What not to wear to court

T-shirts with slogans, flip flops and wrinkles.

I prefer a wimple

To that godawful black taffeta poke bonnet worn by the nuns in "Doubt."

So true: 'Men are not mugs'

Linda Grant:

Here is a picture from the Prada menswear show AW8. If you were to take a shirt and slit it down the back and then gird it with some horizontal braces and put it on Agyness Deane, I can guarantee that two things would happen: a) Victoria Beckham would be wearing the self-same shirt the following week b) a month later I would be standing on the tube looking at hordes of teenage girls shivering with cold backs.

And yet I can also guarantee that you are not going to see this shirt on anyone. You will, in fact, never see it again. Why? Because men are not mugs. They don't wear stuff like this, they get women to wear stuff like this.

And yet, I don't agree with this assertion:

The extraordinary conservatism of men and their clothing is a twentieth century phenomenon. For a thousand years men dressed as peacocks. Now they don't. They dress for function. With some colour sense. Personally I find it quite boring, but perhaps it says something about a crisis of masculinity as a response to feminism - butch it out.

If men stopped dressing like peacocks it's not a response to feminism, but rather because men's clothing reached its apotheosis with the suit.

Cary Grant was the perfect man in the perfect suit.



But Fred Astaire, a man conspicuously without Grant's obvious physical perfection, knew how to wear a suit.



Brit Hume isn't the world's most handsome man, but he always looks well turned out, thanks to his suits.



The Duke of Windsor was, basically, nothing but a suit. Or rather, many suits. And a knot.



There is nothing more perfect than a man in a suit. Any man. You can take the most loathsome specimen off the street,



Pop him in a suit and all of a sudden he looks decent, even desirable.

Standardized sizes? I wish

Virginia Postrel on clothing sizes, specifically women's clothing sizes:

Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from which deviations seem like flaws. There’s nothing like a trip to the dressing room to convince a woman—fat, thin, or in between—that she’s a freak. Her torso is too long for the jacket or too short for the dress. Her arms are too short for the blouse that fits her bust. Her seat is too flat for the pants that hug her waist. Her hips nearly split the skirt that fits her waist. The more tailored the garment, the greater the problem. (Men’s clothes are easier, because they tend to be looser and because, as one industry expert puts it, men “have fewer bumps.”) Jeans are particularly troublesome. With its body-hugging fit, America’s egalitarian uniform provides little room to hide deviations from the norm.

And nobody’s normal. Sizes are standardized. Bodies aren’t.

Not so. The real problem is that there are no standard sizes. Ask any woman trying on clothes: In one brand you wear a 6, in another a 4 and in a third a 12. Not to mention S, M, L. One brand's S often turns out to be another brand's L.

Once upon a time, I'm told, one could reliably be a size XYZ. And there were variations in fit, too. There used to be a distinction between junior and missy sizing; I believe juniors were for shorter-waisted women. Now the distinction seems to be that junior sizes are tighter, less well made and way too young for anyone over 18.

This doesn't solve the problem of having a different size top and bottom--a problem for many women--but it at least helps eliminate uncertainty. And the freakish feeling Virginia describes.

And men don't have it easier because they have fewer bumps; they have it easier because their clothing actually still comes in standard sizes. A man wants a dress shirt, he measures his neck and his sleeve and--presto, chango--he knows what size to buy. A man wants an off-the-rack suit, he goes in the store, the salesperson measures him and he's got a suit. A suit with free alterations to eliminate the differences between a man's nonstandard body and his standard-sized suit.