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The Peacock's Tail, by Pearl Binder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Binder)
Written in 1958
Some novelty, but hardly a useful book for the shelf. Fashion-centric, and with some odd notions.
For brevity and clarity, I sometimes slightly re-wrote a sentence or paragraph.
The simple drawings in the book didn't do it justice, so I updated it with a few relevant photos, in a light-hearted spirit. I decided against a few possibly controversial inclusions.
Begin...
VS Pritchett says, “We live by our inner life and our illusions.” Man dresses as he feels, as he wants to appear, as he would be. In his dress, he puts his hopes – and not only his hopes, but his fears as well. If to-day he dresses with dull anonymity that is the way he is feeling. It is his heart which is speaking, and his heart is filled with endless ennui and fear of appearing different from millions of other robots.
Obviously something is deeply amiss with Western man. He is not happy. He is unable to find the comfort and reassurance he needs either in the various creeds of the various Churches or in politics… Man wants to belong to a stable community. He wants to make his little impression. He wants to love and be loved. He wants to feel that his job has some significance. And in his spare time he wants to have some fun. These apparently simple desires appear to be impossible to realise to-day, especially the last, though he pursues entertainment as never before.
Few men in the Western world will to-day admit that their dress is bad, whatever they may secretly think. Instead they immediately advance four reasons in favour of it as it is. These reasons are: first, to dress more brightly would look effeminate; second, dark colours, they say, do not show the dirt; third, their present dress, they say, is both functional and comfortable; fourth, anything different, they say, would be more costly.
America has attracted some of the most skilful tailors in the world… the products of these top-rank American tailors are still more expensive than those of the top-rank English tailors. And it may be that the English cachet still confers its magic.
The bowler hat and rolled umbrella, the exquisitely prosaic city suit, express to perfection the man whose mission in life is to make money. It is a protective colouring suitable for the financial jungle. Costly sobriety is its hallmark: costly to show that he is financially successful and can afford to have his suit made in Savile Row, sober to show that he is respectable.
The tailors of the eighteenth century, who made such breathtaking clothes for men, did not know how to cut. They were clumsy amateurs compared with the contemporary magicians of Savile Row. But they were not afraid of brilliant colour, varied texture, and rich embroidery, any more than were their clients. To-day taste in male dress has degenerated into restraint and restraint only.
I have chosen Henry Poole as representative of the small class of superlative English tailors. Their London establishment is large, impressive in an extremely quiet manner, and of cathedral solemnity. People there speak in hushed tones.
Henry Poole is renowned to-day as the supreme tailor for the older gentleman.
For an ordinary lounge suit forty-four hours’ work is necessary. Each craftsman here is a highly trained specialist in his own particular garment or portion of garment. No less than three fittings are usually required of the customer, each fitting lasting as a rule about fifteen minutes. Five years’ apprenticeship is required for a coat-maker, to qualify as a cutter seven or eight years’ apprenticeship is necessary, and the cutter must first qualify as a coatmaker. No cutter would ever be considered under the age of at least thirty, because he could not have had enough experience of his craft.
No client of Poole’s is believed to practise any kind of waist-suppression by belt or corset. In the autumn of 1957, Poole’s prices, including purchase tax, were as follows [the prices are followed with adjustment to 2010 for average earnings and the current prices at Poole]:
For a lounge suit£49 16s 0d (£2334/£3433)
For a dining-suit£58 2s 0d (£2723/£3830)
Tails
For a winter overcoat£48 15s 9d (£2283/basic £2504 good cashmere £3745)
For a summer overcoat£44 12s 0d (£2088)
Men’s clothes are less tight-fitting on the whole than they were twenty years ago, the tendency towards looseness having started after the 1914 War when officers returning to civilian life wished to feel more at ease. More recent tendencies have been towards a looser jacket, which fashion, having been started in expensive tailoring, was immediately taken up and grossly exaggerated by the cheap tailors and consequently at once abandoned by the expensive tailors.
