Tussles With Tailors.

Strange as it may seem, many a man who casually slams on a lid is a terror

“The hut either will slip down to his ears or sit on his head like a pigean on the dome of St. Paul's”

to his tailor. He may not be one of those men whose pants are a poem, whose neckwear is a tonal tribute to the outfitter's art, whose vests are vestments and whose coats cuddle the form as if they had been poured on hot and smoothed out with a spatula. On the contrary, he probably is one of those large St. Bernard looking men whose suits, five minutes after his tailor has given them a farewell kiss, look as if a tractor had passed over them on a tin roof; his trousers may look like the legs of a loose-skinned elephant, but, nevertheless, he watches the tailor from tape to trousers.

Perhaps it is that the constructive instinct, latent in the male, is aroused; for a suit is rather a structural undertaking than a commercial transaction. Consequently the suitee keeps his eye on the specifications. He is not so concerned as to how the suit is to be built so much as to how it is not to be built. Unless watched, the scriptural words, “You have done those things which you should not have done and you have left undone those things which you should have done,” apply very neatly to tailors. The trouble with tailors is that they study form too closely and, because they have ascertained, by reference to the “Tailor and Cutter,” that the Maharajah of Chutney appeared at Ascot arrayed like the lily——and then some—they are cut to the buckram and their linings are lacerated because you refuse to impersonate the Maharajah of Chutney, or any other saucy scion of the Indes. Women accuse men of undue conservatism in dress, of their failure to change their styles to meet the times; but little do they wot of the battles that rage in tailor's parlours every day; of tailors on their knees imploring their clients, in the name of art and sartorial sublimity, to submit to stream-lined coats, low-pressure pants and vests modelled like the double doors of a strongroom.

Tailors may have their faults, but if men's clothes have not developed through the ages, it is no fault of tailors.

It is the fault of their clients who, year after year, have fought with their backs to the buckram to retain the Englishman's ancient privilege of looking like nothing on earth.

Cave-Man!!