RUFFLES AND ROUES.

Waipa Post, Volume XVII, Issue 963, 3 July 1920, Page 8

RUFFLES AND ROUES.

SHORT STORY. I picked up the Daily Mirror yesterday. It was the overseas edition, the one profusely studded with photographs. And there on the front page, a full-page print, with a picture of a man in evening dress. He wasn’t exactly in conventional evening dress—not the kind of evening dress we have been accustomed to for a decade or so. He had on a peacock blue coat of shimmering satin ; a red vest of velvet with little pearl buttons ; and his trousers were white glistening sateen, with ruffled edges. At least, that is what the Daily Mirror said he had on. In reporting weddings, I only know one word, and that is ninon. The bride’s sisters tell me the rest. But I’m getting away from the subject. The individual who thus graced the front page of one of England’s finest periodicals was a scion of the latest house of masculine fashion in London. Eschewing the mediocre tints used for men’s clothes, and objecting to the orthodox white shirt front of evening dress, they have chosen the Georgian era—George IV. I mean—and have decided to dress as gallants did in his time.

They may be quite right. Possibly they will find satin and brocade more cheap in these days of forty guinea cloths: probably they will look very charming in their gaudy array. I prefer an old dinner jacket when I have to put on glad rags. However, the picture in the Daily Mirror made me think. For eight hundred years our knowledge of the dress ok our ancestors has been with us. By Rouen tapestries we can surmiss—with embellishment, of course —how William the Norman appeared at Hastings, or how William the Red dressed when hunting in Sherwood. Possibly Rufus would have been mildly surprised to have seen a hunter of to-day, dressed in conventional puttees and grey shirt—not omitting a pair of tweed unmentionables—appear from out of the greenwood, shotgun in hand. It is both wonderful and surprising how dress changed in the centuries. John grew up wearing tight buckskin hose, a girdle of leather, silken doublet, and peaked cap, with the toes of his long shoes fastened with little clamps above his knees. For the fight he wore a corselet of trusty mail, flexible and free; knee guards of bronze, and casque of steel. A junior sub would have flown to-day at the array of finery.

Chaucer has left us many good pictures. The friar’s dress is the same. A modern profiteer, fat-paunched as his fourteenth-century simile, would have looked just as fatly aggressive as did Chaucer’s travelling merchant. The gay young bard of Chaucer’s time wore green parti-coloured hose, red doublet—enough to turn John McCormack’s face pale at the thought of it. Clothes have always made the man. From the time that Sir Gui, the Seneschal, marched forth from Ysolet. “In burnished armour sumption sly bedight His scarlet plumes ’bove gleaming helm a’ dance, His bannerole a’ uutter from long lance. ” Prepared to do or die in the Baronial war, or Cornet Dudley Langlan, an esquire of Charles the Sorrowful bestrode his charger to away, to the North, ’gainst, the Roundhead; or when Lieutenant Vavasour proudly wore his first apaulettes against the French at Waterloo. We are known by our clothes. The finer the better. That is the reason why in the country we know each other and see through each other so well. For old clothes don’t matter so much in the open lands. It is different in the city. And the changes in our raiment. Myriad though they be cannot really affect ourselves. Even though time and time again the peacock gains new plumage, lie is still the blusterer —the braggart, William Hohenzollern had 160 uniforms always in commission. General Haig had three—and one of them was a suit of flannel pyjamas.

But I started to write on ruffles. Yes, they are certainly attractive. And there is no reason at all why the fashions of the time should not change with the years. I’m sure that we would look splendid here in Te Awamutu with frills and furbelows —the men, I mean.

In the meantime, we are content to dress as convention ordains. If prices continue to rise, convention must fiy. There are plenty of ferns. F. E. BAUME.