Poole’s are resolutely opposed to the introduction of any colour or dash whatsoever into male dress, and earnestly dissuade their customers from attempting the slightest gaiety.
The economic position to-day of those Englishmen who care to uphold such gentlemanly standards of sartorial elegance is unfortunately not too promising. To-day no less than 60 per cent of Poole’s business is export trade.
Increasing numbers of gentlemen who ought to be dressed by Savile Row are becoming less interested in what they wear, so that soon it will be only South American millionaires who dress like English gentlemen.
Tailors are finding it increasingly difficult to engage staff with the high qualifications they require. Any English gatherings of any consequence, from a provincial wedding to the great ceremonies of court and State, are still notable for the numbers of meticulously dressed men apparently turned out by Savile Row. The secret is that most of these expensive clothes are quite simply hired for the occasion, as a pragmatic solution.
Despite Savile Row, man is not born with sober and restrained tastes. Like any magpie or mackerel, he has an inborn craving for colour and glitter, and even anthropoid apes show a distinct aversion to the colour black.
The most interesting items of contemporary American dress, the lumber-shirt of bright plaid, the tight trousers and dungarees, derive from the garb of common people fulfilling themselves in tedious and dangerous jobs. Though to-day glamorized out of recognition of this basic truth and worn by men who may never leave their office all day such was their origin. The glaring pattern of the lumber-shirt was obligatory in order that the lumber-jack wearer might stand out in the gloom of the forest, so as to avoid accident from falling trees, and in order to be instantly visible in the turbulent currents of the unfreezing rivers, in times of accident during dam-breaking. The bright kerchief was there to be pulled over the face in dust-storms. The broad leather belt was a corset to offset the intense physical strain of the lasso. Dungarees display the dignity and simplicity of all unpretentious working dress. The cut is easy. Blue is universally the cheapest of all dyes. The pockets, strategically placed and shaped to contain tools, are right because they are there for a purpose and belong to the dress. Such is the plain honesty of dungarees, conveying the essential dignity of the readiness to employ physical effort, that their manliness cannot be denied. Perhaps it is just this manliness that contemporary American youth are desperately seeking.
Just what is “relaxed formal”, a contradiction in terms? “Authentic Black Watch Tartans” are offered ‘also in brown and green,’ with no sense of anachronism. The New Yorker male-dress advertisements offer fascinating mixtures of sentiment and snobbery such as “Authentic Ascot cap, soft yet robust, for perfectionists”, and “Unusual Shetland jackets.” Of which the high selling point consists in the claim that they are “woven on primitive hand-looms in stone cottages”. Five-dollar ties are boasted to display patterns “purloined from antique music boxes,”.
Such innovations flourish as flowered Hawaiian shirts in city offices, on the weary backs of middle-aged salesmen.
Esquire, the arbiter of American dress for men…Mr Birmingham, its editor… he was wearing, with a delicate sense of social position, a well-cut jacket of Black Watch tartan with huge embossed silver buttons. “But,” he assured me, “I would not, of course, permit my salesmen to dress like this. They have to wear conventional dark suits.
Mr Birmingham grouped American male dress into three sections: first, dress remarkable for extremism of cut, design, and colour; second, dress displaying quieter and more restrained taste (typical, he declared, of the professional classes); and, third, the dress of the younger men for whom Esquire caters, a class more enterprising than the second class and better off than the first.
Such younger men are demanding more colour in their dress.
There is plenty of money to be spent on male dress,
a real if confused interest in the subject,
and no foolish embarrassment about trying what is new, no matter how often the styles change.
American men to-day have advantages over their ancestors as they are able to purchase such figure-aids as elasticized shorts
and to diet intelligently,
and therefore are in better shape than their ancestors, and in consequence have a good figure to dress.
Diet, elastic shorts, psychoanalysis, twenty-five-cent know-how handbooks, all these make the American man feel not so bad when he feels not so good, but none of them can give him the quiet assurance of absolute confidence in himself he really needs to dress really well. He may have money, but he is not yet morally and emotionally adult.
