Suit Yourself!
O.K., confess. You don't know why we wear suits, what is a good one, how to clean it or why there are buttons on the sleeve.
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There's one catch in all this. The suits were "medium" weight. Generally speaking that's good enough for Texas winters, but may be too heavy for the summers. If you work in an air-conditioned office and seldom have to leave it during the day, you'll make it through the summer just fine. Otherwise (or if you travel takes you north during the winter), you're probably going to need six suits: three medium-to-heavy and three light weight. That adds another $450 to the $1200 listed above. Sorry.
A wardrobe, however, is not a static thing and maintaining it year after year at a fairly high standard is not that expensive. The following is a yearly buying plan:
2 suits; one light, one heavy if necessary; or perhaps one suit and one sports jacket and slacks; @ $150...$300
5 shirts; @ $15...$75
5 ties; @ $8...$40
1 pair shoes...$50
2 slacks; @ $40...$80
personal preference...$55
$600
THE NON-DRESSER
There is one approach to fashion that is never touched on and it is, by any standard of style, a valid approach and possibly a more difficult approach to bring off properly, or at all, than the traditional one of style, taste, and grooming. I am speaking of the Non-Dresser, a type found in three classes of society: bohemians, college students, and workingmen.
The Non-Dresser comes by his clothes completely by accident. They are given to him or left behind in empty apartments or have been in his possession for so long that their origins are obscured by the dimness of ages past. He seldom goes into stores because he's not comfortable there, but when he does it is completely spur of the moment: "It's cold today. I guess I need a jacket." He walks into the first store he sees and buys the first jacket he sees that comes close to fitting regardless of style, color, pattern, or price. All he wants to do is find a jacket and get out of there as soon as possible.
To worry about price would mean more looking, more trying on, and it would mean that he cared. And care is exactly what the Non-Dresser must not do. He must dress each day without any regard for color, fabric, pattern, style. His only concern is the weather, hot or cold, rainy or clear. If he has a jacket, he has one jacket and wears it everywhere. If he has shoes, he has one pair of shoes and he wears them everywhere. The shoes and the jacket have no relation to one another.
The Non-Dresser may have nothing in his wardrobe that he likes for the way it looks, nothing that postures, nothing that stands out, nothing that is conspicuously in or out of style. This total unselfconsciousness makes his clothes invisible, as unnoticeable and unremarkable as his elbows.
The irony is that the Non-Dresser gets away with it. He looks good. People remember his face, his words, his gestures and can't recall a single article of his clothing the moment he's left. And that can be maddening for the man who has to lunge into a suit each morning and find a tie to match it.
BEAU BRUMMEL AND HIS INFLUENCE ON THE MATING CALLS OF THE MALE OF THE SPECIES
Although Brummell's name has by now come to suggest affectation, foppery, and effeminacy in dress, those were not qualities the man himself presented. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the way men dress today and have dressed since Brummel lived. The course of male fashion was set, Max Beerbohm wrote, "that bright morning when Mr. Brummell, at his mirror, conceived the notion of trousers and simple coats." The modern business suit is a direct descendent of the costume Brummell designed, while formal tails, though different in detail, are precisely Brummell's in concept.
Probably as important as Brummell's discovery of trousers and coat was his insistence on being clean. Early in the 19th century, people still did not bathe with any great frequency. Instead they splashed themselves with perfume to cover their smell. Brummell's pride was that he did not need perfume because he did not smell. His toilet began with vigorous daily washing, a habit unheard of at the time. Certain noblemen, permitted the honor of watching Brummell dress, were shocked to find him apply a brush to his teeth and scrub vigorously, sloshing, gurgling, and then spitting into a silver basin ("It is impossible to spit in clay," Brummell said.). He also shaved carefully, brushed his skin to bring color to it, and finished by using tweezers and a magnifying mirror to search out and pluck any whiskers that still survived.
His wit was as large a part of the legend as his appearance. Brummell considered vegetables too gross for his palate; asked his hostess at dinner if he had ever eaten them, Brummell replied, "Madame, I once ate a pea." Bored once by a visitor's accounts of his travels through the Lake Country, Brummell suddenly summoned his valet: "Robinson, which of the lakes do I admire?"
"Windermere, sir."
