Topical Guide 486
Mark Dorset
Clothing
Fashion
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 4
PADDED with winter coats, most of the people lined up along the staircase that twists down into the restaurant occupy about twice their summer volume, but first in line is a lightly dressed couple of a type that Matthew and Liz used to snicker at
“Colonials to your left,” Matthew mutters.
Liz looks without seeming to, turning her head only the minimum, shifting her eyes as much as she can. “Oh, but definitely,” she says, raising her eyebrows.
“Hmm?” says Belinda. “Colonials?”
“The people at the bottom of the stairs, the first ones in line,” says Liz. “Just take a look at them.” Belinda does. “A little fancy for this place, wouldn’t you say?” Belinda smiles and nods. The man is wearing a double-breasted suit and shoes that look like dancing pumps, the woman a straight black skirt and a halter that seems to be made of chain mail, with gloves and reticule to match. Belinda and Liz snicker and chortle, lean against each other like impudent schoolgirls. “How does it happen to people?” Liz whispers. “How do they wind up thinking that a place one flight below the sidewalk is a place for fancy clothes? Matthew and I always used to call this the Black Hole, did I tell you that already? I told you that already. Anyway, we used to call these people colonials.”
“Right,” says Matthew. “They make me think of a colonial attitude, somehow.”
Honoré de Balzac, Treatise on Elegant Living, “On Clothing in All Its Parts” (translated by Napoleon Jeffries):
Clothing is how society expresses itself. […]
Clothing is at once a science, an art, and a sentiment. […]
Clothing does not consist so much in clothes as in a certain manner of wearing them. […]
Anything that aims at an effect is in bad taste, as is anything that is tumultuous. […]
If people look at you closely, you are not well attired: you are too well attired, too stiff, or too mannered. […]
Anything that an outfit seeks to hide, conceal, augment, and exaggerate more than nature or fashion prescribes or requires, is always presumed to be licentious. Consequently, any fashion that has a lie as its objective is essentially transient and in bad taste.
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 1:
He has begun to dress with a certain flair. He still buys his suits and shirts at a conservative shop — a department store, to tell the truth — but he’s buying his socks and ties at a little place with marble floors and brass doors, where everything is imported, up-to-the-minute, and breathtakingly expensive. He doesn’t buy anything that really stands out, only things that are a little out of sync with his conservative suits. The combination is intended to make him look a little out of the ordinary, but the other day the worrisome thought struck him that he might be making himself look even less remarkable than before, that the new mix of dull and chic had made him more generalized, spread him out all over the culture: a graying toy designer, moonlighting as a restaurant reviewer, in a conservative suit with an interesting Italian tie and startling socks, […]
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 3:
“I wanted to be a tall blonde in a fur coat. […] I used to get hand-me-down clothes from the family next door. It was so humiliating. You don’t know. […] We weren’t starving,” says Belinda, “I know that. I know how much worse off everyone else in the world was or is or whatever. I know that life was basically pretty comfortable, but for a girl, then anyway, for a girl to go to school in clothes that everybody recognized weren’t hers — I mean, I knew they were looking at me, and they knew I was wearing what Elaine Toomey wore last year. It was horrible.”
See also: Self-Presentation (or Presentation of the Self) TG 427; Voice of Reason, Man of Action, Madman, the Engagé and the Dégagé TG 430; Altruist TG 443; Devil-May-Care Bon-Vivants, Self-Denying Elder, and Outspoken Rebel TG 446
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