The dark and sombre nineteenth-century city suit, depressing as it is, avoids the embarrassment of flagrantly unsuitable dress meant for the young and fair, and which is to-day in America so often worn by the old and ugly. Those flowered shirts (very like the loose covers on settees in English country drawing rooms) are so often worn by massive men on the streets of American cities that the simile is even more marked. They belong by rights on slender brown bodies on burning coral beaches in the South Seas. America is slowly finding that it does not pay aesthetic dividends to borrow bits from different cultures without the culture that informs them. The gaucho of South America, with his dignified dress and demeanour, represents something that rich Americans are vainly searching for. What they find instead are such things as mink neckties sold in “The New York Shop for smart men” and worn by other rich romantics searching vainly for something their money prevents them from buying.
Since he was writing for those with pretensions to gentility the author of The Whole Art of Dress was careful to warn them how not to appear vulgar:
Beaver until latterly has been almost solely worn amongst the nobility and gentry. A silk hat (if known) only recalling a low mechanic to the ideas of the former on the subject.
Of the two ways of overcoming social rank in dress – that is, by every one dressing up or by every one dressing down – the first is the one that in the past has most tempted humanity. Rich commoners eagerly bedecked themselves in fine lace, and the not-so-rich bedecked themselves in imitation lace as soon as imitation lace had been invented. The gentleman therefore had to distinguish himself in other ways from the less well-born. One way, and an immensely important way, was to understand how to know a cravat properly.
A narrow waist has always been looked upon with approval as a sign of manly virility.
The Renaissance male shape…the male leg, of which the thigh was concealed to some extent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrated for its appeal on the beauty of the calf, which could be faked.
Pantaloons: Dress manuals suggest that they were worn so tight that there was constant danger of the material tearing.
Slimness was worshipped, but not thinness. The desired silhouette included a very broad chest, very narrow waist, very long, straight legs with suddenly swelling calves, and very small, narrow feet. Muscles had to appear only where required, and many gentlemen found it easiest to buy them ready-made from an outfitters.
It is interesting that plus-fours, which became fashionable in the nineteen-twenties when the boy-girl was coming to the front, seemed designed to dodge the issue of whether the wearer had good calves or not. To-day none can guess what shape a man’s legs are inside his elephant-leg trousers.
To-day gentlemen who wish to remain gentlemen in England may wear no other jewellery than cuff-links and evening shirt studs. And these must be of an extreme austerity. An extremely thin flattened gold watch is also permitted. Nothing more.
To-day tattooing is still commonly found both among petty thieves and the more important members of the underworld such as pimps. More respectable crafts also like to have the trademark of their work tattooed on their forearms. Men in the army or navy also.
The English are the most aristocratic democrats in the world, always endeavouring to squeeze through the portals of rank and fashion and then slamming the door in the face of the unfortunate devil who may happen to be behind them. 1830.
Society desires the individual to stay put in his allotted place, whereas the individual desires to elevate himself.
Brummel was a shrewd young man on the make. Hollywood is where he really belongs. Nobody knew the news-value of his affectations better than he did, and the legend he was so skilled in creating has lasted successfully into our own times. He could always think up something new. He told infatuated young noblemen that his recipe for boot-varnish was to add champagne to the standard recipe. He let it be widely known that he made his valet first wear all his new clothes as they came from the tailors, so that they should not look too vulgarly new when he worse them himself. He behaved, indeed, like the classic valet of French comedy, dressed up in his master’s clothes and overdoing the role… the valet’s revenge on society, valeting it into a cleanliness bordering on mania and at the same time taking all the gaiety and pleasure out of its dress.
HG Wells ventures to forecast that “we may be moving towards a much more varied costume than the world has ever known before.” Alas, the opposite seems to be the case. English male dress shows a tendency to level up and down into a general miasma of respectable conformity.
