During discussions for our recent article on clothing etiquette, I spent some time talking to my good, old friend Bruce Boyer. (Not that either of us are old, but rather that I have known him for a good few years.)
Bruce, as expected, was both eloquent and erudite in his thoughts, and rather than build them into the article, I thought I’d simply share some of them here, as a little coda to our discussion in last week’s article.
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Hello Simon,
Clothing etiquette and manners for me is wrapped historically in class distinction, sumptuary laws and economics.
Historically when the late medieval world shifted into the Renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries, men went from being feudal warrior knights to courtiers in a polite society of court life, and we begin to see a ‘civilising process’, books of instruction about how a courtier should represent himself in this new world.
It’s there that we get the first studies and guidance on manners. I think Baldessare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier is not the first but the best book of the period.
Later it was the fluidity and porousness of class that occasioned more and more books of manners. The 19th and 20th centuries are awash in them, and what they show is the tension between what is considered elite and what is considered mass culture.
Sumptuary laws, whether written or unwritten, tell us what is both prescribed and proscribed.
All guide books can be said to be on middle class virtues in a bourgeois society. All of it caused when individuals move more freely up the ladder, between what Chris Breward calls “a controlled exercising of restraint and an abandonment to conspicuous consumption. Think of Donald Trump: the most derisive thing some of his critics say about him is that he’s gauche and vulgar; that’s his great sin to the upper class Republicans.
To be just a bit more specific. The old rule was that we should be appropriate to the occasion, the audience, and the purpose: you don’t wear torn jeans to a fancy dress ball. You don’t wear a business suit and shirt without a tie. Formal dress was of course shot through with rigid rules.
Today all those thoughts of appropriateness seem laughable, and I suppose that the history of dress will be seen in future as a democratic movement towards a homogenisation. Logically that will eradicate most of the rules regarding class, sexual orientation and ethnic concerns and we’ll all be able to concentrate on sustainability.
Particular rules from my childhood:
1. Polished shoes. We were always told that was a sign of ‘character’ and that a personnel manager always looked at the prospective employee’s shoes immediately.
2. Always carry a clean handkerchief.
3. Men’s jewellery should not go further than a watch, wedding ring and perhaps cuff links, collar bar and tie clip for dandies.
4. Hats were never worn indoors, never.
5. It was expected that men would wear tailored clothing and tie to a place of worship, festive occasions such as dances and parties, weddings, funerals, and anywhere else you were expected to show respect.
6. If you were with a lady, you removed her outer coat first, then yours.
7. Shoes, whether being wore or not, were never placed on furniture.
I don’t think any of those matter these days; many women resent them as patronising, and nostalgie de la boue has taken hold everywhere it seems; class is more and more determined solely by economic status, which makes the porosity of class even greater.
