………………..The capacity for rapid change which women's 'modish' dress possesses - that very capacity which man, in his greater sartorial stability had so long despised - has enabled woman suddenly to become reasonable in her costume, and to adopt clothes that are superior to man's in nearly every respect. So great is this difference that it is worth while to attempt a brief enumeration of the chief points in which women's clothes, as they are at the present moment, allow of greater satisfaction than do men's.

(1) The use of a far greater variety of colour.

(2) The use of a far greater variety of stuffs, including an almost exclusive right to artificial silk - that most useful and attractive sartorial invention of modem science - together with other materials that combine lightness with elegance and that allow some passage of the ultra-violet rays.

(3) Much greater individual liberty as regards choice of materials, cut, and general style of dress.

(4) Much lighter weight of clothes {according to recent measurements in America and Germany, men's summer clothes weigh from three to ten times as much as women's).

(5) Much greater adaptability to varying seasons. Women can wear the lightest clothes in summer and thick fur coats in winter; men's clothes are admittedly much hotter in summer, and it is, in some countries at any rate, considered somewhat unmanly to wear fur coats in winter.

(6) Much more rapid and efficient adaptability to the different temperatures of various environments. Women can adapt by wearing a thin layer of essential clothes, and then putting on other layers over this - jumper, coat, overcoat, etc. Modem convention dictates that man should always wear his coat as an essential outer garment. He sometimes makes surreptitious and inconvenient adjustments by taking off his waistcoat or putting on an extra one - obviously from all points of view an inferior method to that of women.

(7) Greater freedom of movement. Except perhaps in high winds, trousers cause a slightly greater impediment to leg movement than do short skirts, while women's upper garments certainly allow of considerably freer arm and trunk movements than do men's coats.

(8) Much greater cleanliness.

(9) An exclusive right to exposure of parts of the body other than the face and hands.

(10) Greater convenience for putting on and off.

(11) Absence of constriction in parts of the body where freedom is especially desirable for comfort and health (a free neck, whereas men are condemned to the collar-and-tie system, with its threefold, or more usually fourfold, bandage round the neck). [Don't forget tight trousers!]

(12) Greater convenience for packing and transport.

(13) An admittedly greater hygienic value in virtue of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ,8, 9, and 11 above.

Truly a formidable list. And the sting of the whole matter lies in the last point. For recent changes in our ideas of hygiene have deprived men of what would formerly have been their very obvious retort, namely, that men's clothing was more healthy than women's, because it provided, in most circumstances, for a higher temperature of the air immediately surrounding the body. Up to a few years ago, when women appeared in décolleté dresses or 'pneumonia blouses', men might envy them their coolness, but could take comfort in the thought that they themselves were not courting disease and death as were their sisters. Now this consolation has been taken from them just as they most needed it. It is as if the reward of virtue, for which many sacrifices had been made, had been ruthlessly snatched away from the expectant prize-winners and given to those who had broken all the hitherto accepted rules of common sense and morals.

It is not surprising then that men find the present situation galling. Discontent is rampant (as my own investigations, among others, amply show), and has in England crystallised in the formation of the Men's Dress Reform Party, which has issued a preliminary call to freedom. Nevertheless, it is clear that the forces that brought about man's 'great renunciation', as we have earlier called it, are still at work and make it difficult for him to strike out for his own rights. In the light of our previous considerations, it is fairly easy to describe the deeper psychological forces on either side of this conflict. On the side of the reformers, the principal factors are:

(1) The Narcissistic tendencies, in revolt against the suppression to which they have been subject for the last 130 years or so.

(2) The various homosexual and Eonist tendencies, in virtue of which men desire to dress as women (for, of course, as women's dress has nearly all the advantages, any reform of men's must inevitably mean an approximation to women's in certain respects). Since, as psycho-analysis has shown, there is a close developmental relation between Narcissism and homosexuality, there is a certain relation between these two factors.

(3) The auto-erotic elements of skin and muscle eroticism which underlie the 'rebellious' type of clothes mentality. This last element is not necessarily connected with any homosexual tendency or lack of virility, except perhaps - (a) in so far as a relatively strong skin eroticism (relative, that is, to the genital eroticism) tends to produce a general distribution of libido resembling the more diffused sexuality of women; and (b) that a relatively weak genital sexuality can provide the individual concerned with only a relatively small enjoyment of phallic symbolism to compensate for the loss of pleasure from cutaneous and muscular sources.

