A Penny of Observation
ARMADO : HOW hast thou purchased this experience ? Mom: By my penny of observation.
PHANTASMAGORIA It was our delightful privilege to attend a Men's Dress Reform Revel which was held in London last week. In the costumes of the male guests the profusion of colour was only equalled by the variety of cut, and our eye was charmed. But we must confess, at the risk of appearing churlish, to a certain bewilderment. The ideals of the movement responsible for this exhibition (our use of the word is subject to correction) achieved, as it seemed to us, no coherent expression. Conscious, on arrival, that our own attire, which was that worn by most members of the working classes, and hence known as a lounge suit, stood gravely in need of fantastication, we looked about us for an object-lesson. Alas! there were too many. Hardly had we decided to drop into our tailor's (like a character in a pre-War novel) and order just such a pair of puce taffeta shorts as were sharply defining the limbs of a stout gentleman in pince-nez, when our purpose was shaken by the sight of a youth in plus-fours of sable velvet. Round that man's legs, we reflected, there is enough black velvet to act Shake- speare in front of, in a smallish theatre. We were perplexed, disorientated. The knees, those bones of sartorial contention— were they to be revealed, or was their very existence to be glossed over ? Even in the matter of the male neck, whose emancipation from the thraldom of starch we had understood to be a cardinal tenet of these revellers, opinion seemed divided. While there were many who flaunted the Adam's apple undraped and even exposed a segment of their chests, a small but conspicuous minority wore high, tight collars of coloured
stuffs and that expression of strong but ineffectual resentment usually associated with the early stages of death by strangu- lation. It was, we repeat, bewildering—the more so since, in that squeak-and-djibbah atmosphere, the company seemed pervaded by a kind of ghastly unreality, and there were several present whose appearance was so peculiar that we wrote them off as hallucinations. We left the building with the conviction that, if anything is to come of the movement for Men's Dress Reform, its disciples must first make up their minds which part of the human body they want to expose, and then go and expose them in the South of France.
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