There have been sporadic attempts at dress-reform in recent years, always starting among youth. In 1925 ‘Oxford bags’ enjoyed a brief popularity. These were extremely large, loose trousers of the palest possible shades of flannel, worn to look as sloppy as possible. To-day the swing is in the contrary direction, the chief quality of Teddy-boy dress being in the extreme tightness and sobriety of colour of the trousers.
Around this Teddy-boy dress these boys have woven a complete personality for themselves, delighted to be in the public eye, behaving with aloofness and an attempted hauteur which scarcely hides a gaucherie they can only cover by keeping together in bands.
There are various conceptions of Teddy clothes. Usually the form is a wide-shouldered jacket often coming well over the thighs and worn loose with ‘drapes’. Sometimes the coat has a black velvet collar. A ‘slim Jim’ tie is de rigeur. Trousers are worn very tight and black, and often rather short in the leg, the better to show up the socks, sometimes of brilliant yellow or flame-colour, and the clumpy shoes.
What is worth noting is that it is a real attempt at a gentlemanly dress, or what these lads imagine it to be, something far more in common with the English dandies of the last century than might have been expected from this generation of youth, brought up entirely on American tough movies and American comics.
Here are the words of a young girl from West Ham, in East London, describing the ideal attire of her ideal sweetheart, in the 1959 “Leap Year” radio programme:
Thick crepe shoes. Spivvy socks. Skintight drainpipes. Stiff shirt collar. Waistcoat. Not a double-breasted coat, a one-button coat. Fingertip drapes. A white handkerchief in the top of his coat. A duffle coat and a cheese cap.
…the duffle coat being the darling of present day youth, and…the cheese cap [flat cap] now being ok for poor boys to wear again, since it has come back to them sanctioned as gentlemanly wear from a class well above their own income group.
For Teddy-boy dress is not the dress of the social outcast or the aggressive sloven. The lads who wear it are well washed and tidy and as well groomed as they know how to be. They valet their dress with care, and they brush their careful coiffure.
The psychological arguments waged to account for the Teddy-boy cult. Dr Macalister Brew suggests Teddy-boy dress is a mating lure. The County Youth Officer of the Surrey County Council has a different theory. Youth are neither aggressive by nature nor especially desirous of collaborating with authority. All they want is something to relieve the boredom… so bored with life that in sheer desperation they adopted a mode of dress that would at least give them an opportunity to express their individuality.
These are explanations why youth to-day should want to wear some kind of distinctive dress. They do not explain why the dress is the particular dress that it is. There is every reason in the world why it should rather have taken the form of Western cowboy dress, since youth is so much more accustomed to seeing such dress on the screens of the cheap cinemas.
I believe it is a social-climbing dress, like most fine dress. These boys, I think, want to be somebody, and who they want to be is a real English gent who counts for something.
An evening standard report of a men’s fashion show in 1955 states:
The tailors favour narrow trousers often without turn-ups. Jacket pockets with crescent-shaped openings instead of the usual straight tones. Waistcoat buttons are spaced in groups of two or three like a guardsman’s.
Just at this time there was a most interesting series of letters in The Times from correspondents all over England, and of all classes, expressing a real interest in the cape, as a useful and beautiful garment worthy of readoption in present English male dress. Capes are so essentially simple, and look so good even in inexpensive material.
Life is not worth living when men work only ‘for the lolly’, whether on the Stock Exchange or in the factory. The unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the real scientist, the endless taking of time and trouble to make something well of the real artist, these are what we need to-day to restore man’s self-respect and belief in himself.
The Savile Row suit is dying of inanition to-day. It must adapt itself to the times or it will die. Surely this is the moment for Savile Row to take a hint from such distinguished designers of female dress as Norman Hartnell and Christian Dior, men not too proud to design good clothes for the multitude. Once Savile Row removes the stranglehold of exclusiveness, which is killing its possibility of real service to more than a dwindling handful (mostly of South American millionaires), [and begins to design for the multitude] English tailoring could again lead the world.
