There is nothing more gallant than the flourish of a trusty hankie
Shake, rumple and stuff is my advice for a happy day, even for an agreeable passage through the larger matter of life itself. This is about the coming renaissance of the handkerchief. And what to do with it, pocket-wise.
Perhaps I belong to the last generation to be sternly reminded as a child never to leave home without a hankie. To do so would infringe both common sense and good manners. Besides, where else to put a half-sucked gobstopper?
Yet the handkerchief could not survive ruthlessly quick-’n’-easy Pop Culture. Laundering a hemmed fabric square became a ludicrous burden when paper tissues and, later, wipes became cheaply available. But now we know these disposables were the works of Satan, time to reappraise a humble accessory.
The more so with news that Leicester Royal Infirmary has been treating a gallant without a hankie who damaged his pharynx while manfully stifling a convulsive expulsion of irritants, or what we call a sneeze. There was noble social purpose here: prevention of the airborne transmission to strangers of infected droplets.
But, as it so often does, gallantry led to suffering. Ruptured throat? It could have been so much worse: a cerebral aneurysm, damage to the seventh cranial nerve or, in extreme cases, eyeballs popping out of sockets. And it could have been avoided by a hankie: with stifling no longer necessary, free expression becomes possible.
The sneeze has a curious cultural history. The Greeks believed sternutation, as it is properly called, to be a divine messenger, while East Asian people insist that an involuntary sneeze means someone is talking about you. But the handkerchief evolved in the middle ages as a practical means of capturing infectious miasmas.
Yet there was always art to the hankie, too. You might wave one above your head while dancing a quadrille or a farandole. More recently, sumptuary laws put limits on the allowable vanities of men: the modest flourish of a handkerchief visible in a suit’s breast-pocket was an exception. Here it becomes a pocket-square whose role is principally decorative.
Its expressive range, however, was limited: the inhibiting mentality of Royal courtiers in The Crown finds expression in the neatly folded strip of white linen barely visible above the pocket’s threshold, a haberdasher’s equivalent to a trimmed moustache. Even Sean Connery in early Bond films maintains this strict discipline: a thin parallelogram of starched whiteness says precision and authority…. with the merest suggestion of a nearly feminine vanity.
Handkerchief liberation has its roots in Seventies San Francisco gay culture, when coloured bandanas in back pockets indicated, in a language understood by all, specific sexual preferences.
De-sexualised, a pocketsquare is the easiest way of lifting the drabbest outfit with just a little frivolity, like a baroque cartouche. The cost is modest, variety of patterns is endless, the improvement of the wearer’s mood reliably impressive. Some advocate the Westo Four Point Fold, others the Cagney or Astaire. Few today go for the starched Connery. A more anarchic shake, rumple and stuff is what I recommend. This is thrilling disinhibition, but – if absolutely necessary – can be used safely to contain autonomous sternutation. If only all fashion were so useful.