It’s cold, really cold – especially in the mornings – so I’m wearing the thickest coat I can find. It was once my husband’s, and it fastens the wrong way; who was it that decreed female clothes should button right to left and men’s left to right? Come to that, why is it pink for girls and blue for boys? Once, it was: “A girl is always safe in blue.”
I’m prepared to admit that some outfits are as they are for practical reasons – short skirts or pants because sweeping skirts are not easy to run in, for example. But practicality is only a minor consideration in decisions about clothes. Wearing trousers was considered racy before the war, but there are cultures in which trousers are the only thing a respectable woman should wear.
Serious men today don’t wear flashy clothes, but portraits from earlier centuries show the most powerful men as the most sumptuously robed. GK Chesterton thought the robes of monarchs and archbishops meant that men dressed up like women when they were most important, but those who wore them surely didn’t think of them as effeminate.
Clothes can keep you warm, show where you come from or what you do for a living, attract the opposite sex and impress the same sex – or do none of these things. It’s amazing we pay them so much attention; maybe we should not.
What do you think? Have your say below