Written in 1958
Some novelty, but hardly a useful book for the shelf. Fashion-centric, and with some odd notions.
For brevity and clarity, I sometimes slightly re-wrote a sentence or paragraph.
The simple drawings in the book didn't do it justice, so I updated it with a few relevant photos, in a light-hearted spirit. I decided against a few possibly controversial inclusions.
Begin...
VS Pritchett says, “We live by our inner life and our illusions.” Man dresses as he feels, as he wants to appear, as he would be. In his dress, he puts his hopes – and not only his hopes, but his fears as well. If to-day he dresses with dull anonymity that is the way he is feeling. It is his heart which is speaking, and his heart is filled with endless ennui and fear of appearing different from millions of other robots.
Obviously something is deeply amiss with Western man. He is not happy. He is unable to find the comfort and reassurance he needs either in the various creeds of the various Churches or in politics… Man wants to belong to a stable community. He wants to make his little impression. He wants to love and be loved. He wants to feel that his job has some significance. And in his spare time he wants to have some fun. These apparently simple desires appear to be impossible to realise to-day, especially the last, though he pursues entertainment as never before.
Few men in the Western world will to-day admit that their dress is bad, whatever they may secretly think. Instead they immediately advance four reasons in favour of it as it is. These reasons are: first, to dress more brightly would look effeminate; second, dark colours, they say, do not show the dirt; third, their present dress, they say, is both functional and comfortable; fourth, anything different, they say, would be more costly.
America has attracted some of the most skilful tailors in the world… the products of these top-rank American tailors are still more expensive than those of the top-rank English tailors. And it may be that the English cachet still confers its magic.
The bowler hat and rolled umbrella, the exquisitely prosaic city suit, express to perfection the man whose mission in life is to make money. It is a protective colouring suitable for the financial jungle. Costly sobriety is its hallmark: costly to show that he is financially successful and can afford to have his suit made in Savile Row, sober to show that he is respectable.
The tailors of the eighteenth century, who made such breathtaking clothes for men, did not know how to cut. They were clumsy amateurs compared with the contemporary magicians of Savile Row. But they were not afraid of brilliant colour, varied texture, and rich embroidery, any more than were their clients. To-day taste in male dress has degenerated into restraint and restraint only.
I have chosen Henry Poole as representative of the small class of superlative English tailors. Their London establishment is large, impressive in an extremely quiet manner, and of cathedral solemnity. People there speak in hushed tones.
Henry Poole is renowned to-day as the supreme tailor for the older gentleman.
For an ordinary lounge suit forty-four hours’ work is necessary. Each craftsman here is a highly trained specialist in his own particular garment or portion of garment. No less than three fittings are usually required of the customer, each fitting lasting as a rule about fifteen minutes. Five years’ apprenticeship is required for a coat-maker, to qualify as a cutter seven or eight years’ apprenticeship is necessary, and the cutter must first qualify as a coatmaker. No cutter would ever be considered under the age of at least thirty, because he could not have had enough experience of his craft.
No client of Poole’s is believed to practise any kind of waist-suppression by belt or corset. In the autumn of 1957, Poole’s prices, including purchase tax, were as follows [the prices are followed with adjustment to 2010 for average earnings and the current prices at Poole]:
For a lounge suit£49 16s 0d (£2334/£3433)
For a dining-suit£58 2s 0d (£2723/£3830)
Tails
For a winter overcoat£48 15s 9d (£2283/basic £2504 good cashmere £3745)
For a summer overcoat£44 12s 0d (£2088)
Men’s clothes are less tight-fitting on the whole than they were twenty years ago, the tendency towards looseness having started after the 1914 War when officers returning to civilian life wished to feel more at ease. More recent tendencies have been towards a looser jacket, which fashion, having been started in expensive tailoring, was immediately taken up and grossly exaggerated by the cheap tailors and consequently at once abandoned by the expensive tailors.
