Costume nostalgia

On Friday January 4th, my wife and I went to a Viennese New Year concert, three days late and in Malvern rather than Vienna. Nevertheless, this was an excellent event. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was in fine form, and played not just the usual Strauss waltzes and polkas but also music by composers inspired by the Strauss family. These included Lehar’s Gold and Silver Waltz, which was composed in 1902 for a grand ball in Vienna organised by Princess von Metternich-Sándor. As the music played, I closed my eyes and imagined that ball. It would have been held in an ornate baroque palace. The women would have worn long flowing gowns in bright colours, with ostrich feathers in their hair. The men would have worn white ties and tails, although some would have been in the dress military uniforms of the Imperial Army, with golden epaulettes and shiny cavalry boots. I opened my eyes and looked around the audience in Malvern: all wearing the usual drab clothes of the English.

When did we stop wearing brightly-coloured clothes? In the 1960s and 70s, we walked around in bright colours. I once had some purple trousers and a red cheesecloth shirt. Now my wardrobe consists entirely on blues, dark browns and blacks, although I do occasionally wear a red tie. The idea of dressing up for special events is also in decline. Many people now turn up at funerals in their ordinary day clothes - the men without even a black tie. There are some exceptions. Weddings remain an occasion for dressing up, and young women will still spend hours getting ready to go out in the evening. But look at any picture of an African market for a different attitude to everyday clothing. The women have headscarfs and dresses printed in the brightest colours. The men might wear jeans, but they will top this with a red, blue or yellow shirt.

If clothes are a form of self-expression, then the clothes we wear in England express misery and tedium. More joyous self-expression is now vicarious, demonstrated in the popularity of the many ‘costume dramas’ on television and film. Watch an episode of Poirot or Downton Abbey, and you see wealthy people in the 1930s dressing up in their most formal clothes even to eat dinner in their own homes. The various adaptations of Jane Austen novels show women in flowing empire-line dresses, and men in stylish clothes that set off their figures.

Many of these costume dramas were not written as such. Jane Austen wrote books about moral dilemmas among her contemporaries. Although the television adaptations of Agatha Christie’s books are set in 1936 (Poirot) or 1952 (Miss Marple), the original texts were published over several decades and were set in the times they were written. But television producers know that the public are fascinated by the costumes and formal behaviour of an earlier time. Viewers are more interested in looking at the suits and dresses than in who exactly murdered who and why.  

It is possible that this vicarious enjoyment of costume on television is itself a cause of the universal drabness of our clothing. The young man who sits for hours in front of his computer watching pornography but is too timid to ask a woman out; or the person who watches television programmes in which cordon bleu cooks prepare wonderful meals but who then warms up a ready meal for his dinner - these are examples of the vicarious eliminating the actual. It is after all striking that the world of drab clothing began at about the same time that colour television began to dominate our waking hours.

See also:
What old men wear
The land of make believe