Hints as disparate as music  and fashion have told us the classics will always endure. Music has dropped them in the form of Vampire Weekend, Chester French and Mayer Hawthorne, looking almost like drop-outs if not for the constant barrage of nostalgia and reinterpretation. Fashion has had an epiphany, picking age old patterns and staples that only a Harvard or Yale fan might appreciated. Oxford shirts, Nantucket reds and mocassins have returned to trend status, and not just on campus.

What I call the ‘urban prepsters’ have descended on indie rock and film, which have been mixing gently with 60s rebellion and attitude (beardos), 50s intellectual (on the road), as well as nod to the modern era of music. The Ivy league has been downright co-opted by those that celebrate the melding of the influences — African, Nantucket, California casual with a splash of Ohio for good measure. This time, Ralph Lauren isn’t the one in the driver seat, but his people have had the presence to know what T. Hayashida saw when he compiled Take Ivy, in 1968, that they should try and track down a copy of this book. The Japanese photographer was obsessed with Northeast culture, and documented campuses all over the US.

In 1968, Japanese photographer T. Hayashida scanned the campuses of America’s top universities and cataloged the prep persona — real live students wearing boat shoes, blazers and strong, wide plaids — in a volume that was published by Hachette’s Japanese publishing arm, Hachette Fujingaho.

Not surprising, the book has reached a sort of “cult” status amongst collectors, almost as much as some of the original gear. Fear not though, the classics never die and somehow with this level of interest, I think we may see the leading document to the era get revisited.

“Take Ivy” has always been extremely rare in the United States, a treasure of fashion insiders that can fetch more than $1,000 on eBay and in vintage-book stores. But scanned images from the book have been turning up online in recent months. Ricocheting around the network of sartorially obsessed Web sites and blogs (like acontinuouslean.com and thetrad .blogspot.com), it has aroused renewed interest for its apparent prescience of preppy style.