Modes of the Moment; a Fashion Article
Among the furbearing races the adult male of the French species easily
excels. Some fine peltries are to be seen in Italy, and there is a type
of farming Englishman who wears a stiff set of burnishers projecting
out round his face in a circular effect suggestive of a halo that has
slipped down. In connection with whiskers I have heard the Russians
highly commended. They tell me that, from a distance, it is very hard
to distinguish a muzhik from a bosky dell, whereas a grand duke nearly
always reminds one of something tasty and luxuriant in the line of
ornamental arborwork. The German military man specializes in mustaches,
preference being given to the Texas longhorn mustache, and the walrus
and kitty-cat styles. A dehorned German officer is rarely found and a
muley one is practically unknown. But the French lead all the world in
whiskers--both the wildwood variety and the domesticated kind trained
on a trellis. I mention this here at the outset because no Frenchman
is properly dressed unless he is whiskered also; such details properly
appertain to a chapter on European dress.
Probably every freeborn American citizen has at some time in his life
cherished the dream of going to England and buying himself an outfit of
English clothes--just as every woman has had hopes of visiting Paris and
stocking up with Parisian gowns on the spot where they were created, and
where--so she assumes--they will naturally be cheaper than elsewhere.
Those among us who no longer harbor these fancies are the men and women
who have tried these experiments.
After she has paid the tariff on them a woman is pained to note that her
Paris gowns have cost her as much as they would cost her in the United
States--so I have been told by women who have invested extensively in
that direction. And though a man, by the passion of the moment, may
be carried away to the extent of buying English clothes, he usually
discovers on returning to his native land that they are not adapted to
withstand the trying climatic conditions and the critical comments of
press and public in this country. What was contemplated as a triumphal
reentrance becomes a footrace to the nearest ready-made clothing store.
English clothes are not meant for Americans, but for Englishmen to wear:
that is a great cardinal truth which Americans would do well to ponder.
Possibly you have heard that an Englishman's clothes fit him with an
air. They do so; they fit him with a lot of air around the collar and a
great deal of air adjacent to the waistband and through the slack of the
trousers; frequently they fit him with such an air that he is entirely
surrounded by space, as in the case of a vacuum bottle. Once there was
a Briton whose overcoat collar hugged the back of his neck; so they knew
by that he was no true Briton, but an impostor--and they put him out
of the union. In brief, the kind of English clothes best suited for an
American to wear is the kind Americans make.
I knew these things in advance--or, anyway, I should have known them;
nevertheless I felt our trip abroad would not be complete unless I
brought back some London clothes. I took a look at the shop-windows and
decided to pass up the ready-made things. The coat shirt; the shaped
sock; the collar that will fit the neckband of a shirt, and other common
American commodities, seemed to be practically unknown in London.
The English dress shirt has such a dinky little bosom on it that by
rights you cannot refer to it as a bosom at all; it comes nearer to
being what women used to call a guimpe. Every show-window where I
halted was jammed to the gunwales with thick, fuzzy, woolen articles
and inflammatory plaid waistcoats, and articles in crash for tropical
wear--even through the glass you could note each individual crash
with distinctness. The London shopkeeper adheres steadfastly to this
arrangement. Into his window he puts everything he has in his shop
except the customer. The customer is in the rear, with all avenues of
escape expertly fenced off from him by the proprietor and the clerks;
but the stock itself is in the show-window.
There are just two department stores in London where, according to the
American viewpoint, the windows are attractively dressed. One of these
stores is owned by an American, and the other, I believe, is managed
by an American. In Paris there are many shops that are veritable
jewel-boxes for beauty and taste; but these are the small specialty
shops, very expensive and highly perfumed.
