Clothes play a vibrant role in our lives. We
spend large amounts on smart trousers, fancy shirts, natty socks and quality
shoes and the ladies go overboard on hats, cardigans, jumpers, svelte dresses,
enticing nightwear, overpriced court shoes, espadrilles and knee-length boots.
All that is routine. What we love above all is “dressing up” for that special
occasion, when we can really cut loose and create a sartorial sensation.
Historically there were “sumptuary laws” trying
to restrict luxurious imported fabrics and fine materials to the ruling elite.
The proles were condemned to home-spun cloth, flat hats and even unglamorous,
inferior cuts of meat. Happily, these laws were widely ignored or only fitfully
enforced, apart from a Roman imperial monopoly on purple-dyed garments and a
long-standing European veto on gold braid for the plebs. Fortunately, nowadays
even the least enterprising young whipper-snapper can sport more Carnaby Street
gold braid than an 18th century Spanish field-marshal.
Let us kick off with the stereo-typical English
gent. By day he may don a pin-stripe suit, a bowler had and a rolled umbrella,
once a City of London uniform until about the 1960s, but still the apparel of
Guards officers in mufti.
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| William and Harry in Guards mufti |
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| Sir Austen Chamberlain in the 1920s |
Making more of an effort to look like a gent is
Sir Austen Chamberlain, son of Joe and half-brother of Neville, who was a
rather undynamic foreign secretary, but dig that monocle and winged collar!
Sadly, it was said of Austen; He always played the game, and always lost. He
was no aristocrat, the family fortune deriving from screw-making in Birmingham,
a city his family served proud.
In the UK two great arbiters of fashion were
Beau Nash, master of ceremonies in fashionable 18th century Bath and
Beau Brummell, the epitome of elegance for some time in the circle around the
Prince Regent (later George IV) in the early 19thcentury in Brighton
and London. Nash was a rather ugly fellow but Brummell tactfully laid down what
was polite and beautiful, tactfully, because the Prince Regent, was himself
grossly obese and ill-tempered.
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| Beau Brummell |
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| Beau Nash |
As a Scotsman I find full Highland costume
majestic and my pulses race when I see the wonderful portrait of a clan
chieftain by Raeburn in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Now that is
what I call “dressing up”.
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| Macdonell of Glengarry by Henry Raeburn |
In our modern times, we can still remember White Tie and Tails, now only worn on highly formal occasions, but once de rigueur to the theatre or concert-hall. The American Fred Astaire and the British star Jack Buchanan were wonderfully elegant wearers of this uniform. I also cannot resist the sight of Diana’s gorgeous ‘revenge’ dress while splitting up from Charles.
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| Buchanan and Astaire charm |
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| Princess Diana sparkles in black |
The high-spot of the summer season is Ascot,
the ladies dressed to kill, the gentlemen in classic Ascot grey morning coats
with black top hats. I attach a photo of the Royals at Ascot, but below is the YouTube
link to the wonderful Ascot Gavotte sequence from the film of My Fair
Lady which is stunning.
The Royal party at
Ascot
Ah well, you peacocks and dandies can primp
before the mirror and imagine how you would look in these starchy get-ups. For
myself, my days of ecstatic clothes and shimmying through crowded glitterati
are over. Maybe I should revert to the mod fashions of the 1960s;
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| The Who's clothes will please many |
Or maybe I throw on a favourite shirt, a venerable pair of corduroy trousers and some comfy slippers and chuckle through that P G Wodehouse tale of Bertie Wooster until the eyelids droop and it’s time for bed.
SMD
23.7.20
Text copyright © Sidney Donald
2020
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