I read a sensational article in a newspaper the other evening. It
was an article which set forth Fourteen Commandments to men on how to
be dressy. I call it sensational because of its novelty. Every day
in almost any paper you turn to, you will find a page or half-page
about women's dress, usually adorned by amazing drawings of
impossible women dressed in impossible clothes, and standing in
impossible attitudes, who all seem alike in their vacuity and
futility. But never before do I remember to have seen in a daily
newspaper an article addressed to men, telling them what clothes they
should wear and how to wear them. I daresay there have been such
articles, but I have not seen them, and certainly they are so
infrequent that they may be said to be unknown.
I shall be curious to see whether the innovation has come to stay,
for it has been a subject of mild speculation with me why all the
literature of dress should be confined to women. On the face of it
we might suppose that it was only women who wore clothes at all, and
certainly only women who cared what clothes they wore or made a
science of wearing them. No doubt this is largely true. Every woman
has a serious interest in dress. "There was never fair woman but she
made mouths in a glass," says the poet, and there was never woman of
any sort, fair or plain, that could refuse at least the tribute of a
glance at a well-dressed milliner's window. You will hear women
discuss dress on the bus as earnestly and continuously as their boys
discuss cricket, or their husbands discuss stocks and shares, or
motor-cars, or golf, or the iniquities of politicians. I have never
yet heard two men discuss dress in the abstract for two minutes. You
might sit in any smoking-room in any men's club in London for a year
without hearing a remark on the fashion in ties or trousers, or a
single comment on the fact that this or that person was well- or
ill-dressed. If dress is mentioned at all, it is mentioned in an
ironical vein, as a matter fitting, perhaps, for a light jest among
friends, but nothing more.
This must not be taken to mean, I think, that men are wholly
indifferent to dress. It does not fill anything like the place in
their mind that it fills in the mind of women, and I fancy there is
an unwritten convention among them that it is bad form almost
bordering on the improper to talk about clothes. It would smack of
vanity in regard to one's personal appearance. Women can talk about
clothes without this sense of personal vanity. They talk about it in
a detached, abstract way, as they might talk about pictures, or
music, or any other æsthetic subject. They are interested in it
objectively as an art. They like to see pretty dresses, even though
they cannot hope to wear them. They throng to a wedding, not so much
from interest in the principals as from the desire to see the clothes
the bride wears. They like to see them much as they might like to
hear a beautiful performance on the violin, although they themselves
can never hope to play the violin. Even women who dress dowdily
themselves and affect to have souls above the follies of their sex,
secretly love a display of fashions and like to read about the
garments of women they do not know and do not want to know.
Men are certainly not like this. They are not interested in dress as
an art. If their newspaper, describing a political meeting, informed
them that the chairman was dressed in a frock-coat, with three
buttons and a full skirt, that he wore trousers with a tendency to
bell-bottoms, and patent leather shoes with pointed toes, and white
gaiters--if they were told this they would wonder what the joke was
about. Where a man is keenly interested in dress, he is interested
in his own dress. His concern is his own personal appearance. He is
particular about the crease in his trousers and the cut of his coat
where his wife, perhaps, is only interested in the objective beauty
of gowns and toques, and can enjoy the sight of them on other people
as well as in her own mirror.
Are we to conclude that men are superior to women in having none of
this disinterested enthusiasm for dress as an art? It is a nice
question. I should not wish to see the subject fill so large a place
in their thought as it does in the case of women; but they ought not
to be above it, or pretend that they are above it. After all, to be
well-dressed--not "dressy"--nor necessarily fashionable--is as proper
a wish in man as in woman. Dress has its spiritual and moral
reactions. It may seem absurd, but it is true that we are in a real
sense the creatures of our clothes. We are better men, more
civilised men, in a well-fitting garment than in an ill-made garment.
Baggy knees dispirit the mind. Slovenliness does not stop at the
clothes, but infects the soul. That is why a clean-up in the evening
and a change of clothes is a good moral tonic for anyone. The case
was well put by an Australian squatter to a friend of mine who
visited him on his estate far away in the wilds of the interior. My
friend asked him why, in so remote a place, he made it a practice to
"dress" for dinner. "I do it," said the squatter, "to avoid losing
my self-respect. If I did not dress for dinner I should end by
coming in to dinner in my shirt-sleeves. I should end by not
troubling to wash. I should sink down to the level of the cattle. I
dress for dinner, not to make myself pretty, but as a spiritual
renovation."