OUR CLOTHES.

Evening Post, Volume LXIV, Issue 149, 20 December 1902, Page 3 (Supplement)

OUR CLOTHES.

I am content to go on, as I said, without complaint. ' But I really must protest against the extraordinary and perverse combination of ugliness and discomfort with which I am compelled to clothe this poor poisoned body of mine. It is the complete absence of principle and reason about it, which offends me. In days of old men 'dressed for the sake of ajipeanince. It was rather absurd, because nearly all men 1 are such undistinguished, ungainly animals that fine clothes merely increase their grolcsqueness. Still, it was a principle for which something was to be said. It wan a gallant defiance of facts. Women act on it still, and I rather admire tlfir courage. But men now have changed their theory altogether. We profess to dress for comv fort and -convenience. Comfort and convenience ! Take a man walking the London streets in winter. He wears a hat, a great-coat, a coat, a waistcoat, a shirt, a collar, five studs (counting one for the back of the neck), a necktie, a vest, a pair of trousers, drawers, socks, and boots — nineteen separate pieces of apparel, every one of which is capable of being an annoyance to him. I have forgotten his sleeve-links : twentj'-one. Now, all this is derived historically from the^ time -when men dressed for nppe:;rancs. Could anything be a more glaring disproof of human intelligence V We have cnangad our theory; we wish to dress for comfort, not for f.Jiow; but we> pre utterly incapable of fitting fact to the theory, utterly incapable of imagining a .'.r.sicin of dress diirerent from that of our ancestor?-, and therefore are content merely to achieve uglinc.*:; instead of pn?ftini*;;s, and leave liie discomfort where it wa«. Let us be comfortable even if «? have to be iijriy, said we, and. lo ! we mnihige lo be ugly, and cannot by any lrav.ul ot our mmd.-> manage 10 be comforlablf. Upon my won', it almo:-t ileIc;,lk my naiur 1 oplii'r: ;n. I ;:ii» l.v.jiv 111 -.I tlieiv is Mill a lurking idi-a ihiil .1 iivi may dre.-.s even m t lie contrmvwnry lr.odv \\ UU hop.; <>f beauty — but that is n.ther idiotic, isn't it? Jn a chimney-pot hat and frock-coat he

looks, as Diana said, like a smaller edition of the house he has left. In a cutaway coat he looks (especially if stout of j figure) like an egg, and a bowler-hat is perhaps the most hideous object ever devised on ihis planet. But I will not pursue the painful catalogue. Few things distress me more than the siguD of an average man. chinless, goggle-eyed, ■wobbly-nosed, and wi.~ an awkward giiit, carefully dressed for effect in the modern fashion of coxcombry ; I have turned down a side street when one such has approached me. The most that can be said is that a shooting suit — I mean with knickerbockers, of course — on a well-made man is inoffensive. But regard the discomfort. When you dress there are twenty-one occasions for delay and misplacement and exasperation. I have ,knbwn a man (it was not 1) fling a j water-jug through his window in his fury before he had done. Twenty-one opportunities for what the French call j the malice of things, but which I prefer to call their — but I hate strong language. Twenty-one opportunities for the powers of the air tp distress a miserable mortal who, goodness knows, is beset enough without them. Then, when you are dressed, all day long until you fling the follj'. off at bedtime, in twenty-one places you may be maddened by tightness or looseness. Heavens ! I forgot the braces. Twenty-two. If you go on a journey you. have to take with you copies, from a dozen to two or three, of all these nuisances ; if you forget one >-*ung, you are undone, and become a beggor and a borrower. Then the expense. I know a man (again not myself) who owes j thousands of pounds to tailors and their brethren, and is almost literally in rags, and' many a man has been insolvent all his life for no other reason, .and if one is economical, one is always lacking some necessary thing ; one's only pair of boots are suddenly incompetent, one freezes in winter, and dies of heat exhaustion in summer. It is too maddening to go into details, but just think for a moment of the cunning tortures implied in stiff linen into which pieces of metal have to be fitted, of stiff leather on one's feet, often bruising and excoriating one's flesh, and sometimes piercing it with nails, of heav.y structures of felt on, one's Head, of collars which come" unfastened—^th^ tyranny and folly of it all! And what for? Not for beauty — we cannot cheat ourselves with il faut suffrir pour etre beau ; not for piety — we do not believe that we expiate oar sins by such "'punishment of our flesh ; not for any conceivable reason, but just because we are too stupid to think of anything better. The problem is so simple. All we require — but I don't sec why I should bother to devise a comfortable dress. I should not be allowed to wear it.