A NOTE ON DRESS
I read a sensational article in a newspaper the other evening. It was an article which set forth Fourteen Commandments to men on how to be dressy. I call it sensational because of its novelty. Every day in almost any paper you turn to, you will find a page or half-page about women's dress, usually adorned by amazing drawings of impossible women dressed in impossible clothes, and standing in impossible attitudes, who all seem alike in their vacuity and futility. But never before do I remember to have seen in a daily newspaper an article addressed to men, telling them what clothes they should wear and how to wear them. I daresay there have been such articles, but I have not seen them, and certainly they are so infrequent that they may be said to be unknown.
I shall be curious to see whether the innovation has come to stay, for it has been a subject of mild speculation with me why all the literature of dress should be confined to women. On the face of it we might suppose that it was only women who wore clothes at all, and certainly only women who cared what clothes they wore or made a science of wearing them. No doubt this is largely true. Every woman has a serious interest in dress. "There was never fair woman but she made mouths in a glass," says the poet, and there was never woman of any sort, fair or plain, that could refuse at least the tribute of a glance at a well-dressed milliner's window. You will hear women discuss dress on the bus as earnestly and continuously as their boys discuss cricket, or their husbands discuss stocks and shares, or motor-cars, or golf, or the iniquities of politicians. I have never yet heard two men discuss dress in the abstract for two minutes. You might sit in any smoking-room in any men's club in London for a year without hearing a remark on the fashion in ties or trousers, or a single comment on the fact that this or that person was well- or ill-dressed. If dress is mentioned at all, it is mentioned in an ironical vein, as a matter fitting, perhaps, for a light jest among friends, but nothing more.
This must not be taken to mean, I think, that men are wholly indifferent to dress. It does not fill anything like the place in their mind that it fills in the mind of women, and I fancy there is an unwritten convention among them that it is bad form almost bordering on the improper to talk about clothes. It would smack of vanity in regard to one's personal appearance. Women can talk about clothes without this sense of personal vanity. They talk about it in a detached, abstract way, as they might talk about pictures, or music, or any other æsthetic subject. They are interested in it objectively as an art. They like to see pretty dresses, even though they cannot hope to wear them. They throng to a wedding, not so much from interest in the principals as from the desire to see the clothes the bride wears. They like to see them much as they might like to hear a beautiful performance on the violin, although they themselves can never hope to play the violin. Even women who dress dowdily themselves and affect to have souls above the follies of their sex, secretly love a display of fashions and like to read about the garments of women they do not know and do not want to know.
Men are certainly not like this. They are not interested in dress as an art. If their newspaper, describing a political meeting, informed them that the chairman was dressed in a frock-coat, with three buttons and a full skirt, that he wore trousers with a tendency to bell-bottoms, and patent leather shoes with pointed toes, and white gaiters—if they were told this they would wonder what the joke was about. Where a man is keenly interested in dress, he is interested in his own dress. His concern is his own personal appearance. He is particular about the crease in his trousers and the cut of his coat where his wife, perhaps, is only interested in the objective beauty of gowns and toques, and can enjoy the sight of them on other people as well as in her own mirror.
Are we to conclude that men are superior to women in having none of this disinterested enthusiasm for dress as an art? It is a nice question. I should not wish to see the subject fill so large a place in their thought as it does in the case of women; but they ought not to be above it, or pretend that they are above it. After all, to be well-dressed—not "dressy"—nor necessarily fashionable—is as proper a wish in man as in woman. Dress has its spiritual and moral reactions. It may seem absurd, but it is true that we are in a real sense the creatures of our clothes. We are better men, more civilised men, in a well-fitting garment than in an ill-made garment. Baggy knees dispirit the mind. Slovenliness does not stop at the clothes, but infects the soul. That is why a clean-up in the evening and a change of clothes is a good moral tonic for anyone. The case was well put by an Australian squatter to a friend of mine who visited him on his estate far away in the wilds of the interior. My friend asked him why, in so remote a place, he made it a practice to "dress" for dinner. "I do it," said the squatter, "to avoid losing my self-respect. If I did not dress for dinner I should end by coming in to dinner in my shirt-sleeves. I should end by not troubling to wash. I should sink down to the level of the cattle. I dress for dinner, not to make myself pretty, but as a spiritual renovation."