The Secret
Vice
REAL BUTTONHOLES.
THAT’S IT! A MAN CAN TAKE HIS thumb and forefinger and unbutton his
sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes
there. Tom, boy, it’s terrible. Once you know about it, you start
seeing it. All the time! There are just two classes of men in the
world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve,
just some kind of cheapie decoration, or—yes!—men who can unbutton
the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the
sleeve really buttons up. Fascinating! My friend Ross, a Good Guy,
thirty-two years old, a lawyer Downtown with a good head of
Scotch-Irish hair, the kind that grows right, unlike lower-class
hair, is sitting in his corner on East 81st St., in his Thonet
chair, with the Flemish brocade cushion on it, amid his books, sets
of Thackeray, Hazlitt, Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Cardinal Newman,
and other studs of the rhetoric game, amid his prints, which are
mostly Gavarni, since all the other young lawyers have Daumiers or
these cute muvvas by “Spy,” or whatever it is, which everybody
keeps laying on thatchy-haired young lawyers at Christmas—Ross is
sitting among all these good tawny, smoke-cured props drinking the
latest thing somebody put him onto, port, and beginning to talk
about coats with real buttonholes at the sleeves. What a taboo
smirk on his face!
It is the kind of look two
eleven-year-old kids get when they are riding the Ferris wheel at
the state fair, and every time they reach the top and start down
they are staring right into an old midway banner in front of a
sideshow, saying, “THE MYSTERIES OF SEX REVEALED! SIXTEEN NUDE
GIRLS! THE BARE TRUTH! EXCITING! EDUCATIONAL!” In the sideshow they
get to see 16 female foetuses in jars of alcohol, studiously
arranged by age, but—that initial taboo smirk!
Ross, thirty-two years old, in New York
City—the same taboo smirk.
“I want to tell you a funny thing,” he
says. “The first time I had any idea about this whole business of
the buttonholes was a couple of Christmases ago, one Saturday, when
I ran into Sturges at Dunhill’s.” Dunhill the tobacco shop. Sturges
is a young partner in Ross’s firm on Wall Street. Ross idealizes
Sturges. Ross stopped carrying an attaché case, for example,
because Sturges kept referring to attaché cases as leather lunch
pails. Sturges is always saying something like, “You know who I saw
yesterday? Stolz. There he was, walking along Exchange Place with
his leather lunch pail, the poor bastard.” Anyway, Ross says he ran
into Sturges in Dunhill’s. “He was trying to get some girl a briar
pipe for Christmas or some damn thing.” That Sturges! “Anyway, I
had just bought a cheviot tweed suit, kind of Lovat-colored—you
know, off the rack—actually it was a pretty good-looking suit. So
Sturges comes over and he says, ‘Well, old Ross has some new togs,’
or something like that. Then he says, ‘Let me see something,’ and
he takes the sleeve and starts monkeying around with the buttons.
Then he says, ‘Nice suit,’ but he says it in a very half-hearted
way. Then he goes off to talk to one of those scientific
slenderellas he always has hanging around. So I went over to him
and said, ‘What was all that business with the buttons?’ And he
said, ‘Well, I thought maybe you had it custom made.’ He said it in
a way like it was now pretty goddamned clear it wasn’t custom made.
Then he showed me his suit—it was a window-pane check, have you
ever seen one of those?—he showed me his suit, the sleeve, and his
suit had buttonholes on the sleeve. It was custom made. He showed
me how he could unbutton it. Just like this. The girl wondered what
the hell was going on. She stood there with one hip cocked,
watching him undo a button on his sleeve. Then I looked at mine and
the buttons were just sewn on. You know?” And you want to know
something? That really got to old Ross. He practically couldn’t
wear that suit anymore. All right, it’s ridiculous. He probably
shouldn’t even be confessing all this. It’s embarrassing. And—the
taboo smirk!
