Fifty years ago was the age of dressing-gown and slippers. Why is it we never hear slippers mentioned nowadays? I have not owned a pair of slippers (except bedroom slippers) for more than thirty years. Yet in Victorian novels we are always reading of how, when the breadwinner returns to his home in the evening, he finds his slippers ready for him, warmed on the hearth. My father always took off his great boots—worn in summer as well as in winter—and put on his slippers when he came home, having called it a day.
Poets, novelists, and men whose occupation kept them at home, sat down to their desk in dressing-gown and slippers. The moment a man sat down in his own house to anything, with no immediate thought of going out, dressing-gown and slippers were the regulation costume. They were like knights-at-arms, taking off their suits of mail when they entered the interior of the castle.
Eventually the knee-boots gave way to high shoes—called boots in England—which were laced up to the top. In time these were succeeded by low shoes, which are now worn by millions of Americans the year round.
The swaddling, stifling, heavy underclothes were scrapped, and their place taken by sleeveless, shinless undergarments, light in weight, and more or less open in texture. Best of all, the intolerable stiff shirt, the bottom edge of which cut into the abdomen, and bellied out above like a sail in a fair wind, was reserved only for formal evening wear; shirts were made and worn that had no trace of starch in front, back, collar or cuff. I have not worn a stiff shirt (except for evening) in twenty years.
Suspenders (braces) became obsolete; and the pleasant belt came in, the belt that may be loosened or tightened at will, and which in any case leaves the shoulders free. In hot weather the waistcoat was discarded; and the man in his thin, loose clothes moved about almost as easily as Adam in Paradise.
Various are the names for the round stiff hat, derby, dicer, pot hat, bowler, billy-cock. Under any name it is just as bad. Some fifteen or twenty years ago the derby went temporarily out of fashion. Up to that time, if you looked into a cloak-room by a hotel dining-room, you saw about two hundred men’s hats looking exactly alike. Now you see a vast assortment of soft headgear, grey, brown, green, all of pleasing shape. The thousands of men at a football game now show variety aloft, instead of the intolerable black monotony of former years. I have not owned a “derby” since the war. Apart from my own hatred of the object, I always crushed it getting in or out of an automobile. And one indentation ruins a derby forever: every wound is mortal.
I am quite aware that the derby is returning. Everyone knows the nation-wide fame acquired by a certain brown derby. But no stiff hat, black or brown, will ever adorn my brows again during the hours of daylight.
The English, owing to their horrible climate and also partly to an invincible conservatism, still wear heavy clothes, thicksoled high shoes, braces, waistcoats, etc., even in hot weather. The only reform they have made is discarding the frock coat for daily wear, which up to a very few years ago was universal. A common sight in London was to see clerks going to the “city” on bicycles, arrayed in “Prince Albert” coats.
The clothes of an American tourist still look funny to an Englishman; how funny I never realised until I attended a play in London where an American was the object of good-natured caricature. He came on the stage with low shoes and silk shoe-laces, bright, thin socks, trousers held by a belt, no waistcoat, and jacket unbuttoned. The audience burst into roars of laughter and I laughed too, because he did look queer by contrast with the other actors. Then I suddenly realised that I was dressed precisely like the man they were laughing at!
One more reform must be made in men’s dress; and I believe it will come. In very hot weather, men must be allowed to discard the jacket. Even a thin jacket, with its collar and shouldercloth, is intolerable. A clean, attractive shirt, with soft collar and necktie, and belt around the trousers, looks so sensible in hot weather that it ought to become the rule rather than the exception.