CONCERNING MEN'S DRESS [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I
am wondering whether the authoress of your last week's article, " Concerning Men's Dress," wrote to promote the picturesque, or out of kindly compassion for her " muffled and constricted " man, or (likeliest hypothesis of the three) with her tongue in her cheek.
If the picturesque is her aim, she surely cannot wish that osseous and hirsute man should follow woman in " steadily decreasing the amount that he wears," for she admits that in running or bathing kit man is an unlovely object (" His 'prentice han' He tried on man and then He made the lasses, O ! ") ;* nor would she advocate tight-fitting military breeches and Hessian boots for morning dress if at her next Court ball she will note how many British cavalry legs can stand that trying combination. Plus-fours may be, as she says, " hideous and absurd," but at least they often throw a kindly veil over limbs which are even more so.
But if, on the other hand, she writes out of compassion for man and his alleged uncomfortable clothes, she is wasting good sympathy. She advocates, for example, belts in place of " shameful and comic " braces ; but experiment would show her that a belt is far less effective than braces (how many times in an " over " does a bowler hitch up his trousers and tuck in his shirt ?) and far less comfortable—especially after dinner. So also with the " skin-tight breeches worn by Life Guards " which she recommends ; I have not tried these, but the unavoidable constriction round knee and calf of ordinary hunting breeches is quite torture enough. Similarly with the fur cap for which she pleads ; .even in Arctic weather it is a stuffy, clammy headgear. So again, the stiff collar, which she would abandon for the coster's kerchief, is, except in the tropics, the most comfortable neckwear I know.
I agree that trousers are hateful (though if she will try. the Oxford variety she will cease to praise their comfort), but hostesses will not allow plus-fours at garden parties and the like. Here your contributor might intervene and help us.
But, Sir, she cannot really be writing out of compassion for man ; no one with any kindly feeling for the creature would add a new terror to his life by driving him to the inevitable outcome of all these changes in dress and compel him (who can now wear pre-War clothes without remark) to join the anxious-eyed throng which daily and nightly blocks pedestrian traffic between Harrod's and Gorringe's and from Selfridge's to Peter Robinson's in the effort to discover what is " being worn."
No, I am sure that my third hypothesis was right and that your contributor wrote with her tongue in her cheek.
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