Where Toils the Tailor (A bit long)

[Tucker Peterson]

I thought the members might enjoy the following excerpt from The Perfect Gentleman by Ralph Bergengren, published in 1919.

Of the several places in which a man waits to have something done to him, no other is so restful as the establishment of his tailor. His doctor and his dentist do their best with inviting chairs and a pile of magazines on the table: one gets the impression that both of them were both once liberal subscribers to the current periodicals, but stopped a year or two ago and have never bought a magazine since. But these, in their official capacity, are painful gentlemen; and a long procession of preceding patients have imparted to the atmosphere of their waiting rooms a heavy sense of impending misery.
The tailor is different. 'There is peace', wrote Meredith, 'in Mr. Goren's shop. Badgered ministers, bankrupt merchants, diplomatists with a headache, ---any of our modern grandees under difficulties,--might have envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided: and he was an enviable man. He loved his craft, he believed he had not succeeded the millions of antecedent tailors in vain.'
And so it is, I dare say, in varying degrees with all tailors; or at any rate should be, for tailor and customer meet on the pleasantest imaginable plane of congenial interest. A person whose chief desire in life at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chief ambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him. No hideous or insistent apprehension preys on the mind of the waiting customer; for the tailor's worst tool is his tape-measure, and his worst discovery may be that the customer is growing fat. One waits, indeed, without serious apprehension, at the barber's; but here the company is mixed and the knowledge inescapable that it will look on with idle interest while he cuts your hair or covers your honest face with lather. Only the harmless necessary assistant will see you measured, and he, by long practise, has acquired an air of remoteness and indifference that makes him next thing to invisible. So complete indeed is this tactful abstraction that one might imagine him a man newly fallen in love.
I have seen it stated, though I cannot remember just where, that the Old Testament makes no mention of the tailor; the Book, however, shows plainly that Solomon was not only a sage but also a best-dresser, and it stands to reasons that his wives did not make his clothes. One wife might have done it, but not three hundred. A tailor came at intervals to the palace, and then went back to where, somewhere in the business section of the ancient city, was doubtless a tablet with a cuneiform inscription:--

I am he that makes the Glory of Solomon: yea
the Maker of the Upper and the Nether Glory

The Smart Set of Solomon's day patronized him, yet he remained, quite naturally, beneath the notice of the Old Testament writers—unfashionable men, one might readily believe, living at a convenient period when a garment very much like our own bath-robe answered their own purposes, and could be probably bought ready-to-wear.
But one can no think of a full-blown civilization without tailors than one can imagine a complex state of society in which, for example, the contemporary Saturday Evening Post would publish its Exclusive Saturday Evening Styles, and gentlemen would habitually buy their patterns by bust-measure and cut out their new suits at home on the dining-room table. The idea may seem practical, but the bust with men is evidently not a reliable guide to all the other anatomical proportions. Nor, again, however little the Old Testament concerns itself with tailors, did it fail to mention the first of them. The line goes back to Adam, cross-legged under the Tree, --the first tailor and the first customer together, --companioned, pleasantly enough, by the first 'little dressmaker'. They made their clothes together, and made them alike—an impressive, beautiful symbol of the perfect harmony between the sexes that the world has lost and is now slowly regaining.
Times have changed since Adam: the apron of his honest anxious handicraft—for it was the penalty of his sin that he would never be happy until he got it finished and put it on—has undergone many changes, in the course of which even its evolution into Plymouth Rock Pants, yes even those seemingly eternal lines,--

