storeynicholas wrote:For my part, I think that there is a distinction to be drawn between some of the 'stars' of yore and the rest of them. I am surprised to learn of the Hawes & Curtis rebuff to Astaire - but there we are - Scholte sometimes rejected musical comedians but he accepted Jack Buchanan. Wales-Windsor sometimes shocked with his boldness in dress but generally he wouldn't really have frightened many horses in the street. Certainly, Buchanan and Coward were followed in dress and not just by the masses so I don't think that their similarity to the stars of today is clear-cut - especially since the stars of yore were hardly Goth revolutionaries wearing facial ironmongery - but the modern street-cred-yobbo-hoody look has a firm grip on a cross-section of the young, and to some extent the flame is fed by sporting heroes and pop musicians - I wouldn't object nearly so much if the sporting heroes didn't always miss crucial penalty shots or if the pop singers could actually carry a tune...some of them, so far as I can tell, make noises like a death rattle or at the least a creature in distress. But even these people, once they have made enough money, seem to buy themselves small, former stately homes and convert to Savile Row suiting. As long as even they get the message in the end, I suppose that the Flame of Hope, for sartorial standards, burns bright.
NJS
I would not disagree.
I was only voicing my fear that the current TV, sports, pop music, "stars" of today, whom we LL forumists deprecate at great length post after post, may turn into tomorrow's style icons and suggesting that perhaps our own icons of the twenties and thirties may have elicited the same response from their better informed elders. Let us put ourselves into King George V's shoes, if we may presume, for a moment.
As to "facial ironmongery" (You have a gift for wordsmithery, NJS!!
), may I suggest that zoot suits and what not may have made the same impression on the sober adults of those days as those metal rings, with which some otherwise pretty young girls choose to adorn their lips and noses, make on us London Loungers?
Am I a sartorial relativist?
Cum grano salis, as ever,
Frog in Suit
P.S.: The Astaire-Hawes & Curtis anecdote is from
The Savile Row Story book, I very much doubt that a
quiet punk/goth/hippy of any kind would frighten a horse (any more than a proper gent in a correct tweed suit and trilby would), and as to music , there is a passage in Dorothy Sayers'
Gaudy Night where Lord Peter and his lady love find themselves, much to their well-bred disgust, punting on the Isis in the midst of undergraduates playing the crooners of the time on their gramophone.
Plus ça change...
.