The Paris department stores are worse jumbles even than the English
department stores. When there is a special sale under way the bargain
counters are rigged up on the sidewalks. There, in the open air, buyer
and seller will chaffer and bicker, and wrangle and quarrel, and kiss
and make up again--for all the world to see. One of the free sights
of Paris is a frugal Frenchman, with his face extensively haired over,
pawing like a Skye terrier through a heap of marked-down lingerie;
picking out things for the female members of his household to wear--now
testing some material with his tongue; now holding a most personal
article up in the sunlight to examine the fabric--while the wife stands
humbly, dumbly by, waiting for him to complete his selections. So far
as London was concerned, I decided to deny myself any extensive orgy in
haberdashery. From similar motives I did not invest in the lounge suit
to which an Englishman is addicted. I doubted whether it would fit the
lounge we have at home--though, with stretching, it might, at that. My
choice finally fell on an English raincoat and a pair of those baggy
knee breeches such as an Englishman wears when he goes to Scotland for
the moor shooting, or to the National Gallery, or any other damp, misty,
rheumatic place.
I got the raincoat first. It was built to my measure; at least that was
the understanding; but you give an English tailor an inch and he takes
an ell. This particular tailor seemed to labor under the impression that
I was going to use my raincoat for holding large public assemblies or
social gatherings in--nothing that I could say convinced him that I
desired it for individual use; so he modeled it on a generous spreading
design, big at the bottom and sloping up toward the top like a pagoda.
Equipped with guy ropes and a centerpole it would make a first-rate
marquee for a garden party--in case of bad weather the refreshments
could be served under it; but as a raincoat I did not particularly fancy
it. When I put it on I sort of reminded myself of a covered wagon.
Nothing daunted by this I looked up the address of a sporting tailor
in a side street off Regent Street, whose genius was reputed to find an
artistic outlet in knee breeches. Before visiting his shop I disclosed
my purpose to my traveling companion, an individual in whose judgment
and good taste I have ordinarily every confidence, and who has a way of
coming directly to the meat of a subject.
"What do you want with a pair of knee breeches?" inquired this person
crisply.
"Why--er--for general sporting occasions," I replied.
"For instance, what occasions?"
"For golfing," I said, "and for riding, you know. And if I should go
West next year they would come in very handy for the shooting."
"To begin with," said my companion, "you do not golf. The only extensive
riding I have ever heard of your doing was on railway trains. And if
these knee breeches you contemplate buying are anything like the knee
breeches I have seen here in London, and if you should wear them out
West among the impulsive Western people, there would undoubtedly be
a good deal of shooting; but I doubt whether you would enjoy it--they
might hit you!"
"Look here!" I said. "Every man in America who wears duck pants doesn't
run a poultry farm. And the presence of a sailor hat in the summertime
does not necessarily imply that the man under it owns a yacht. I
cannot go back home to New York and face other and older members of the
When-I-Was-in-London Club without some sartorial credentials to show
for my trip. I am firmly committed to this undertaking. Do not seek to
dissuade me, I beg of you. My mind is set on knee breeches and I shan't
be happy until I get them."
So saying I betook myself to the establishment of this sporting
tailor in the side street off Regent Street; and there, without much
difficulty, I formed the acquaintance of a salesman of suave and urbane
manners. With his assistance I picked out a distinctive, not to say
striking, pattern in an effect of plaids. The goods, he said, were made
of the wool of a Scotch sheep in the natural colors. They must have some
pretty fancy-looking sheep in Scotland!
This done, the salesman turned me over to a cutter, who took me to a
small room where incompleted garments were hanging all about like the
quartered carcasses of animals in a butcher shop. The cutter was a
person who dropped his H's and then, catching himself, gathered them
all up again and put them back in his speech--in the wrong places. He
surveyed me extensively with a square and a measuring line, meantime
taking many notes, and told me to come back on the next day but one.
On the day named and at the hour appointed I was back. He had the
garments ready for me. As, with an air of pride, he elevated them for my
inspection, they seemed commodious--indeed, voluminous. I had told him,
when making them, to take all the latitude he needed; but it looked
now as though he had got it confused in his mind with longitude. Those
breeches appeared to be constructed for cargo rather than speed.