When the pant-hunter pantless
is panting for pants

are now fading from human memory; yet until within the past few decades a gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as he had a nose. But now the immemorial visit to his tailor is no longer absolutely necessary. He may, if such is his inclination,--as I'm sure it would be Adam's,-- get his new suit all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley Wax, the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, smiles invitation and encouragement from many a window; an army of elegant and expeditious employees, each as much Charley Wax as humanly possible. Waits to conduct him to a million ready-to-wear suits. His intellect is appealed to by the plausible argument that we live in a busy time, in which leaders of men simply cannot afford to waste their valuable hours by going to the tailor: at the ready-to-wear emporium you simply pay your money and take your choice.
Many a gentleman, suddenly discovering he is a 'leader of men,' has deserted his tailor: many a gentlemen, learning by experience that it takes as long to try on clothes in one place as another, has presently gone back to him. Starting with the democratic premise that all men are born equal,, the ready-to-wear clothier proceeds on the further assumption that each man becomes in time either short, stout, or medium, and this amendment to the Declaration of Independence has indeed created a new republic of shorts, stouts and mediums, in which Charley Wax is the perpetual president. Here, indeed, would seem to be a step toward patterns for gentlemen: one sees the gentleman in imagination happily cutting out his new spring suit on the dining-room table, or sitting on that centre of domestic hospitality, while his hums a little tune to himself and merrily sews the sections together.
But unfortunately the shorts, stouts and mediums are not respectively standard according to bust-measure. A gentleman, for example, may simultaneously be short in the legs, medium in the chest, and stout in the circumference: the secret of the ready-to-wear clothier lies in his ability to meet on the spot conditions which no single pattern could hope to anticipate. We must go back toward nature, and stop short at Adam, to find a costume that any gentlemen could successfully make for himself.
Personally I prefer the immemorial visit to the tailor; I like this restful atmosphere, in which unborn suits of clothes contently await creation in rolls of cloth, and the styles of the season are exhibited by pictures of gentlemen whose completely vacuous countenances comfortable repudiate the desirability of being 'leaders of men.' On the table the Geographical Magazine invites to unexciting wonder at the way other people dress. From the next room one hears the voice of the tailor, leisurely reporting to his assistant as he tape-measures a customer. In the lineage of a vocation it is odd to think that his great-great-great grandfather might have sat cross-legged to inspire the poem

A carrion crow sat on an oak
Watching a tailor shape a coat.
'Wife bring me my old bent bow
That I may shoot yon carrion crow.'
The tailor shot, and he missed the mark,
And shot the miller's sow through the heart
'Wife, O wife, bring brandy in a spoon
For the old miller's sow is in a swoon.'

The quick and unexpected tragedy (for the sow) etches the old-time tailor at his work: one gets, as it were, a crow's-eye view of him. Such, I imagine, was his universal aspect, cross-legged on a bench in his little stall or beside his open window, more skilled with shears and needle than with lethal weapons, despite the gallant brigade of tailors who went to battle under Queen Elizabeth. Yet I cannot imagine my own tailor sitting cross-legged beside an open window; nor, for that matter, sitting cross-legged anywhere, except perhaps on the sands of the sea in his proper bathing-suit. His genealogy begins with those 'taylours' who, in the nineteenth year of Henry Vii, 'sewyd the Kynge to be callyd Marchante Taylours'--evidently earning the disfavor of their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge rose among dyuers other craftys in the cyte against them.' Very soon, I fancy, these Marchante Taylours begin to pride themselves on the straightness of their legs, and let subordinate craftsmen stretch their sartorius muscles. Buy, why, as Carlyle puts it, the idea has 'gone abroad, and fixed itself down in a wide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a distinct species in Physiology, not Men, but fractional Parts of a Man,' nobody has yet explained satisfactorily.
So one muses, comfortably awaiting the tailor, while the eye travels through far countries, glimpsing now and then a graceful figure that somehow reminds one of a darker complexioned September Morn, and helps perhaps to explain the wide-spread popularity of a magazine whose title seems at first thought to limit it to a public-school circulation.
And yet, strangely enough, there are men whose wives find it difficult to persuade them to go to the tailor; or, for that matter to the ready-to-wear clothier. There is, after all, something undignified in standing on a little stool and being measured; nor is it a satisfactory substitute for this procedure to put on strange garments in a little closet and come forth to pose before mirrors under the critical eye of a living Charley Wax. Fortunately the tailor and the polite and expeditious salesman of the ready-to-wear emporium have this in common: art or nature has in both cases produced a man seemingly with no sense of humor. Fortunately, too, in both cases a gentleman goes alone to acquire a new suit. I have seen it suggested in the advertising column of the magazine that a young man should bring his fiancée with him, to help select his ready-to-wear garments; but the idea emanates from the imagination of an ad-writer, and I am sure nobody concerned, except perhaps the fiancée, would welcome it in actual practice. Wives indeed, and maybe fiancées, sometimes accompany those they love when a hat is to be tried on and purchased; but I have been told in bitter confidence by a polite hatter that 't is a custom more honored in the breach than in the observance; and this I think is sufficient reason why it should not be extended, so to speak, to the breeches.

Sincerely,

Tucker

[Costi]

Excellent piece, thank you for taking the time to share it.

A person whose chief desire in life at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chief ambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him.

A tailor has noting to sell, he just gets paid for his work, which is to becomingly dress his client. Charley Wax, by the nature of his trade, has a different agenda: to sell his stock. You end up with a suit of clothes in both cases, but that is not the point. Not even the end result, which may be hardly discernable to a superficial eye. It is the approach, the process, the experience, the philosophy of it all makes all the difference in the world.