Poole’s are resolutely opposed to the introduction of any colour or dash whatsoever into male dress, and earnestly dissuade their customers from attempting the slightest gaiety.
The economic position to-day of those Englishmen who care to uphold such gentlemanly standards of sartorial elegance is unfortunately not too promising. To-day no less than 60 per cent of Poole’s business is export trade.
Increasing numbers of gentlemen who ought to be dressed by Savile Row are becoming less interested in what they wear, so that soon it will be only South American millionaires who dress like English gentlemen.
Tailors are finding it increasingly difficult to engage staff with the high qualifications they require. Any English gatherings of any consequence, from a provincial wedding to the great ceremonies of court and State, are still notable for the numbers of meticulously dressed men apparently turned out by Savile Row. The secret is that most of these expensive clothes are quite simply hired for the occasion, as a pragmatic solution.
Despite Savile Row, man is not born with sober and restrained tastes. Like any magpie or mackerel, he has an inborn craving for colour and glitter, and even anthropoid apes show a distinct aversion to the colour black.
The most interesting items of contemporary American dress, the lumber-shirt of bright plaid, the tight trousers and dungarees, derive from the garb of common people fulfilling themselves in tedious and dangerous jobs. Though to-day glamorized out of recognition of this basic truth and worn by men who may never leave their office all day such was their origin. The glaring pattern of the lumber-shirt was obligatory in order that the lumber-jack wearer might stand out in the gloom of the forest, so as to avoid accident from falling trees, and in order to be instantly visible in the turbulent currents of the unfreezing rivers, in times of accident during dam-breaking. The bright kerchief was there to be pulled over the face in dust-storms. The broad leather belt was a corset to offset the intense physical strain of the lasso. Dungarees display the dignity and simplicity of all unpretentious working dress. The cut is easy. Blue is universally the cheapest of all dyes. The pockets, strategically placed and shaped to contain tools, are right because they are there for a purpose and belong to the dress. Such is the plain honesty of dungarees, conveying the essential dignity of the readiness to employ physical effort, that their manliness cannot be denied. Perhaps it is just this manliness that contemporary American youth are desperately seeking.
Just what is “relaxed formal”, a contradiction in terms? “Authentic Black Watch Tartans” are offered ‘also in brown and green,’ with no sense of anachronism. The New Yorker male-dress advertisements offer fascinating mixtures of sentiment and snobbery such as “Authentic Ascot cap, soft yet robust, for perfectionists”, and “Unusual Shetland jackets.” Of which the high selling point consists in the claim that they are “woven on primitive hand-looms in stone cottages”. Five-dollar ties are boasted to display patterns “purloined from antique music boxes,”.
Such innovations flourish as flowered Hawaiian shirts in city offices, on the weary backs of middle-aged salesmen.
Esquire, the arbiter of American dress for men…Mr Birmingham, its editor… he was wearing, with a delicate sense of social position, a well-cut jacket of Black Watch tartan with huge embossed silver buttons. “But,” he assured me, “I would not, of course, permit my salesmen to dress like this. They have to wear conventional dark suits.
Mr Birmingham grouped American male dress into three sections: first, dress remarkable for extremism of cut, design, and colour; second, dress displaying quieter and more restrained taste (typical, he declared, of the professional classes); and, third, the dress of the younger men for whom Esquire caters, a class more enterprising than the second class and better off than the first.
Such younger men are demanding more colour in their dress.
There is plenty of money to be spent on male dress,
a real if confused interest in the subject,
and no foolish embarrassment about trying what is new, no matter how often the styles change.
American men to-day have advantages over their ancestors as they are able to purchase such figure-aids as elasticized shorts
and to diet intelligently,
and therefore are in better shape than their ancestors, and in consequence have a good figure to dress.
Diet, elastic shorts, psychoanalysis, twenty-five-cent know-how handbooks, all these make the American man feel not so bad when he feels not so good, but none of them can give him the quiet assurance of absolute confidence in himself he really needs to dress really well. He may have money, but he is not yet morally and emotionally adult.