(4) The fact that nonconformity in clothes tends naturally to express nonconformity in social and political thought. Correctness of male attire symbolises conservative principles (identification with, approval of, and obedience to, society as at present constituted), and there would seem to be a general correspondence between conventionality in dress and in politics. Thus, in London, the members of the Constitutional Club, the National Liberal Club, and the 1917 Club correspond on the average to three steps in the descending scale of sartorial correctness. Owing to this correlation, clothes reform tends to receive support from the generally rebellious, as a welcome symbolic expression of revolt.

Among the forces hostile to reform, the following are probably the most significant:

(1) Man's intense fear of appearing different from his fellows. Clothes reformers and women are wont to taunt man with his cowardice in this matter. They are amply justified, but it must be remembered that this cowardice is only the vice associated with the virtue of a greater social sensitiveness - a sensitiveness that has made man, rather than woman, the producer and developer of those wider social institutions which have rendered civilisation possible. If we were right in what we said about the origin of man's 'great renunciation' in matters of dress, this renunciation (tending as it did to abolish competition) had as its function the development of a further social cohesion. The social tendencies that produced this have established very powerful traditions against sartorial nonconformity among men, traditions which have not operated in the case of the less socialised, freer, and more individualistically competitive women.

(2) Man's generally greater repression of Narcissism. Our whole social traditions allow a freer manifestation of Narcissism in women than in men, and this difference largely finds expression in their clothes. A masculine clothes reformer is thus, as it were, offending against one of the most fundamental principles of male morality; for even though his costume be of the simplest, he cannot avoid making himself' conspicuous, through the very fact of being differently attired.

(3) Closely connected with this is the repression of male exhibitionism. In conformity with the ruling convention that woman is beautiful and man is not, there has grown up a very considerable intolerance of the male body; the characteristic signs of maleness, e.g. the greater hairiness, muscularity, and angularity, are in some ways much more apt to arouse embarrassment or repulsion than is the rounder and smoother (and of course much more familiar) female form. As previously suggested, this is perhaps due, at least in part, to a repression of phallicism; the worship of the phallus, so common at an earlier cultural level, has given place to an abhorrence of the male genitals, an abhorrence which has spread to some extent to the whole male body, and which demands that it be decently hid in thick garments, non-provocative in form and colour.

(4) The repression of homosexual tendencies. As we have seen, homosexual tendencies are apt to be strongly represented in the reform movement. This produces a revulsion against it on the part of those who fear, of course unconsciously, to do anything that would gratify these tendencies in themselves.

(5) The guilt attached to the idea of abandoning traditional male costume, owing to the moral symbolism associated with it. A man is apt to feel that if he dispensed with his thick coat and stiff, tight collar, he would be casting off the moral restraints that keep him to the narrow path of virtue and of duty.

(6) Closely correlated with this is, as we have seen, the phallic value of the very clothes that symbolise morality; hence man feels that the clothes reformers are in effect asking him to perform an act of self-castration.

Both these last motives are illustrated in the greater strictness and correctness of men, when in the presence of women, than when by themselves. Most men of the upper social classes experience a curious feeling of guilt and embarrassment if surprised by a woman without a collar and tie or in their shirt-sleeves. On analysis, this feeling seems to be composed of three principal elements: (a) a disagreeable suspicion of having been detected in a condition of moral relaxation; (b) the feeling that the man is somehow insulting the woman by appearing without the panoply of chivalry; (c) a feeling of being sexually inadequate to the demands of a female presence - in other words, the feeling that the man is impotent or castrated.

These more individual factors are supported by others of a more social nature, in particular:

(1) The fact that here, as elsewhere, men punish those who dare to do what they themselves would like to do but dare not. The employer, though he admits he is not comfortable, feels that his 'position' does not allow him to take off his coat, and would be prepared to punish (by dismissal if necessary) any employee who dared himself to do so.

