Seoul Trad Take Ivy campaign 2023 featured thumbnail — thirteen Renacts and MELAVORO members in collegiate letterman sweaters at Yangpyeong English Village, autumn 2023

Seoul Trad: The Iconic Take Ivy In Korea Campaign — Yangpyeong English Village, Autumn 2023

April 30, 2026 SEOUL TRAD

This is a Seoul Trad archive entry about Take Ivy In Korea: the autumn 2023 campaign we shot at Yangpyeong English Village as a Korean reconstruction of Take Ivy — the small Korean theme-park rendition of an American collegiate town. The campaign was led by Renacts (our American-Trad clothing line) and MELAVORO (our Goodyear-welt shoemaker) together, fronted by Lewis Oh, with thirteen friends in collegiate letterman sweaters standing in for the Princeton and Yale undergraduates that Kensuke Ishizu’s VAN Jacket crew filmed sixty years earlier. We knew, going in, that we would fall short of the original. We did it anyway. This post is the visual record, and the argument behind it.

Take Ivy In Korea 2023 — Renacts and MELAVORO Gentlemens Club group portrait at Yangpyeong English Village, the campaign's opening frame — The opening frame. Thirteen Renacts and MELAVORO members at Yangpyeong English Village, autumn 2023 — a Korean reconstruction of *Take Ivy*, sixty years after Kensuke Ishizu’s VAN Jacket crew filmed the original at Princeton and Yale. The collegiate letterman sweaters and the faux-collegiate building behind them say the same compound sentence the campaign would say from the first frame to the last.

Take Ivy In Korea: A Tribute, Honestly

The reason Take Ivy In Korea exists is that Take Ivy is the closest thing American Ivy style has to a sacred text — and the people who made it sacred were not American. In 1965, Kensuke Ishizu, founder of the Japanese brand VAN Jacket, sent a small crew — including photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida, whose stills would later become the famous Take Ivy photo book — to Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and a handful of other Ivy League campuses with a 16mm camera to film what undergraduates actually wore on an ordinary day. The film became a phenomenon in Japan. The photo book of the same name — the one most American readers know — was published afterward, drawing on stills from the shoot. The book is the artifact most people remember. The film is the original.

Sixty years later, in a country that was, in 1965, neither a destination for Japanese photographers nor a participant in the Ivy conversation, we wanted to do the same thing. Not better. The same thing. Lewis Oh put the idea simply: Take Ivy In Korea was the documentary he had always admired, and he wanted to attempt a Korean version of it with the people he’d come to admire over the years of building the Renacts Gentlemens Club. The original is more meaningful and more complete than what we made. We knew that. The point was the act of attempting it together — and putting the result on the record.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 16 at Yangpyeong English Village — A second group portrait — fourteen members on a quiet residential street inside the village. These are the friends, older brothers, and younger brothers Lewis Oh wanted in the frame: the Gentlemens Club, dressed for an ordinary autumn day in 1965 Princeton.

The original Renacts editorial copy, written for the campaign’s product page, frames it as scripture:

The roots of American style lie in Ivy style. In this context, Take Ivy is akin to scripture. For this reason, Take Ivy is always an object of admiration not only for us at the Gentlemen’s Club but also for many of our members. As you know, while Ivy style originated in the United States, it was Japan that formalized it into a defined style. Over 60 years ago, Japan, which was once a barren land for Ivy style, embarked on bold attempts that revitalized its cultural value through a spirit of innovation. Now, half a century later, we aim to carry on this legacy with many members of the Gentlemen’s Club, leading the Ivy style culture in South Korea.

That is the official line. The honest line, told later in the YouTube description that ran with the film, is that we knew we were standing in the shadow of Kensuke Ishizu and his team and we made our version anyway, because some legacies are continued by attempting them, not by perfecting them.

Why Yangpyeong English Village

The location is the second sentence of Take Ivy In Korea, after the clothes. Yangpyeong English Village is a Gyeonggi Province education complex built to give Korean students an immersive English-language environment — a small, walkable simulation of an American or English university town. Brick collegiate halls. Neoclassical columns. Arched stone doorways. A green quadrangle. Even the road signs are in English. It is, on purpose, the cleanest available rendition of an Ivy campus in Korea.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 17 at Yangpyeong English Village — The main entrance of the central hall. Arched glass doors, brick and limestone, four members crossing the steps in blazers and chinos. The architecture is a Korean rendition of a New England college; the people in front of it are wearing the clothes that were canonized on a New England campus in 1965. Both layers are simulations. Neither is dishonest about being one.

There is a temptation to read that as ironic — to say that we shot a tribute to American Ivy at a Korean fake of an American college and the whole thing is a hall of mirrors. We don’t think that’s the right reading. A simulation is dishonest only when it pretends not to be one. Yangpyeong doesn’t pretend. It is openly, almost cheerfully, a rendition. And the men in the frame are not pretending to be American undergraduates. They are Koreans wearing American collegiate clothes in a Korean rendition of an American campus, photographed for a Korean audience that already knows what all of those layers are. Honesty about the layers is what the campaign is for.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 06 at Yangpyeong English Village — A solo frame at the columned facade. The architecture is doing a lot of work here — it’s the nearest thing in Korea to the stone-and-ivy backdrop the 1965 footage was made against. It is also unmistakably its own thing.

