Over at J.Crew, a new arrival is the ‘plantation madras’ button-down, a breezy, colorful shirt just in time for the annual thaw, not to mention a thing whose name I can’t help but associate with slavery. Of course, perhaps I’m being hypersensitive. Because not all plantations got fat off slave-labor and it’s a bit silly to necessarily associate the two. Then again, would anyone ever sell a ‘plantation bullwhip’? J. Peterman might. The company Seinfeld so often mocked seems more eager to revel in blue-blooded patriarchy than a Buckley sipping highballs on a yacht on Long Island Sound. Here’s the company’s description of a pair of its tweed slacks: ‘Did you know that Verdi wrote ‘Falstaff’ when he was 80? … Verdi, Walt Whitman, the Mellons. Hard workers from solid European stock. Just like these pants.’ Well then! At that point, I say to hell with the subtlety; call them the Sorry, Darkie Breeches: ‘From solid European stock and for solid European stockholders.’

Thankfully, even more direct is J. Peterman’s ‘owner’s hat,’ introduced thusly: ‘Some of us work on the plantation. Some of us own the plantation.’