How to Stuff a Shirt
HOLLYWOOD
By GORDON KAHN
IF INDEED clothes are portable architecture, and a cloak on a pole becomes a tent, then the Hollywood male, in season and out, wears the most promiscuous structure of seams since Joseph’s polychrome ulster. It is a weird and wonderful piccalilli of Swiss chalet, horse paddock, and butane gas works.
The façade of this reservoir of threads is the Vagabond jacket. Beneath it hangs the dewlaps of a camisole called the Rogue shirt, which is worn directly over the Californian’s skin, cosmetically braised under a quartz lamp and vibrating with cologne and pomander.
His loins are girded in a lava-lava called a Scamp, which serves at once as foundation garment and abdominal support.
His feet are shod in a pair of Loafers; and upon his proud head, bisecting the brow at an angle of 45 degrees, sits a tarboosh marketed under the name of Haut Beau hat.
Around his bronzed column of neck he may wear the Navvy, a pocket-sized square of silk knotted under the left ear; the Apache, slightly larger; or the Toff, which is long enough for a lynching and is figured with mottoes such as “Oh You Kid!” and pictures of girls telephoning on their backs.
Rogue — Vagabond — Scamp — Haul Beau this mummery is spreading. You may see François Villon gandy-daneing in full fig down Boylston Street, and groups of vested beachcombers any day at Second and Elm in Spoonbread, Alabama.
At a distance there appears to be nothing outlandish in the cut and set of the Vagabond jacket; no more so than the jerkins worn by the assassins of Thomas a Becket. It is likewise reminiscent of the formal gentleman’s doublet in the engravings by Albrecht Dürer.
Then, suddenly, you discern that it has no sleeves, or no collar, or no lapels, being frequently just two front panels held together, like your coat and mine, with cowrie shells or sardonyx frogs. The pattern, on the other hand, may be a little racy, running mostly to checks — hound’s tooth to shuffleboard. That touch of bright color on the breast may be the escutcheon of Winchester, Dolor, Harrow, or William McKinley High, from the dealer’s large stock of heraldic sunbursts.
Some of the newer Vagabond jackets — and it may be a trend — have no front at all; merely a back, which is cinched across the withers like a saddle.
The Rogue shirt is a more classic garment. Here the designers (and we shall come to them, let me assure you) have adapted the chlamys that Cincinnatus wore to the severer drape of the Minute Man’s nightshirt. The tails of this item are bobbed, and its blunt ends are worn outside for spectating at sporting events, informal teas, and workaday gadding about. But only a barbarian would leave his shirttails out after dusk.
It is down in the minutes that Charles Boyer wore the Rogue shirt first and irresistibly on the screen in 1938, when, in Algiers, he implored Hedy Lamarr to come — come with him to the Kasbah.
The rayon garrote known as the Apache was introduced by Edmund Goulding, according to the swells in the artists’ agencies on the Sunset Strip. To Ronald Colman they give the palm for the less constricting boa, the fluffed ruff with the bounced flounce.
The napless busby that goes with Rogue wear appears to have come off the same drawing board as the LST invasion craft, with only a slight modification in design. Except among actors who are compelled to wear the mouse, or toupee, the hat is a sometime thing which enjoys only flurries of vogue.
In footgear, Hollywood high style once sponsored the plaited Mexican sandal. But no longer. The moccasin is now the basic pattern for the Loafer shoe. And it had better be loose because of the approved hose. These must be of wool, in the Argyll pattern and thick as a miner’s drawers.
In Hollywood perforce, more than anywhere else, the sidewalks echo to the clop-scrape-clop of men proceeding in a risky pavane on their elevator shoes. When Brian Donlevy is vis-à-vis a leading lady who’s stacked like a grenadier, he may be standing on an apple box instead of these cobbles. But when Crosby gives tongue with hymn or hotcha he is usually teetering on a pair of shoes Guilt up to the height of a paving block. In actual courtship these “personal platforms,”as advertised, are sovereign medicine, but they certainly complicate a Vagabond ensemble.
It would be imagined that for habiliments like these, the designers (pretty soon, now) would go to the angelfish; to the quetzal and tanager among the birds; to the desert and the incarnadined mountains for exotic colors. Instead, they have come up, so far, with nothing more exciting than Bambu, Tabac, and Sandune.
And in the looming of these Vag-rags it appears that no animal is sheared or trapped for its pelt, nor is any plant harvested for its fiber. Being neither wool nor cotton, the materials are brewed — in vats, like beer — and given names such as Gooskin, Snofo, Anzacuna, Fijiana, Finegora, and — Buddyserge.
The spectacle of an errant client in a wrap-rascal called an Acapulco, spot-welded out of Coquimbo cloth, is maddening to the honest draper. Custom tailors are making only enough topcoats to keep the franchise while their tears fall on every yard of selvage. Their former patrons are wearing Batllefront Jackets, Don Cossack Dolmans, and Eisenhower Duo-Casuals. Ask your tailor to make you a Partisan Jumper with Hawkskin front and Gabeteca sleeves, and sitting there, cross-legged in the correct position for it, he may be tempted to an act of slit-belly with his own shears.
This mutation from the decorous to the gamin is simply an epidemic and is bound to pass. But for the record, it is useful to find out where it originated: in California, of course — specifically in the hothouses of the Guild of California Dons. This is not a brotherhood of Spanish noblemen, but an association of manufacturing tailors clustered in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
They are cunning analysts of the only clothed animal extant, and exploit the male primarily as the more bedizened of the species.
Nobody holds the Guild of California Dons responsible for the recent launching of a shaggy horror called the Gorilla, which is half sweater, half poncho. They can’t, however, deny that a Hollywood member of their fraternity has published to the trade that he is making jackets “with exclusive ball-bearing shoulders.”