The wealthy never fail to fascinate—especially when it comes to their taste in clothes. From the Roy family’s bland style vacuum on Succession to Mark Zuckerberg’s affinity for mid-priced hoodies, what rich people wear is always a ripe topic for dissection.
Now, Gen Z has focused its glare on ideas of affluent dressing, posting images and videos on social media of what is being dubbed the “old money aesthetic”: cable-knit sweaters tossed over polos, oxford shirts, navy blazers, and the like. Images of Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr., The Talented Mr. Ripley’s Dickie Greenleaf, and vintage Ralph Lauren and J.Crew advertisements abound. On Instagram alone, the hashtag #OldMoney has nearly a million posts and #OldMoneyAesthetic has around 360,000.
“It’s interesting to see younger generations fetishize these things,” says Zach Weiss, a writer who is himself a bit of an old money aesthetics practitioner. “At some point you think you discovered it, which I’m sure I did at that age.” Weiss recalls first being transfixed by the look in high school, where he played tennis, and sought an alternative to the go-to court uniform at the time: ratty T-shirts and garish Nike gear. After some research, he stumbled upon the sport’s more refined sartorial tradition, discovering tennis whites, Lacoste polos, and the like, which, in turn helped him develop his personal style. Today, Weiss often dresses like a dapper Great Gatsby character, an anachronism so distinct that, last year, when he sported a white blazer, banker-striped shirt, and yellow tie to the US Open, he pulled attention from the couple making out one row behind him: Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner.
Now 31, Weiss says it's fascinating to witness the style he discovered as a teen filtered through the eyes of a younger generation, this time neatly tied up with a bow and served up as social media content. “This new generation seems really self-aware, and the old money look is like a character you can play,” he says.
Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford law professor who wrote the book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, broadly defines what’s being called old money aesthetics as anything that evokes mid-20th century East Coast elites—think clothing that would be worn to prep schools or Ivy League college quads. Items that are classic, not trendy, and made to last. They are timeless in the truest sense of the word—they could be worn today or 100 years ago without looking out of place. It’s a style that, say, 10 or 20 years ago, we would’ve just called preppy—but to Gen Z that word now means something different.
Hoặc