Joe Bennett: Clothes hide a multitude of sins

Suited up and ready to go.

OPINION

These days I don’t own a suit. If an event requires me to wear one, I don’t go. So when, in cleaning out the garage, I find a zip-up suit protector on a coat hanger I am surprised.

But when I unzip it I recognise the contents immediately. I reach in and finger the thick cloth, the satin lapels. It’s my dinner jacket, the only one I have ever owned, bought second-hand 40 years ago. I lean in and sniff. Cigarettes and wine. Just cigarettes and wine. Years of them soaked into it. I’m not sure I ever had the thing dry-cleaned. I just let time do the laundering between outings.

At university I didn’t have a dinner jacket. If the occasion called for one I made do with a plain black suit, swapping a straight tie for an elasticated bow. No one seemed to notice or to mind.

Besides, occasions that called for a dinner jacket differed only in degree from those that called for a suit. I would get drunk at both. But whereas in a suit I would come home late, stumbling and singing, in a bow tie I was more likely to wake at dawn face down in a flower bed. In other words, the greater the formality of dress, the worse the standard of behaviour. It was ever thus. As King Lear observed, ‘robes and furred gowns hide all’.

Rank and social status has always been a game of dress-up. Kings, bishops, knights of the realm, governors-general, require the finery to suggest that they really are superior beings. It’s a similar story with the business suit. The qualities we most admire in daily life - kindness, modesty, deference - are handicaps in business. The suit disguises that. The formal dress suggests civility. But underneath there beats a heart of pure self-interest.

The British upper classes in the Victorian age were perhaps the dressiest people in history. This is partly because of Darwin, who suggested they were descended from apes. They found that hard to take. Clothes helped. The more formally they dressed, the more they distanced themselves from those simian ancestors. And also, of course, the British were rapacious colonisers, exploiting huge swathes of the planet. Dressing up helped them pretend they were superior rather than just greedy.

The story goes that in the 1860s the Prince of Wales grew tired of evening dress and had his tailor make him a shorter jacket to be worn with a bow tie, a stiff shirt, a matching pair of trousers and a pair of shiny shoes. The fashion caught on. In the States it became a tuxedo. In non-English-speaking countries a smoking jacket.

In my late 20s I taught briefly at a school with pretensions to posh and there were numerous events for which a dinner jacket was required. So I took myself down to the sort of back street shop you don’t see any more, a second-hand gentleman’s outfitters that advertised its interest in the wardrobes of deceased estates. I bought a dead man’s dinner jacket.

This was the beast I brought to this country in 1987. It was rarely needed. The last time I recall wearing it in a formal capacity was at a leavers’ ball at the school I taught at. Though dressed up, I was there as policeman. Late in the evening a girl came to me in a panic. Her friend had collapsed in the toilets. I sent her to seek help and rushed in. A girl in a ball gown costing thousands has passed out from drink and seemed to be choking. I rolled her on her side and went to scoop the tongue out of her throat. She bit down on my index finger with remarkable ferocity. Then medical help arrived.

When eventually I grew too fat to fit the dinner jacket, I still didn’t have the heart to throw it out and it went to the garage.

I take the jacket off the hanger. Beneath the dust the lapels still have a sheen. I shove an arm in one sleeve but the thing’s never going to fit over chest or shoulders. I don’t bother to try the trousers.

Half an hour later on the way to the supermarket I stop at a charity dumpster, asking for good used clothing. Into the heavy metal drawer I place the DJ that’s been mine for 40 years and was a dead man’s before that. The drawer shuts with a clang.