"Ah yes, Windermere. So it is, Windermere."
Asked by a contemporary his opinion of a new coat, Brummell replied, "Do you call that thing a coat?" When a nobleman approached Brummell at the horse races to compliment his clothes, Brummell answered, "But how could I be beautifully dressed if you have noticed me?"
Brummell believed that his distinction in dress should be apparent only to the initiate, that to be noticed on the street because of his dress was the worst indignity a gentleman could suffer. He wore a coat with high lapels, collar, and tails. This coat buttoned tightly across the waist and was always blue. Complementing it were buff trousers, neither loose nor tight, a vest and cravat of which very little showed, the cleanest, brightest white linen, and the blackest, high-topped boots, the soles of which were polished as highly as the tops. His materials were the simplest: wool, linen, leather.
These styles and fabrics were not the exclusive province of the rich or the royal; as England prospered through the rest of the century, they became accessible to a great many. It's ironic that Brummell, the Regency's arbiter of elegance, should have democratized fashion for the next 200 years. He would neither have desired this result nor found it repelling. He could oppose a man's admission to White's by saying, "His boots smell of cattle dung and inferior blacking"; at the same time, asked the secret of his dress, Brummell replied, "Fine linen, plenty of it, and country washing."
Brummell's contemporaries report that his presence and manners were quite masculine, but there is not a hint of any liaison between Brummell and any women—or man. He seems to have been completely indifferent to sex of any kind. He loved himself. He could not, after all, wear another person; the presence of another, man or woman, would spoil the perfection of his costume.
His legacy to us, the modern business suit, is a particularly unerotic garment. It neither hangs loosely enough to complement the movement of the body nor tightly enough to reveal the body. A suit's effect is calculated, straightforward, sensible; nothing is playful, accidental, blatant, or—and this is really the most significant—hints at being somehow, somewhere vulnerable. A man in a suit might look handsome, competent, successful, intelligent, and a good many other things; but if he looks erotic it is in spite of his clothes not because of them.
"Well," you may say, after a shrug of the shoulders and a long sigh, "so what?" The odds are you can't go to a business meeting looking like a rock and roll star; if you did, the explanation that you wanted to dress more erotically wouldn't do you any good either. But your whole life isn't going to be spent at that meeting and you shouldn't let its needs dictate the look of every piece of clothes you own.
More than 300 years ago, Robert Herrick, who understood such things, wrote this about his mistress:
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A Lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there Enthralls the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectfull and thereby Ribbons to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticote:
A careless shoestring, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when Art
Is too precise in every part.
And isn't it true that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander?
WORLDS GREATEST FASHION JOKE
A man goes to Henry the Tailor and buys a suit of clothes, but comes back the next day complaining that one sleeve is too short. "I'll have to fix it later," Henry says "but in the meantime pull down the sleeve, hold it with your fingers. You'll have to walk with your arm stiff at your side, but anything for a good fit, right?"
The man agrees but when he gets I home he notices that holding down the sleeve and walking with his arm stiff at his side makes the jacket wrinkle across the back. He goes back and points this out to Henry. "Why don't you reach around behind you with your other arm," Henry says, "and pull the jacket down from the back flap. You'll have to walk with one arm stiff and the other curled up behind you, but that'll get rid of the wrinkles. Anything for a good fit, right?"
So the man agrees but when he gets home he notices that walking with one arm stiff and the other behind his back makes him lean forward from the waist and that makes his trousers ride up a little bit. He goes back to Henry. "I still don't have time to fix it," Henry says, "but why don't you just scrunch down the waist of the pants with each elbow. You may have to bend down a little bit and walk a little funny, but anything for a good fit, right?"
So the man is walking down the street and one arm is stiff and the other is curled up behind him and he's bent over and walking funny holding both elbows tightly against his waist. Two old ladies see him, "My, my," says one, "Look at the poor cripple walking over there."
"Yes," says the other one, "but isn't he wearing a beautiful suit of clothes."
BUT EVERYONE WEARS ONE
Last year, a year in which almost 11 million new cars were sold, American men bought only 16 million new suits. Although predictions are that more suits will be bought this fall and winter than during the last few seasons, there are still only about the same number of suits sold each year as were sold in 1930.
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