The New Color-Styles for Men
Among the more persistent rites of spring is the annual outburst by manufacturers of men’s clothing. From this point on, everything will be different, they proclaim. This is the year of years. Suits? Gay colors, bold patterns, and surprise! — no collar or lapels on the coat. Shirtings will be floral, with more bold designs. Ties — just a bit of colorful ribbon. Shoes now lace up the back. Evening wear: black is out, everything in is color, color, color — the brighter the better.
Just what mysterious prompting stirs all the manufacturers in this fiercely competitive business to combine, at the same time each year, in the production of radical novelties is not known. The seizure seems to occur in the summer of the previous year, for the new designs and materials take some months to bring into being, and all must be available for showing, if not for actual delivery, by the time the newspapers are clamoring for the details. It should be pointed out that having decided to bring out an entirely new kind of apparel for men, the manufacturers, by another strange concatenation of their desires, all wish to advertise these phenomena on the same spring Sunday. News columns, already hard to locate in the usual Sunday paper, would vanish altogether under the avalanche of clothing advertising, so the publisher has no choice but to put the whole outburst into a special fashion supplement: The New Color-Styles for Men. Coming next week! Don’t miss it!
The supplement is a triumph of color photography, and it is difficult to tell the reading matter, if indeed there is any, from the paid advertising in the welter of pictorial support for the new fashions. The men in the photographs who are wearing the clothes of many colors — one hesitates to call them models, for it is distressing to think that a man might be regularly employed at this sort of work — have a remarkable appropriateness for the assignment: they seem neither abashed nor defiant about their attire, and most of them are not even grinning the grin which the American housewife has taken for herself as she goes about the dirtier jobs at home — oven cleaning, toilet scouring, and such. The men are, rather, staring resolutely at something other than the camera, a harmless lot of middleaged Joes, the type one might find sitting in the next chair in a one-arm lunchroom, apathetic even when a small boy in the same photograph is wearing the same collarless blazer, potato-chip straw hat, and burntorange slacks, “just like Dad’s.” There is nothing high style about the men in the clothing supplement; they’re just folks like the rest of us. Their unawareness of the fantastic finery in which they are decked out calls to mind Batman’s reply to the headwaiter who has just offered him a ringside table in a crowded nightclub. “No, thanks,” says Batman, who is wearing his helmet-mask, tights, and swirling cape, “I don’t want to attract attention.”
The big supplement on the new styles for men gets bigger every year. Its experts and advertisers seem ever more confident that the barrier is finally down. But what becomes of the puffed shirt-sleeves, the sequined pullover, the Roman-striped golf stockings, the buckskin bowler, and the cellophane business suit? Where do they all go after the supplement has announced their arrival in our midst? Just as a man is somewhat angrily deciding to have none of this nonsense, he finds that it doesn’t exist anyhow. He never sees anyone wearing any of it, nor is it being offered for sale. The new colorstyles, he concludes, are being worn only within the city limits of Los Angeles or in the disputed areas along the Sino-Tibetan border.