The Look — Letterman Sweaters and Repp Stripes

The wardrobe was deliberately narrow. Letterman sweaters with chenille varsity letters. Cricket sweaters with the V-neck stripe. Tweed sport coats and navy gold-button blazers. Repp-stripe ties and knit ties, OCBDs in white and ecru. Corduroy and chino trousers. Black and dark-brown penny loafers and plain-toe derbies. We are not going to walk through every garment here — the lookbook does that — but the rules of the wardrobe are the rules of the original 1965 footage, set down a generation earlier on the Princeton and Yale quads.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 14 at Yangpyeong English Village — Two members in green and navy varsity letterman sweaters at the columned facade. The chenille “R” patches are the literal Renacts mark; the silhouette is straight 1965 Princeton.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 07 at Yangpyeong English Village — Four members at an arched stone doorway in white cricket-knit sweaters with the canonical V-neck stripes. Different sweater family, same vocabulary — undarted body, soft shoulder, knit that breathes against autumn air.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 04 at Yangpyeong English Village — Solo frame on a park bench. Navy varsity sweater with red “R”, khaki cotton trouser, black penny loafers. The single-figure equivalent of every *Take Ivy* photograph that worked.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 09 at Yangpyeong English Village — A second bench frame. A book, a green letterman sweater, brown loafers, no phone in sight. The point of the wardrobe is that it does not require a context to read; the context follows the clothes.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 02 at Yangpyeong English Village — A walking frame with an “OUTLET” road sign in the foreground — a small reminder of where we actually were. Tweed sport coat, knit tie, magazine in hand. The simulation does not get in the way of the outfit.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 15 at Yangpyeong English Village — Newspaper on a stone balcony. A navy gold-button blazer with brass-button closures, ecru chinos, the columns of the village hall behind. The blazer silhouette is the same one we still cut today: natural shoulder, 3/2 roll, undarted body. The campaign is set in 2023 but the jacket has not changed since 1965.

A Day on the Quad

Take Ivy In Korea was structured the way Ishizu’s film was: as a day on campus, not a sequence of poses. People walked to class, stood around between things, leaned bicycles against fences, looked at one another’s notebooks. The camera was inside the day, not in front of it. When the framing works, you can’t tell whether the photograph happened on the way to something or whether the something was the photograph.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 03 at Yangpyeong English Village — Eight members crossing a brick path between buildings — autumn ginkgos gone yellow, one bicycle in the middle of the group. This is the canonical *Take Ivy* frame: a campus moving, with the wardrobe carried by it rather than imposed on it.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 10 at Yangpyeong English Village — Two members on bicycles on the quad road. The bicycle in *Take Ivy* is an underrated styling note — it forces a trouser break, a sock height, and a posture that no studio frame can produce.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 05 at Yangpyeong English Village — A small group huddled around a phone screen and a film camera. Five sweaters, three sweater families (cricket, varsity, fisherman), one bicycle. The composition is lifted directly from the 1965 ground rules: the camera is closer than a stranger but not closer than a friend.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 08 at Yangpyeong English Village — Footwear, on orange brick. Three pairs of penny loafers, one plain-toe derby, white socks where they should be — every shoe in the frame is **MELAVORO**, the Goodyear-welt line we make alongside Renacts. The campaign’s footwear policy was the same one we’ve held for years: black penny loafers, dark brown penny loafers, and plain-toe derbies, no exceptions.

In the Classroom

Inside, we shot the half of the day that the original film also shot, and which most contemporary tributes leave out: the studying. A campus is two-thirds rooms with desks. The wardrobe has to read in those rooms too.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 11 at Yangpyeong English Village — A classroom interior — six members at desks, notebooks open, varsity sweaters on. The fluorescent light reads as period. The clothes hold their register against it.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 13 at Yangpyeong English Village — A working session at a back table — books, a laptop, four members in cricket and varsity sweaters, one standing. The 2023 prop list (the laptop) is allowed to be in the frame. The campaign is not in costume.

Renacts Take Ivy 2023 campaign — figure 12 at Yangpyeong English Village — A lounge break — leather chairs, paper cups, five members in sweaters. This is where Ishizu’s film slowed down too, and where the wardrobe gets to do the thing it was built for: looking like a uniform without looking like one.

Take Ivy In Korea — The Film

The campaign’s primary artifact was not these stills. It was a short film — Take Ivy In Korea — released to Renacts’ YouTube channel as the moving-image companion to the 1965 original. These photographs are stills from the same shoot.

Take Ivy In Korea — the autumn 2023 short film that this photo set documents. Recorded at Yangpyeong English Village, fronted by Lewis Oh, with the Renacts and MELAVORO Gentlemens Club community.

What we wrote in the YouTube description, almost verbatim: this Korean reconstruction was led by Renacts and MELAVORO — the two brands we operate — but the larger ambition was a four-season project. Take Ivy is, in its 1965 form, an autumn document. We wanted to film spring, summer, autumn, and winter as a single complete work, with broader public participation and brand collaboration, until what we ended up with was a precedent for the culture we love rather than a one-off tribute. Autumn 2023 was the first chapter. The other three chapters are, as of this writing, still ahead of us.

The Last Time We Borrowed a Legend

Take Ivy In Korea matters in the Renacts archive for a reason that was not visible at the time and has become clearer since: it is the only borrowed-legend campaign of 2023, and the last one we will ever shoot under someone else’s name.

By the time we got to Yangpyeong in September, the new self-archive premise had already been established twice that year — first in April with the 2023 Renacts Gentlemens Club Yearbook, then again in early summer with the Legacy Suits campaign. We had already stopped borrowing. Take Ivy In Korea was a deliberate exception: a single tribute we wanted to make under our own hands, in our own country, before the door closed for good.

The campaigns that came after — the 4th Gentlemens Social Club photographed by 2ND Magazine in October, and the 5th Gentlemens Social Club with J.Press Tokyo in December — went straight back to the self-archive work the Yearbook had set down in spring. Take Ivy In Korea is the one frame in the 2023 sequence that points outward instead of inward, on purpose.

You can’t pivot away from a legend you never honored. We honored this one. Then we got to work on our own.

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