The dark and sombre nineteenth-century city suit, depressing as it is, avoids the embarrassment of flagrantly unsuitable dress meant for the young and fair, and which is to-day in America so often worn by the old and ugly. Those flowered shirts (very like the loose covers on settees in English country drawing rooms) are so often worn by massive men on the streets of American cities that the simile is even more marked. They belong by rights on slender brown bodies on burning coral beaches in the South Seas. America is slowly finding that it does not pay aesthetic dividends to borrow bits from different cultures without the culture that informs them. The gaucho of South America, with his dignified dress and demeanour, represents something that rich Americans are vainly searching for. What they find instead are such things as mink neckties sold in “The New York Shop for smart men” and worn by other rich romantics searching vainly for something their money prevents them from buying.
Since he was writing for those with pretensions to gentility the author of The Whole Art of Dress was careful to warn them how not to appear vulgar:
Beaver until latterly has been almost solely worn amongst the nobility and gentry. A silk hat (if known) only recalling a low mechanic to the ideas of the former on the subject.
Of the two ways of overcoming social rank in dress – that is, by every one dressing up or by every one dressing down – the first is the one that in the past has most tempted humanity. Rich commoners eagerly bedecked themselves in fine lace, and the not-so-rich bedecked themselves in imitation lace as soon as imitation lace had been invented. The gentleman therefore had to distinguish himself in other ways from the less well-born. One way, and an immensely important way, was to understand how to know a cravat properly.
A narrow waist has always been looked upon with approval as a sign of manly virility.
The Renaissance male shape…the male leg, of which the thigh was concealed to some extent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrated for its appeal on the beauty of the calf, which could be faked.
Pantaloons: Dress manuals suggest that they were worn so tight that there was constant danger of the material tearing.
Slimness was worshipped, but not thinness. The desired silhouette included a very broad chest, very narrow waist, very long, straight legs with suddenly swelling calves, and very small, narrow feet. Muscles had to appear only where required, and many gentlemen found it easiest to buy them ready-made from an outfitters.
It is interesting that plus-fours, which became fashionable in the nineteen-twenties when the boy-girl was coming to the front, seemed designed to dodge the issue of whether the wearer had good calves or not. To-day none can guess what shape a man’s legs are inside his elephant-leg trousers.
To-day gentlemen who wish to remain gentlemen in England may wear no other jewellery than cuff-links and evening shirt studs. And these must be of an extreme austerity. An extremely thin flattened gold watch is also permitted. Nothing more.
To-day tattooing is still commonly found both among petty thieves and the more important members of the underworld such as pimps. More respectable crafts also like to have the trademark of their work tattooed on their forearms. Men in the army or navy also.
The English are the most aristocratic democrats in the world, always endeavouring to squeeze through the portals of rank and fashion and then slamming the door in the face of the unfortunate devil who may happen to be behind them. 1830.
Society desires the individual to stay put in his allotted place, whereas the individual desires to elevate himself.
Brummel was a shrewd young man on the make. Hollywood is where he really belongs. Nobody knew the news-value of his affectations better than he did, and the legend he was so skilled in creating has lasted successfully into our own times. He could always think up something new. He told infatuated young noblemen that his recipe for boot-varnish was to add champagne to the standard recipe. He let it be widely known that he made his valet first wear all his new clothes as they came from the tailors, so that they should not look too vulgarly new when he worse them himself. He behaved, indeed, like the classic valet of French comedy, dressed up in his master’s clothes and overdoing the role… the valet’s revenge on society, valeting it into a cleanliness bordering on mania and at the same time taking all the gaiety and pleasure out of its dress.
HG Wells ventures to forecast that “we may be moving towards a much more varied costume than the world has ever known before.” Alas, the opposite seems to be the case. English male dress shows a tendency to level up and down into a general miasma of respectable conformity.