Yes! The lid was off, and poor old Ross
was already hooked on the secret vice of the Big men in New York:
custom tailoring and , the mania for the marginal differences that
go into it. Practically all the most powerful men in New York,
especially on Wall Street, the people in investment houses, banks
and law firms, the politicians, especially Brooklyn Democrats, for
some reason, outstanding dandies, those fellows, the blue-chip
culturati, the major museum directors and publishers, the kind who
sit in offices with antique textile shades—practically all of these
men are fanatical about the marginal differences that go into
custom tailoring. They are almost like a secret club insignia for
them. And yet it is a taboo subject. They won’t talk about it. They
don’t want it known that they even care about it. But all the time
they have this fanatical eye, more fanatical than a woman’s, about
the whole thing and even grade men by it. The worst jerks, as far
as they are concerned—and people can lose out on jobs, promotions,
the whole can of worms, because of this—are men who have dumped a
lot of money, time and care into buying ready-made clothes from
some Englishy dry goods shop on Madison Avenue with the belief that
they are really “building fine wardrobes.” Such men are considered
to be bush leaguers, turkeys and wet smacks, the kind of men who
tote the leather lunch pail home at night and look forward to
having a drink and playing with the baby.
God, it’s painful to hear old Ross talk
about all this. It’s taboo! Sex, well, all right, talk your head
off. But this, these men’s clothes—a man must have to have beady
eyes to even see these things. But these are Big men! But—all
right!
It’s the secret vice! In Europe, all
over England, in France, the mass ready-made suit industry is a new
thing. All men, great and small, have had tailors make their suits
for years, and they tend to talk a little more with each other
about what they’re getting. But in America it’s the secret vice. At
Yale and Harvard, boys think nothing of going over and picking up a
copy of Leer, Poke, Feel, Prod, Tickle, Hot Whips,
Modern Mammaries, and other such magazines, and reading them
right out in the open. Sex is not taboo. But when the catalogue
comes from Brooks Brothers or J. Press, that’s something they whip
out only in private. And they can hardly
wait. They’re in the old room there poring over all that tweedy,
thatchy language about “Our Exclusive Shirtings,” the “Finest
Lairdsmoor Heather Hopsacking,” “Clearspun Rocking Druid Worsteds,”
and searching like detectives for the marginal differences, the
shirt with a flap over the breast pocket (J. Press), the shirt with
no breast pocket (Brooks), the pants with military pockets, the
polo coat with welted seams—and so on and on, through study and
disastrous miscalculations, until they learn, at last, the business
of marginal differentiations almost as perfectly as those
teen-agers who make their mothers buy them button-down shirts and
then make the poor old weepies sit up all night punching a
buttonhole and sewing on a button in the back of the collar because
they bought the wrong damn shirt, one of those hinkty ones without
the button in the back.
And after four years of Daddy bleeding
to pay the tabs, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of these schools turn
out young gentlemen who are confident that they have at last
mastered the secret vice, marginal differentiations, and they go
right down to Wall Street or wherever and—blam!—they get it like
old Ross, right between the eyes. A whole new universe to learn!
Buttonholes! A whole new set of clothing firms to know about—places
like Bernard Weatherill, probably the New York custom tailor with
the biggest reputation, very English, Frank Brothers and Dunhill’s,
Dunhill’s the tailor, which are slightly more—how can one say
it?—flamboyant?—places like that, or the even more esoteric world
of London tailors, Poole, Hicks, Wells, and God knows how many
more, and people knock themselves out to get to London to get to
these places, or else they order straight from the men these firms
send through New York on regular circuits and put up in hotels,
like the Biltmore, with big books of swatches, samples of cloths,
piled up on the desk-table.
The secret vice! A whole new universe!
Buttonholes! The manufacturers can’t make ready-made suits with
permanent buttonholes on the sleeves. The principle of ready-made
clothes is that each suit on the rack can be made to fit about four
different shapes of men. They make the sleeves long and then the
store has a tailor, an unintelligible little man who does
alterations, chop them off to fit men with shorter arms and move
the buttons up.
And suddenly Ross found that as soon as
you noticed this much, you started noticing the rest of it. Yes!
