September is now upon us. The summer holidays are over, and readers of The Critic will be sadly packing away their buckets, spades, and dog-eared beach copies of Roger Scruton, as they contemplate a return to the hard grind of work in an autumnal YooKay.
No doubt many will be particularly downcast at the prospect of slogging into the office on the graffiti covered Tube or a railway network whose trains are exotic with the thrill of uncollected refuse, caterwauling iPhones and the menace of random aggression. Is there any hope, they will ask, of things getting better in the public sphere? Perhaps they will be casting their minds back to the beginning of the summer where, for a moment, individuals started to take the initiative to improve things. A circle of guerilla graffiti removers riled Sadiq Khan by scrubbing clean the Bakerloo Line. Robert Jenrick shamed TfL into a brief moment of action against fare dodgers by chasing them himself with his video camera. Now, many are hanging up flags to bring a bit of cheer. Critic readers may be wondering if there is anything similar they can do: any personal initiative they can take in the face of sluggish authority to make our shared spaces just a little bit more pleasant and homely?
I’m glad to say that there is. There is something every person reading this can do that is cheap, simple, not time consuming, that will not attract the sniffy opprobrium of LBC or Laura Kunsberg, but that will immediately change the whole atmosphere of the public realm. When you go out, put on a tie. Ditch the denim. Eschew the tee-shirt and the saggy trackie bums. Guillotine the gilet. Push away the puffa jacket. Tread down the trainers. Reach for the worsted, the pinstripe, the herringbone twill and the tweed. Cherish the waistcoat. If you are daring, top it off with a trilby. In a word, dress properly.
Dressing well is a gift to others, and a sign that they matter to you
Why trouble to do this in our modern age of ease and convenience? Was not the tie a tyranny? The suit an intolerable straitjacket? Why go to the effort when one can throw on a tattered top and battered cargo pants and lollop to work, to promenade in the park, the Michelin-starred restaurant or the theatre entirely at your ease? But ease, as Hamlet reminded us, is what you rot yourself with. What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure, said Dr Johnson, and the same goes for dress. Is there any pleasure, any sense of occasion, in witnessing a crowd whose clothes are thrown on without effort, as quickly and heedlessly as the litter in the streets is thrown away? What joy in beholding a people who dress tattily for the ease of themselves thoughtless of others, and who have no thought to add to the beauty or elegance of the world around? Non nobis solum nati sumus, said Cicero: we are not born for ourselves alone but for the whole world. If you dress scruffily, for the comfort of yourself alone, it is the first sign that others in society are of lesser worth in your eyes. Dressing well is a gift to others, and a sign that they matter to you.
But ties, waistcoats and the like, you say, are all archaic. They speak of an outmoded world, and times gone by. Yes, indeed, of an outmoded world of shared customs and assumptions, a public sphere where there were universally understood and unspoken rules of courtesy which made the public sphere a gentler and more agreeable place, where it was easier to get on. Clothes bespeak values, and they create expectations. A while ago, the guards on my train line wore smart old-fashioned three-piece uniforms. One saw this as a passenger and had the pleasing sense that one was also going to be treated with a similarly old-fashioned sense of deference and politeness. Such dress prompted one to respond in like way. Now, packs of “revenue enforcement” officers clump in packs through the train dressed like paramilitaries, with flabby fleeces topped off with hi-vis gilets festooned with body cameras and pockets bulging with who knows what pieces of equipment. The air is now not of calm courtesy, where we are of the same gentle society, but of a midnight raid or frontier patrol, where violence and confrontation are ready to burst out. Perhaps train guards want this combat aesthetic to keep what they see as a restive mob pacified. But maybe if they dressed in the old ways we would be more at ease. And if we passengers dressed better, they might also feel likewise.
Clothes bespeak values, and also identities. A change in clothes often goes with a change in identity. In 330 BC, when Alexander the Great wanted to advance the idea of a cosmopolitan empire of east and west, he started wearing a mixture of Persian and Macedonian garments – a purple mantle and diadem from the Persian tradition, a white cloak from the Macedonian. In 1925, when Kemal Attaturk wanted to move away from Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman identity, he banned the use of the Fez – the quintessential Ottoman garment – and enforced the wearing of hats with brims.
In our case, the three-piece suit is, before anything, English national dress. It was created by King Charles II, and first publicly worn by him in Westminster Hall on 15 October 1666. Although a melange of different sartorial ideas – the waistcoat based on Persian and Turkic garments, the tie derived from the cravat of Croatian mercenaries popularised in France – they were melded together to make a new, understated type of costume that was distinct to the flamboyant dress of the French nobility. “The King hath yesterday in Council declared his resolution of setting a fashion for clothes, which he will never alter,” wrote Samuel Pepys on hearing about the creation of the three-piece suit, and indeed it has been a constant in our national life since then. The length of the jacket and waistcoat may have changed, as might their colour, the style of tie and cuffs, the use of trousers or knee breeches, but the use of the suit and tie for standard and formal public dress remained the same from the 1660s until the 2010s.
The fashion which spread in the workplace and public realm after that time for the abandonment of ties at work, then jackets, then any notion of the traditional suit, is a more profound change than many perhaps realise. The adoption of a day-to-day dress based essentially on Americanised sports clothes, accelerated by the chaos of the 2020 lockdown, is a radical discontinuity in our inherited English culture. It represents a sort of revolution, a sharp break from a centuries-old tradition which makes it seem that a new world is being created, and that older generations, even though recent, are somehow estranged from us. This sense of discontinuity is a danger, something that needs to be repaired at this moment of cultural drift and uncertainty.
The radical thing at the moment is to hoist a St George’s flag on a lamppost. Perhaps the simple act of putting on a suit and tie is an even more radical statement of cultural belonging, and all the more delicious for being something that no lanyarded council official can find a lawful way to cover up.
