All at sea: the sailor suit

ELOQUENCE AND BAD TASTE

Between cliche and madness in the language of dress are all the known varieties of speech: eloquence, wit, information, irony, propaganda, humor, pathos and even (though rarely) true po­etry. Just as a gifted writer combines unexpected words and images, risking (and sometimes briefly gaining) the reputation of being deranged, so certain gifted persons have been able to combine odd items of clothing, old and new, native and foreign, into a brilliant eloquence of personal statement. While other people merely follow the style of the age in which they live, these men and women transform contemporary fashion into individual expression. Some of their achievements are celebrated in the history of costume, but here, as in all the arts, there must be many unknown geniuses.

Unfortunately, just as there are more no-talent artists than there are geniuses, there are also many persons who do not dress very well, not because of lack of money but because of innate lack of taste. In some cases their clothes are merely monotonous, suggesting an uninteresting but consistent personality. Others seem to have a knack for combining colors, patterns and styles in a way that - rightly or wrongly - suggests personal awkward­ness and disharmony. In Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), the bad taste in clothes of the heroine, Verena Tarrant, fore­shadows her moral confusion and her bad taste in men. Verena, who has bright-red hair, makes her first public appearance wear­ing “a light-brown dress, of a shape that struck [Basil Ransom] as fantastic, a yellow petticoat, and a large crimson sash fastened at the side; while round her neck, and falling low upon her flat young chest, she had a double chain of amber beads.” And, as if is this were not enough, Verena also carried “a large red fan, which she kept constantly in movement.”

Like any elaborate nonverbal language, costume is sometimes more eloquent than the native speech of its wearers. Indeed, the more inarticulate someone is verbally, the more important are the statements made by his or her clothes. People who are skilled in verbal discourse, on the other hand, can afford to be somewhat careless or dull in their dress, as in the case of certain teachers and politicians. Even they, of course, are telling us something, but they may not be telling us very much.

The tunics Dickens refers to, which look to us like full-skirted short dresses, continued to be worn by boys between the ages of three and seven until the 1860s, when they began to be replaced by various combinations of jacket and pants - and also, increasingly, by the sailor suit. This costume, first introduced at the end of the eighteenth century in schools that trained boys for the Navy, soon began to be seen on children of all ages and both sexes. (The girls' version, of course, was made with a skirt instead of shorts or knickers.)

Although sailor suits were soon common wear for children in both America and continental Europe, their greatest vogue was in Britain. Though most popular on holidays and at the seaside, they were by no means limited to such scenes. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the sailor suit or sailor blouse and skirt was almost the standard everyday costume for middle-class boys and girls - as can be seen in the illustrations to the books of con­temporary juvenile authors. In city and country, at home and abroad, in navy blue for warmth and wear or in white for sum­mer and parties, the children of Britain proclaimed that she ruled the waves. It was not until after World War II, when Britannia had waived the rule and naval strength counted for less on the international scene, that the sailor suit began to lose its popularity. At a summer camp for girls I attended in 1940-41, our Sunday dress-up uniform was a white middy blouse and skirt with a red-silk neckerchief. In this costume, every weekend, we sat on the porch of the main building and sang patriotic songs, often with a seagoing theme: "Anchors Aweigh" and "Sailing, Sailing" were favorites. As Paul Goodman asks after a description of similar ceremonies at his summer camp, "Where were we all going to, sitting down?"

When worn by children, who had reached adolescence, nauti­cal costume had additional, sometimes contradictory meanings. It could convey a rugged heartiness, as in Arthur Ransome's stories about juvenile sailors; or it could suggest a pampered, overcivilized beauty such as that of fourteen-year-old Tadzio in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, whose "English sailor suit" gave him “a spoilt, exquisite air”.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-24