With some internal misgivings I lowered my person into them while he
held them in position, and when I had descended as far as I could go
without entirely immuring myself, he buttoned the dewdabs at the knees;
then he went round behind me and cinched them in abruptly, so that of
a sudden they became quite snug at the waistline; the only trouble was
that the waistline had moved close up under my armpits, practically
eliminating about a foot and a half of me that I had always theretofore
regarded as indispensable to the general effect. Right in the middle of
my back, up between my shoulder blades there was a stiff, hard clump of
something that bored into my spine uncomfortably. I could feel it quite
plainly--lumpy and rough.
"Ow's that, sir?" he cheerily asked me, over my shoulder; but it seemed
to me there was a strained, nervous note in his voice. "A bit of all
right--eh, sir?"
"Well," I said, standing on tiptoe in an effort to see over the top,
"you've certainly behaved very generously toward me--I'll say that much.
Midships there appears to be about four or five yards of material I do
not actually need in my business, being, as it happens, neither a harem
favorite nor a professional sackracer. And they come up so high I'm
afraid people will think the gallant coast-guards have got me in a
lifebuoy and are bringing me ashore through the surf."
"You'll be wanting them a bit loose, sir, you know," he interjected,
still snuggling close behind me. "All our gentlemen like them loose."
"Oh, very well," I said; "perhaps these things are mere details.
However, I would be under deep obligations to you if you'd change 'em
from barkentine to schooner rig, and lower away this gaff-topsail which
now sticks up under my chin, so that I can luff and come up in the
wind without capsizing. And say, what is that hard lump between my
shoulders?"
"Nothing at all, sir," he said hastily; and now I knew he was flurried.
"I can fix that, sir--in a jiffy, sir."
"Anyhow, please come round here in front where I can converse more
freely with you on the subject," I said. I was becoming suspicious that
all was not well with me back there where he was lingering. He came
reluctantly, still half-embracing me with one arm.
Petulantly I wrestled my form free, and instantly those breeches seemed
to leap outward in all directions away from me. I grabbed for them, and
barely in time I got a grip on the yawning top hem. Peering down the
cavelike orifice that now confronted me I beheld two spectral white
columns, and recognized them as my own legs. In the same instant, also,
I realized what that hard clump against my spine was, because when he
took his hand away the clump was gone. He had been standing back there
with some eight or nine inches of superfluous waistband bunched up in
his fist.
The situation was embarrassing, and it would have been still more
embarrassing had I elected to go forth wearing my breeches in their
then state, because, to avoid talk, he would have had to go along too,
walking immediately behind me and holding up the slack. And such a
spectacle, with me filling the tonneau and he back behind on the rumble,
would have caused comment undoubtedly.
That pantsmaker was up a stump! He looked reproachfully at me, chidingly
at the breeches and sternly at the tapemeasure--which he wore draped
round his neck like a pet snake--as though he felt convinced one of us
was at fault, but could not be sure which one.
"I'm afraid, sir," he said, "that your figure is changing."
"I guess you're right," I replied with a soft sigh. "As well as I can
judge I'm not as tall as I was day before yesterday by at least eighteen
inches. And I've mislaid my diaphragm somewhere, haven't I?"
"'Ave them off, please, sir," he said resignedly. "I'll 'ave to alter
them to conform, sir. Come back to-morrow."
I had them off and he altered them to conform, and I went back on the
morrow; in fact I went back so often that after a while I became really
quite attached to the place. I felt almost like a member of the firm.
Between calls from me the cutter worked on those breeches. He cut them
up and he cut them down; he sheared the back away and shingled the
front, and shifted the buttons to and fro.
Still, even after all this, they were not what I should term an
unqualified success. When I sat down in them they seemed to climb up on
me so high, fore and aft, that I felt as short-waisted as a crush hat
in a state of repose. And the only way I could get my hands into the
hip pockets of those breeches was to take the breeches off first. As ear
muffs they were fair but as hip pockets they were failures. Finally
I told him to send my breeches, just as they were, to my hotel
address--and I paid the bill.
