SHIRT SACRIFICE
Back to Ivy League again, because these Bengal-ish striped plus one nonstriped shirts with cut-away collars again refer back to the campus culture inspired genre that also intersected with The Queen’s Gambit. The stripes, while maybe not truly Bengal in proportion, can trace their ancestry to the fabric won by the British Indian Army’s Bengal Lancers back in the bad old days of the Empire. And as Alfred Brown IV noted in his engaging opening, the ancestry of chess can be chased back to the nation too – so that’s an interesting echo. Furthermore, modern chess includes a variation known as Indian Defenses that were largely created by a talented self-taught Bengali Brahmin named Moheschunder in the 1850s – so Bengal relates to check too.