RAIMENT AND MERE CLOTHES
Raiment and Mere Clothes
Women, of course, dress to annoy one another. We wouldn't be guilty of a truism of this nature, if it were not that a lot of worthy people have gone about lately talking and writing and warning from pulpits as though women dressed for the express purpose of luring the minds of men from the contemplation of the higher and more spiritual things to which they are naturally inclined.
There has even been a Papal Bull—or if not a real honest-to-goodness Bull, at least a good husky yearling of the sort known as an Encyclical—condemning slit skirts and demi-tasse waists and the dances people do in them, on the ground that they put in masculine minds ideas that wouldn't be there naturally. This, however, shows how little the Vatican knows about feminine psychology—though their ignorance is naturally very much to their credit.
In the first place, no lady would do such a thing—would you, girls? In the second, the average man is too unobservant. And in the third, the women are too busy considering how to "put it over" one another, to have time to worry about the effect of the things they wear—or don't—on their male entourage (with the accent on the "—rawzh," the Society Editor assures us). As we said above with epigrammatic force and brilliancy, women dress to annoy one another. The mere fact that someone else or several may have said the same thing before does not lessen the truth of the aphorism or the pleasure we take in it.
Whatever their motive, women devote a lot of thought, time, and some man's money to the subject of dress. Most people are agreed on this. With men, however, it is supposed to be very different. There is a curious theory that men don't give a dern—whatever that may amount to—about their clothes. People generally seem to have an idea that a man waits till his suit is torn, or so shiny that he gives the effect of an animated heliograph, before he orders another. And when he does, he is supposed to rush in to his tailor for half a minute between important business calls, or he rings him up on the 'phone.
"Send me up a new suit," he shouts, or something to this hasty effect. "What color?—oh, any old color you got. Something that will wear a long time. Solong!"
That is the way most women and a few men think the average man buys his clothes. But they are wrong. If you want to know how wrong, you have only to go into a tailor's place, Friend Reader—supposing you keep a tailor and not a bargain-counter—while some fat old boy with mutton-chops and a protuberant abdominal profile is raising the dickens because the poor tailor can't take the strain off the trouser-band and put it on the top buttons of the vest. Then you will learn that the shaping of collars and shoulders is a matter of supreme masculine concern, and that the hang of a trouser-leg is a thing on which the happiness of years may depend. Then possibly you will come to the conclusion that the average man thinks a great deal more about his attire than you have ever suspected.
Not that the average man's clothes are numerous or conspicuous—not at present prices, anyway. On the contrary, they are usually quite few and inconspicuous—except possibly from age. But the fewer they are the more attention he has to devote to them. That is the paradox of the thing.
A wealthy Adonis—or one with a good line of credit, at least—can adopt a careless attitude towards his clothes. He may even keep a valet to worry about them. When he orders a new suit he orders two or three. His shirts and ties and socks he buys by the dozen. Suits he doesn't like, he doesn't have to wear. If he grows weary of a certain color or pattern—one of those shepherd-plaids you can play chess on, for instance, or a nice hot brown that would melt the film of a camera—he tosses it to his man or an itinerant Hebrew and turns to one of a dozen other outfits in the wardrobe. Why should he worry? He doesn't.