TYRANNY OF CLOTHES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 165, 14 July 1928, Page 8

TYRANNY OF CLOTHES.

It sounds incredible, but it is none the less a fact, that the average Aucklander, of the male persuasion, wears the same clothes in this cold mid-winter weather as he does in the semi-tropical heat of mid-February. A little thicker underwear perhaps, perhaps not, but the same old suit, with no attempt to make the suit suit the climatic conditions. Why? Just, because everyone else does so, and no one seems to have the pluck to lead a campaign for the whites that should be our summer garb. So we plod along, warm enough in winter, perhaps, stewed to apoplexy in summer. It is not merely a matter of, cost, though heaven knows that is high enough; it is just an affair of lack of both pluck and common sense. Life may be just one damn suit after another, but the suits are all on the one pattern, all the one weight. The only difference is that each sartorial masterpiece costs a little more than the last—you have put 011 a couple of pounds in your weight since then, and it costs a couple of pounds or so more to cover that carefully-acquired avoirdupois, so the amount of money one spends on one's back runs to alarming proportions; we visit the tailor frequently and pay him occasionally — w e never get any further ahead financially— neither does the tailor, but he does not count;

Clothes have developed into a fetish. Along comes the invitation with the advice that you may wear morning dress. Follows a dinner, and with it the clawhammer. When you go to work you put on another rig; for bed you have still another suit. If you play football you have the regulation uniform; you dare not step on the tennis court without your flannels. If you go to war you must have khaki; if you fight Satan you must dress in sober black and turn your waistcoat and collar back to front. If you play golf the plus-fours must tell the world about it, and so it goes on, a thousand costumes if you are to be respectable—and each one costing money. It's the same with the womenfolk. Entangled in a web of high skirts and high prices they explore all the possibilities of a thousand new materials until he who foots the bills grows aweary. Clothes, clothes, clothes—a perfect avalanche of them.

Life was simpler in the good, old days, when a covering of blue woad, whatever that might have been, was sufficient, and one coating lasted about a lifetime. Now the punishment must fit tfoe crime, or, what is the same thing, the suit, must fit the occasion. You 'would not dare to go to a ball in a sports coat, or to wear dress clothes at ten in the morning along Queen Street. If you did you would probably find yourself leading a procession whose immediate objective was the lock-up. If you went to a dinner party, in a frock coat you would be as much out of it as the boy who fell from the balloon. Had you the pluck to do the block in the regulation neck-to-knee costume of the beach, and a more suitable attire could hardly be found, you would probably soon be on the way to the Wolff reception home. No, you must be orthodox or be forever damned. You remember that someone in the Bible made his appearance somewhere "clothed and in his right mind." There is the whole philosophy of clothes, but to that the modernist has added that you must be clothed as befits the occasion. Herein lies the worst of the tyranny of clothes: they are regarded as an index of a man's mentality. The orthodox does as the Romans do; the heterodox wears a bow and flowing locks and passes for an artist—if he can get away with it. If one's clothing is not shipshape one is an untidy beggar; if it is, one is a dude. If one disdains a collar he is written down as a proletarian; if one expresses his own fancy he is eccentric, and so it goes on. Britons never shall be slaves—but they are, and the Simon Legree is the man with the vardstick. —F.A.C.