I brought them home with me. On the day after my arrival I took them to
my regular tailor and laid the case before him. I tried them on for him
and asked him to tell me, as man to man, whether anything could be done
to make those garments habitable. He called his cutter into consultation
and they went over me carefully, meantime uttering those commiserating
clucking sounds one tailor always utters when examining another tailor's
handiwork. After this my tailor took a lump of chalk and charted out a
kind of Queen Rosamond's maze of crossmarks on my breeches and said I
might leave them, and that if surgery could save them he would operate.
At any rate he guaranteed to cut them away sufficiently to admit of my
breast bone coming out into the open once more.
In a week--about--he called me on the telephone and broke the sad news
to me. My English riding pants would never ride me again. In using the
shears he had made a fatal slip and had irreparably damaged them in an
essential location. However, he said I need not worry, because it
might have been worse; from what he had already cut out of them he had
garnered enough material to make me a neat outing coat, and by scrimping
he thought he might get a waistcoat to match.
I have my English raincoat; it is still in a virgin state so far as
wearing it is concerned. I may yet wear it and I may not. If I wear
it and you meet me on the street--and we are strangers--you should
experience no great difficulty in recognizing me. Just start in at
almost any spot on the outer orbit and walk round and round as though
you were circling a sideshow tent looking for a chance to crawl under
the canvas and see the curiosities for nothing; and after a while, if
you keep on walking as directed, you will come to a person with a plain
but substantial face, and that will be me in my new English raincoat.
Then again I may wear it to a fancy-dress ball sometime. In that case
I shall stencil Pike's Peak or Bust! on the sidebreadth and go as a
prairie schooner. If I can succeed in training a Missouri hound-dog to
trail along immediately behind me the illusion will be perfect.
After these two experiences with the English tailor I gave up. Instead
of trying to wear the apparel of the foreigner I set myself to the
study of it. I would avoid falling into the habit of making comparisons
between European institutions and American institutions that are forever
favorable to the American side of the argument. To my way of thinking
there is only one class of tourist-Americans to be encountered abroad
worse than the class who go into hysterical rapture over everything they
see merely because it is European, and that is the class who condemn
offhand everything they see and find fault with everything merely
because it is not American. But I must say that in the matter of outer
habiliments the American man wins the decision on points nearly every
whack.
In his evening garb, which generally fits him, but which generally is
not pressed as to trouserlegs and coatsleeves, the Englishman makes
an exceedingly good appearance. The swallow-tailed coat was created for
the Englishman and he for it; but on all other occasions the well-dressed
American leads him--leads the world, for that matter. When a Frenchman
attires himself in his fanciest regalia he merely succeeds in looking
effeminate; whereas a German, under similar circumstances, bears a
wadded-in, bulged-out, stuffed-up appearance. I never saw a German
in Germany whose hat was not too small for him--just as I never saw a
Japanese in Occidental garb whose hat was not too large for him--if it
was a derby hat. If a German has on a pair of trousers that flare out
at the bottom and a coat with angel sleeves--I think that is the correct
technical term--and if the front of his coat is spangled over with
the largest-sized horn buttons obtainable he regards himself as being
dressed to the minute.
As for the women, I believe even the super-critical mantuamakers of
Paris have begun to concede that, as a nation, the American women
are the best-dressed women on earth. The French women have a way of
arranging their hair and of wearing their hats and of draping their furs
about their throats that is artistic beyond comparison. There may be a
word in some folks' dictionaries fitly to describe it--there is no such
word in mine; but when you have said that much you have said all there
is to say. A French woman's feet are not shod well. French shoes, like
all European shoes, are clumsy and awkward looking.
English children are well dressed because they are simply dressed;
and the children themselves, in contrast to the overdressed, overly
aggressive youngsters so frequently encountered in America, are mannerly
and self-effacing, and have sane, simple, childish tastes. Young English
girls are fresh and natural, but frequently frumpy; and the English
married woman is generally dressed in poor taste and appears to have
a most limited wardrobe. Apparently the husband buys all he wants, and
then, if there is any money left over, the wife gets it to spend on
herself.
