A CHANCE FOR MALE DRESS REFORMERS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXVI, Issue 7566, 9 May 1919, Page 6

A CHANCE FOR MALE DRESS REFORMERS

■ 1 BY TWELLS BRBX. This advertisement appeared on a Monday in The Times "Personal" co.l\imn. that interesting, human expository that so many people read as eagerly as they read a noval.

Fine Velvet Court Suit, medium size, cut steel buttons, complete with sword; cost £40 pre-war, sell

for £15

Apart from the unique opportunity here offered (the only instance that has occurred to my knowledge) of buying something for less than its cost before the war, what a chance is here for one of the male dress reformers who are urging that the war has taught us the aesthetic values of comely male costume and that men should now rebel against their drab civilian attire, to take his courage in his hands, or rather, on his legs, and put his theory into personal practice.

Fine velvet, cut steel buttons, and a sword—for £15! And only • the other morning I read in The Daily Mail that We3t End tailors are charging £12 12s and even £16 16s for a tweed suit!

I am not a dress reformer, having arrived at that lamentable middle age when a man regards clothes as necessities of life, used for keeping out weather, making oneself inconspicuous, and harbouring as many pockets as the tailor will allow; but if only the words "medium size" were not a bar I would have sent a telegraphic remittance for the fine vel 'et Court suit.

S'Death! How I would have strutted Piccadilly. Zounds! How I would lwve n.Med it in the Strand! II »w uiy hand would have gone to the hilt of that sword at some of the impudences I have suffered from fellow strap hangers. How I could have spitted insolent waiters! And think of hailing a taxicab with a sword instead of with an umbrella!

I cannot believe that not one of cur dress reformers has taken adjutage of this offer of the fine velvet suit. A mere dingy economist of medium size would snap at it, even if he only wore the suit in the privacy of his home and buckled on the swoffl to overawe his wife.

Velvet, as I have discovered with armchairs, is a splendid hard wear fabric; steel buttons could be polished for years; fashions in swords are changeless.

The £15 fine velvet suit would outlast four or five of the tailor's tubular abominations. Wherever its wearer went, whatever other sort of attentions he might arouse,.he would be stamped as a nobleman.

And, after all, he would be no more individual and courageous than that old and splendid looking English gentleman whom I sometimes behold walking Feet street wearing a half-height grey "top hat" with a curly John Bull brim, a strangely cut "Norfolk" jacket with ribbon insertions of his own device instead of buttons, knickerbockers of a large check pattern, hand woven Donegal stockings and brogued shoes.