Yale: The undergraduate, often with a Wall Street career in his future, already acts and dresses like the young broker type who haunts New York's Financial District.
This is from Esquire magazine in June of 1934 and tell us a couple of things about menswear during the Great Depression. First, that young college men were not trying out new fashions, and second, that the fashion they were wearing were those worn by older men, and third, that men have fashion which is something we often overlook as the shifts in women's fashions have been so much more dramatic. Clearly, any 1920s excitement about new looks like "bags"--goofily wide-legged trousers at the time--had petered out in favor of less novel ideas. And looking like a mature adult had become fashionable as well. Both perhaps because of the seriousness of the economic situation.
I found this quotation in an enormous tome entitled Esquire's Encyclopedia of 20th Century Men's fashions by O.E. Schoeffler and William Gale which came out in 1973.
