Nice suit, shame about the fluff in your turn-ups!
Good, I thought, as I picked up this book — I may find the explanation for some of the weird things I have worn, or stopped wearing over the years.
For example, trouser turnups, garters, collar studs and shirt studs, buttons t hat don’t button anything and distressed jeans.
Lucy Adlington runs History Wardrobe, which presents costume talks across the UK.
Her chief interest is in recent costume, 20th century British fashion. The variety in menswear seems to me just as interesting as women’s. But menswear rules are even more rigorously enforced. Men are deadly conformist, even when being non-conformist.
The old cliche stills applies — your clothes are a statement about you. Well, the statement most men made when I was young was: ‘don’t worry, I am just like you, obeying the rules’. And then the rules began to change: from tight to loose, from buttoned-up to open, from uncomfortable to easy-going, let it all hang out — or down.
Her story is a tale of liberation. In the course of it, men got rid of hats, gloves, tight, starchy collars separate from the studded shirt, bow-ties, braces and suspenders (why worry if your socks slide down a bit?) and finally, to my amazed relief, ties.
We Are not quite a tie - less society ( see Jon Snow nightly in glorious technicolour), but you can now go to the smartest of restaurants and dine open-necked.
I used to worry that my son would turn up tie-less at a date and be refused admission. These days, it is he who wears the impeccable tie and I who am open-necked and unrespectable.
I may conceivably be the last man alive to have seen spats worn in deadly earnest. They were a lovely dove-grey with a nap like a billiard table, and my father was fitting them like inverted saucers around his lower leg, twixt shoe and trouser bottom.
He was due to escort King George V, a stickler for sartorial propriety, round an exhibition. Spats remained de rigueur at court. It wasn’t until his son, edward VIII, took over that frock coats were dropped as court wear.
edward had a big influence on fashion as a dashing Prince of Wales. He introduced loud golf stockings worn beneath plusfours — baggy trousers that ended at the knee.
Just for the hell of it he wore oxford ‘bags’, which had bottoms a ludicrous 20 in wide. They didn’t last, of course, but their turn-ups, which weighed them down, did.
I wore turn-ups from the time I put on long trousers (at the late age of 12).
The turn-up served no purpose but to collect fluff, grit, pins and, on lucky days, sixpences. Sadly, Lucy Adlington has no explanation of them to offer.
Tailors insisted on them until they were swept away in the economy drive that marked the Second World War.
This put traditional tailors to great lengths to maintain standards — there were pocket flaps with no pocket behind. once I was offered false turnups — a ridge of cloth stitched on the bottom where the turn- up should be, but with no capacity to collect anything. We have now reached that foundation garment of respectability, the lounge suit. even after the Second World War you had to have a tailor to make it to measure if you had any pretension to being gentlemanly.
Mass-produced suits ‘off the peg’ were for clerks, salesmen and suchlike. It took two fittings and the delicate manoeuvre of measuring the inside leg with a tape measure and the question: ‘dress left or right, sir?’
OF coUrSe, s ui t s came with fly buttons, many of them awkward to undo in a hurry. When the liberating zip arrived it was greeted with relief.
A modest- sized label with t he name was stitched into an inside breast pocket.
Tailors’ reputations were (and still are) valuable secrets passed on by word of mouth. ‘dammit, Jeeves,’ says Bertie on being reproved for his faulty taste, ‘chaps ask me who my tailor is.’
Jeeves’s reply is a classic: ‘Possibly in order to avoid him, sir.’
over the years, for no discernible reason, trousers have shrunk to drainpipes or swelled to flares. But the suit remains essential correct wear in the professions and the city. So does its strict buttoning code.
The bottom button of the waistcoat, like the top button of the single-breasted jacket, must be left undone.
A story I love illustrates the hold which the suit retains on correctness. einstein was going to be visited at home by two very high-up officials from Washington. Mrs einstein had spent all morning urging him to change from his usual genial disorder into his suit.
He wouldn’t comply. ‘ Albert, they will think you haven’t got a suit!’ einstein, as always, had a brilliant solution to the problem.
‘ When they arrive,’ he said sweetly, ‘take them upstairs, open the wardrobe . . . and show them my suit!’