senior Costume Designer saw the boy’s popped collar (didn’t make the connection with hickeys or Count Dracula), thought it looked swell, and behold, Don Johnson’s unstructured jacket with pushed up sleeves and wrinkled popped collar was born.

So what do I think of popped collars? They look great on Count von Count from Sesame Street.

XO,
Adj.