Chapter 10. Modes Of The Moment; A Fashion Article

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_ Chapter X. 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 subsantial 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 oniy 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 anexceedingly good appearance. The swallow-tailed coat was created for the Englishman andhe 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 insome 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. _

Read next: Chapter 11. Dressed To Kill

Read previous: Chapter 9. The Deadly Poulet Routine

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