AND ANOTHER THING
In praise of FDR's tweed suit, a pope's giant slippers and other old rags
PAUL JOHNSON
While American immigration officials desperately try to stop Mexicans crossing into the United States, on the other side of the border Mexican customs officials are fighting a losing battles against the smug- gling of American old clothes. Why Mexico should want to impose heavy duties on these items is unclear, but it does, and as a result Brownsville in Texas has become the world's old clothes centre. One business there employs 350 people and handles 50 tons of second-hand clothing every day. It sells not just second-hand skirts, jeans and shirts in bulk, at $1.25 a pound, to impecu- nious Mexicans, but vintage items at high prices to collectors in Japan, Italy and else- where. Here is a theme for Dickens, who wrote a novel about the Golden Dustman who inherited a valuable heap.
I have no false delicacy about wearing clothes which once belonged to someone else. My favourite garment was given to me by a lady who inherited it from, I think, a great-uncle. It is a magnificent rust evening jacket of velvet corduroy, superbly lined in satin with wide lapels, made long, long ago by Simpson's, who ruefully admit that they do not sell such items any more. I pass on stuff too. Some years ago I made over to the only one of my sons whom my clothes will fit a series of monumental Harris tweed suits I had constructed in the 1950s. It is virtually impossible to wear out these integuments, which, come the millennium, will be half a century old.
It used to be quite common for people to inherit clothes. For instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt had passed on to him by his father, in about 1910, a tweed suit which had been made in 1878. FDR wore it con- stantly but in 1926 passed it on in turn to his eldest son, who was still wearing it in 1939. My ecological friend Teddy Gold- smith used proudly to show his fine pair of highly polished and much-mended shoes which had originally belonged, I think, to his great-grandfather. It would not surprise me if those shoes were still in use, though leather, alas, unlike Harris tweed, is not imperishable.
Nor need the whims of fashion preclude the wearing of inherited clothes. I recall Cristobal Balenciaga, greatest of the post- war Paris designers, boasting that his ball- gowns, if properly looked after, would last for ever, and I was not surprised to come across a girl who occasionally wears a Balenciaga evening frock first made for her grandmother in the early 1950s. The work- manship, especially the hand-sewing, on an authentic item of Paris haute couture is breathtakingly fine and durable. The unpleasant and ignorant little man from Luxembourg who currently runs the Brus- sels bureaucracy recently abused Britain for having what he called 'Dickensian sweat- shops', as though such places were unknown across the Channel. He cannot ever have been in a Paris couturier's ate- lier; there is no other way to produce clothes of the highest quality than by using the nimble fingers of indefatigable young women. I don't know whether it would be right to call these places sweatshops, as the girls are very well paid today, but they are Dickensian in the sense that they involve a lot of people crowded together and work- ing very hard indeed with their hands., The Victoria & Albert Museum now col- lects and displays a superb procession of grand dresses, some of them going back to the early 19th century, every one of which could be worn with reclame tonight. A fine- ly conceived and well-made dress is good for all seasons and centuries, as our ances- tors knew. In the later Middle Ages, sarto- rial splendour was an important aspect of kingship — one of the criticisms of the woefully inept Henry VI was that he always wore the same old blue gown 'as if he had noe more to change with' — and the dis- play clothes of royalty were state proper- ties, kept and inventoried in the official wardrobe. Henry VIII's wives often had to wear the gowns of their predecessors, and hand them back when their time, too, came for dismissal or the chop.
None, unfortunately, survive, any more than Caesar's bloodstained toga, or the gar- ments Caiaphas rent when Jesus was accused of blasphemy, or the Emperor Constantine's purple wigs, or the short socks (curt-hose) worn by the Normans. More's the pity. Nothing brings historical personalities closer to us than seeing what they actually wore, a striking example being the immense suit of armour of Henry VIII when he was full-blown, especially when seen in the Tower, ranged alongside the dinky set made for the diminutive Charles I. I love gazing at Elizabeth I's magnificent gauntlets, chosen carefully from skins which emitted no smell, achingly thin and finely sewn, which she pulled on and off repeatedly to draw attention to her beauti- ful hands, her best feature. Another favourite of mine are the colossal size-16 slippers of St Pius X, whose feet must have been as impressive in grandeur as his views were soundly reactionary.
The tragedy is that, from the 18th cen- tury on, people have been less and less inclined to keep their own clothes, let alone preserve their ancestors'. The last king of England to hoard all his kit was George IV. At his death, thousands of outfits of his were found, the pages claim- ing he knew the exact whereabouts of them all in his apartments. Many had never been worn but others had pockets stuffed with guineas and sovereigns, worth a fortune when totted up. What eventual- ly happened to this regal wardrobe? Gone with the wind. Edward VII was another profuse and natty dresser whose gear has vanished without trace. I should love to be able to wear one of the special Hom- burg hats he had made, with a crease in the middle, worn at a jaunty angle, or one of the first short-coat-tailed jackets he devised to go with them. The fashions having moved full circle again, there are women who would give a fortune to be seen in one of old Queen Mary's gowns. Were they all destroyed too? Come to think of it, what happened to the enor- mous wardrobe of the Duke of Windsor, which included a number of innovative items, in shocking taste but undoubtedly of historical interest?
I used to possess a bit of cloth allegedly cut from one of Bonaparte's overcoats, and I would like to hear from readers who own, or have heard of, other items worn by the ancient great. Who would not wish to wrap himself in Sir Walter Ralegh's puddle-stained cloak, which bore the imprint of the Virgin Queen's foot? And what woman could resist wearing, if it were possible, one of those elegant-sound- ing gowns sewn by Jane Austen's skilled hands and described in detail in letters to her sister Cassandra? Lincoln's and Brunel's stovepipe hats, Tennyson's black sombrero, the Iron Duke's original wellingtons, George Sand's pants, George Eliot's famous 'smalls' — these would all be enviable treasures. So it is good to hear that the old clothes trade is now Big Busi- ness, in Brownsville anyway.
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