The scyes, for example. The scyes! Imagine somebody like Ross
knowing all this esoteric terminology. Ross is a good old boy, for
godsake. The scyes! The scyes are the armholes in a coat. In
ready-made clothes, they make the armholes about the size of the
Holland Tunnel. Anybody can get in these coats. Jim Bradford, the
former heavyweight weight-lifting champion, who has arms the size
of a Chapman Valve fire hydrant, can put on the same coat as some
poor bastard who is mooning away the afternoon at IBM shuffling
memos and dreaming of going home and having a drink and playing
with the baby. Naturally, for everybody but Jim Bradford, this coat
is loose and looks sloppy, as you can imagine. That’s why
custom-made suits have high armholes; because they fit them to a
man’s own particular shoulder and arm. And then all these other
little details. In Ross’s league, Wall Street, practically all of
these details follow the lead of English tailoring. The waist: the
suits go in at the waist, they’re fitted, instead of having a
straight line, like the Ivy League look. This Ivy League look was
great for the ready-made manufacturers. They just turned out simple
bags and everybody was wearing them. The lapels: in the custom-made
suits they’re wider and have more “belly,” meaning more of a curve
or flared-out look along the outer edge. The collar: the collar of
the coat fits close to the neck—half the time in ready-made suits
it sits away from the neck, because it was made big to fit all
kinds. The tailor-made suit fits closer and the collar itself will
have a curve in it where it comes up to the notch. The sleeves: the
sleeves are narrower and are slightly tapered down to the wrists.
Usually, there are four buttons, sometimes three, and they really
button and unbutton. The shoulders are padded to give the coat
shape; “natural shoulders” are for turkeys and wet smacks. The
vents: often the coat will have. side vents or no vents, instead of
center vents, and the vents will be deeper than in a ready-made
suit. Well, hell, Ross could go on about all this—but there, you
can already see what the whole thing is like.
Ross even knows what somebody is likely
to say to this. You walk into a room and you can’t tell whether
somebody has real buttonholes on his sleeves or not. All of these
marginal differences are like that. They’re so small, they’re
practically invisible. All right! That’s what’s so maniacal about
it. In women’s clothes, whole styles change from year to year. They
have new “silhouettes,” waists and hems go up and down, collars go
in and out, breasts blossom out and disappear; you can follow it.
But in men’s clothes there have been only two style changes in this
century, and one of them was so esoteric, it’s hard for a tailor to
explain it without a diagram. It had to do with eliminating a
breast seam and substituting something called a “dart.” That
happened about 1913. The other was the introduction of pleats in
pants about 1922. Lapels and pants leg widths have been cut down
some, but most of the flashy stuff in lapels and pants goes on in
ready-made suits, because the manufacturers are naturally hustling
to promote style changes and make a buck. In custom-made suits, at
least among tailors in the English tradition, there have really
been no changes for fifty years. The whole thing is in the marginal
differences—things that show that you spent more money and had
servitors in there cutting and sewing like madmen and working away
just for you. Status! Yes!
Yes, and how can these so-called Big
men really get obsessed with something like this? God only knows.
Maybe these things happen the way they happened to Lyndon Johnson,
Our President. Mr. Johnson was campaigning with John Kennedy in
1960, and he had to look at Kennedy’s clothes and then look at his
own clothes, and then he must have said to himself, in his winning,
pastoral way, Great Hairy Ned on the mountaintop, my clothes look
like Iron Boy overalls. Yus, muh cluths look luk Irun Bouy
uvverulls. Now, this Kennedy, he had most of his clothes made by
tailors in England. Anyway, however it came about, one day in
December, 1960, after the election, if one need edit, Lyndon
Johnson, the salt of the good earth of Austin, Texas, turned up on
Savile Row in London, England, and walked into the firm of Carr,
Son & Woor. He said he wanted six suits, and the instructions
he gave were: “I want to look like a British diplomat.” Lyndon
Johnson! Like a British diplomat! You can look it up. Lyndon
Johnson, President of the United States, Benefactor of the Po’,
Lion of NATO, Defender of the Faith of Our Fathers, Steward of
Peace in Our Times, Falconer of Our Sly Asiatic Enemies, Leader of
the Free World—is soft on real buttonholes! And I had wondered
about Ross.