Venturing one morning into a London chapel I saw a dowdy little woman of
this type kneeling in a pew, chanting the responses to the service. Her
blouse gaped open all the way down her back and she was saying with much
fervor, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done."
She had too, but she didn't know it, as she knelt there unconsciously
supplying a personal illustration for the spoken line.
The typical highborn English woman has pale blue eyes, a fine complexion
and a clear-cut, rather expressionless face with a profile suggestive
of the portraits seen on English postage stamps of the early Victorian
period; but in the arranging of her hair any French shopgirl could give
her lessons, and any smart American woman could teach her a lot about
the knack of wearing clothes with distinction.
In England, that land of caste which is rigid enough to be cast iron,
all men, with the exception of petty tradespeople, dress to match the
vocations they follow. In America no man stays put--he either goes
forward to a circle above the one into which he was born or he slips
back into a lower one; and so he dresses to suit himself or his wife or
his tailor. But in England the professional man advertises his calling
by his clothes. Extreme stage types are ordinary types in London.
No Southern silver-tongued orator of the old-time, string-tied,
slouch-hatted, long-haired variety ever clung more closely to his
official makeup than the English barrister clings to his spats, his
shad-bellied coat and his eye-glass dangling on a cord. At a glance one
knows the medical man or the journalist, the military man in undress or
the gentleman farmer; also, by the same easy method, one may know the
workingman and the penny postman. The workingman has a cap on his
head and a neckerchief about his throat, and the legs of his corduroy
trousers are tied up below the knees with strings--else he is no
workingman.
When we were in London the postmen were threatening to go on strike.
From the papers I gathered that the points in dispute had to do with
better hours and better pay; but if they had been striking against
having to wear the kind of cap the British Government makes a postman
wear, their cause would have had the cordial support and intense
sympathy of every American in town.
It remains for the English clerk to be the only Englishman who seeks, by
the clothes he wears in his hours of ease, to appear as something more
than what he really is. Off duty he fair1y dotes on the high hat of
commerce. Frequently he sports it in connection with an exceedingly
short and bobby sackcoat, and trousers that are four or five inches
too short in the legs for him. The Parisian shopman harbors similar
ambitions--only he expresses them with more attention to detail. The
noon hour arriving, the French shophand doffs his apron and his air of
deference. He puts on a high hat and a frock coat that have been on a
peg behind the door all the morning, gathers up his cane and his gloves;
and, becoming on the instant a swagger and a swaggering boulevardier, he
saunters to his favorite sidewalk cafe for a cordial glassful of a pink
or green or purple drink. When his little hour of glory is over and done
with he returns to his counter, sheds his grandeur and is once more your
humble and ingratiating servitor.
In residential London on a Sunday afternoon one beholds some weird
and wonderful costumes. On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a
Kensington suburb I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a
little Cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of
his breed. He was presumably going to church, for he carried a large
Testament under his arm. He wore, among other things, a pair of white
spats, a long-tailed coat and a high hat. It was not a regular high hat,
either, but one of those trick-performing hats which, on signal, will
lie doggo or else sit up and beg. And he was riding a bicycle of an
ancient vintage!
The most impressively got-up civilians in England--or in the world,
either, for that matter--are the assistant managers and the deputy
cashiers of the big London hotels. Compared with them the lilies of the
field are as lilies in the bulb. Their collars are higher, their ties
are more resplendent, their frock coats more floppy as to the tail and
more flappy as to the lapel, than it is possible to imagine until
you have seen it all with your own wondering eyes. They are haughty
creatures, too, austere and full of a starchy dignity; but when you come
to pay your bill you find at least one of them lined up with the valet
and the waiter, the manservant and the maidservant, the ox and the ass,
hand out and palm open to get his tip. Having tipped him you depart
feeling ennobled and uplifted--as though you had conferred a purse of
gold on a marquis.