There have been sporadic attempts at dress-reform in recent years, always starting among youth. In 1925 ‘Oxford bags’ enjoyed a brief popularity. These were extremely large, loose trousers of the palest possible shades of flannel, worn to look as sloppy as possible. To-day the swing is in the contrary direction, the chief quality of Teddy-boy dress being in the extreme tightness and sobriety of colour of the trousers.
Around this Teddy-boy dress these boys have woven a complete personality for themselves, delighted to be in the public eye, behaving with aloofness and an attempted hauteur which scarcely hides a gaucherie they can only cover by keeping together in bands.
There are various conceptions of Teddy clothes. Usually the form is a wide-shouldered jacket often coming well over the thighs and worn loose with ‘drapes’. Sometimes the coat has a black velvet collar. A ‘slim Jim’ tie is de rigeur. Trousers are worn very tight and black, and often rather short in the leg, the better to show up the socks, sometimes of brilliant yellow or flame-colour, and the clumpy shoes.
What is worth noting is that it is a real attempt at a gentlemanly dress, or what these lads imagine it to be, something far more in common with the English dandies of the last century than might have been expected from this generation of youth, brought up entirely on American tough movies and American comics.
Here are the words of a young girl from West Ham, in East London, describing the ideal attire of her ideal sweetheart, in the 1959 “Leap Year” radio programme:
Thick crepe shoes. Spivvy socks. Skintight drainpipes. Stiff shirt collar. Waistcoat. Not a double-breasted coat, a one-button coat. Fingertip drapes. A white handkerchief in the top of his coat. A duffle coat and a cheese cap.
…the duffle coat being the darling of present day youth, and…the cheese cap [flat cap] now being ok for poor boys to wear again, since it has come back to them sanctioned as gentlemanly wear from a class well above their own income group.
For Teddy-boy dress is not the dress of the social outcast or the aggressive sloven. The lads who wear it are well washed and tidy and as well groomed as they know how to be. They valet their dress with care, and they brush their careful coiffure.
The psychological arguments waged to account for the Teddy-boy cult. Dr Macalister Brew suggests Teddy-boy dress is a mating lure. The County Youth Officer of the Surrey County Council has a different theory. Youth are neither aggressive by nature nor especially desirous of collaborating with authority. All they want is something to relieve the boredom… so bored with life that in sheer desperation they adopted a mode of dress that would at least give them an opportunity to express their individuality.
These are explanations why youth to-day should want to wear some kind of distinctive dress. They do not explain why the dress is the particular dress that it is. There is every reason in the world why it should rather have taken the form of Western cowboy dress, since youth is so much more accustomed to seeing such dress on the screens of the cheap cinemas.
I believe it is a social-climbing dress, like most fine dress. These boys, I think, want to be somebody, and who they want to be is a real English gent who counts for something.
An evening standard report of a men’s fashion show in 1955 states:
The tailors favour narrow trousers often without turn-ups. Jacket pockets with crescent-shaped openings instead of the usual straight tones. Waistcoat buttons are spaced in groups of two or three like a guardsman’s.
Just at this time there was a most interesting series of letters in The Times from correspondents all over England, and of all classes, expressing a real interest in the cape, as a useful and beautiful garment worthy of readoption in present English male dress. Capes are so essentially simple, and look so good even in inexpensive material.
Life is not worth living when men work only ‘for the lolly’, whether on the Stock Exchange or in the factory. The unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the real scientist, the endless taking of time and trouble to make something well of the real artist, these are what we need to-day to restore man’s self-respect and belief in himself.
The Savile Row suit is dying of inanition to-day. It must adapt itself to the times or it will die. Surely this is the moment for Savile Row to take a hint from such distinguished designers of female dress as Norman Hartnell and Christian Dior, men not too proud to design good clothes for the multitude. Once Savile Row removes the stranglehold of exclusiveness, which is killing its possibility of real service to more than a dwindling handful (mostly of South American millionaires), [and begins to design for the multitude] English tailoring could again lead the world.
