DEMOCRATIC DRESS SUIT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 306, 28 December 1931, Page 6

DEMOCRATIC DRESS SUIT.

Truth will out, and tShis time its mouthpiece is the editor of the "Outfitter," who has just told us that at least twenty times as many dress suits are sold as in 1914 (writeis Mr. J. B. Priestley in the "Evening Standard"). These are startling propositions. There is, it seems, an ideal before us—one man, one dress smit. Week after _ week more and more shirts are boiled, and even in the East End they inquire anxiously of one another now: "White tie or black?" _ The great change has taken place, you notice, since 1914. The war to make the world safe for democracy has also made the world safe for diress suits. This is as it should be. Indeed, this in dress suits is about the only real evidence we have that the war succeeded in its purpose. If we buy twenty times as many dross suits as we did in 1914, then England really is becoming a democratic country. And I write as a genuine democrat, one of the few that atill exist among men of letters.

Most of my colleagues, , I notice, denounce democracy and favour some aristocratic system, usually rather vague but always including themselves among the aristocrats and the governing class. I happen to believe that the world has not passed by democracy, but has not yet arrived at it. And these dress suitis show that we are making headway. For the dress suit and the bathing costume are perhapis the only genuine democratic outfits we possess. The dress suit is simply the uniform of evening leisure. I have always had a contempt for the intelligence of those Labour leaders who refused to wear evening clothes on the ground tjhat they were the sign and mark of the governing class, the idle rich, the bloated capitalists. Mr. J. H. Thomas probably deserves a place in any Cabinet simply because of his drawerful of uncompromising stiff dress shirts. Once a man has his dress suit on— no matter how old, how green, it is he is as good as any other man. E& is clothed in a uniform that carries no badges of rank and no suggestion of inequality. It ia far easier to tell rich men from poor men in a restaurant at lunch time than it is at a dance in t!ie evening. Those rigid fronts are our fortresses. The brotherhood of man is there in black and white.

We have suffered a long time in this country from a shadowy and uneasy class system, in which most people never know quite where they are and insist upon pretending this and that. You can, I imagine, be fairly comfortable and independent-in a society that has sharply defined social classes and demands that you dress according to your station. You can tic still more comfortable and independent in a society that has abolished classes altogether. We in England have been for a long time in the between stage, in which pretence and snobberies aibound; but now there are a thousand signs that -we are approaching a real democracy. Perhap.3, when we get there, everybody will dress for dinner.