(2) The fact that the long period during which men's dress has undergone very little change has induced a most thoroughgoing orthodoxy and conservatism throughout the makers and retailers of men's clothes. No one engaged in this trade has personally known, or has even been taught by anyone who has known, anything essentially different from the present system, and - in great contrast to the women's clothing trade - the whole circle of ideas in the world of tailors and of outfitters has become almost completely stereotyped.

(3) It is often said that women are opposed to any change in male attire. I am inclined to think, however, that this is only true in a certain limited sense. Women are conscious, of course, of the disapproval and ridicule that other men pour on the isolated reformer (they feel especially, perhaps, the implied taunt that the reformer is lacking in virility, and to that extent dislike associating themselves with him. They also, perhaps, derive some satisfaction from the fact that the moral seriousness of male attire contrasts rather piquantly with the symbolic freedom and irresponsibility of their own. Furthermore, they enjoy the reversal of the rôles that recent conditions have brought about; in the place of men's previous contempt for women's fashions, men have now to admit that women's are superior to their own. It would, indeed, be more than human if women did not indulge in a little triumphant amusement at this situation, but on the whole this amusement in women is astonishingly small showing thereby their Narcissistic independence, alike of the past disapproval of men and of their present praise.

Women are, moreover, aware that from the heterosexual point of view, they have lost much by men's drabness (as is shown by their much greater susceptibility to uniforms, if these are at all attractive), and that they stand very greatly to gain in this way from an abandonment of men's obsessive Puritanism. On the whole, then, it would seem that women cannot be reckoned as very serious opponents of men's dress reform.

In all this we have been taking stock of moral forces rather than ourselves making an ethical evaluation. This short return to psychology has been worth while, however, as throwing fresh light upon the present dynamic aspect of certain problems that were discussed in more general terms in Chapter VII. Returning to the task of expressing our own attitude to the matters concerned, it seems clear that the ideal that we should have in view is the retention of the peculiar advantages enjoyed by both sexes and the abolition of the peculiar disadvantages suffered by both. In the light of what we have seen in this and previous chapters, our judgment of men's clothing is that it represents an ascetic reaction-formation, into which, however (as in the case of many similar mental manifestations), there have crept - or perhaps we should more correctly say, in which there have persisted - certain surreptitious libidinal elements. judged both by the satisfaction given and by its ability to adapt to real situations, men's clothing must be pronounced a failure; the wholesale inhibitions that underlie it are so severe that they cannot but cause much suffering and much loss of efficiency. Moreover, the unconscious alliance between the super-ego and the instincts is one that we have reason to believe is opposed to the ultimate interests of morality itself. Our sympathies must therefore be with the reformers; though we must ask them (even in their own interest) to take account of the psychological factors by which they are themselves impelled. In working for the ends they have in view, it is evident that they have two chief tasks before them: the overcoming of the 'moral' associations of men's conventional clothing, and the provision of alternative outlets for 'manliness'. Men have to be convinced that it is a sign of weakness rather than of strength to need the support of external symbols, and that the choking collar and the clogging coat can be abandoned without any very shocking result either to their respectability or their virility; that, in fact, the truest manliness can be achieved by freedom rather than by a slavish subservience to convention. This freedom can perhaps only be attained by a reduction in the present amount of the displacement of male libido from body to clothes. We must learn to tolerate the male body, and perhaps even to admire it - if only as a counterpart to the female body, which we already idolise. If we are to have faith in the results of modem psycho-therapy, we cannot believe that wholesale repression is ever a really satisfactory solution of a conflict. Sublimation is a better course, but sublimation can seldom be brought about suddenly, completely, or deliberately; to achieve sublimation we must first have the courage to allow freedom. The freedom required here is a more natural attitude of man towards his own body; and perhaps the easiest and at the same time the best way in which this can be done is for man to allow himself a little more latitude in making use of his bodily attractions for heterosexual purposes in making, in fact, a somewhat greater sexual appeal to women. Such a course seems both likely to meet with. smaller social resistances than, and to be socially preferable to, the other alternative - a greater Narcissism (and consequent tendency to homosexuality).

The only serious objection that could be raised against such a course concerns the possibility of sacrificing the social advantages of men's present costume to which we drew attention in Chapter VII. Our reply to this objection must be twofold. In the first place, modern psychology has taught us that moral or social inhibitions, when they become excessive, are liable to produce fresh evils as great as those which they aimed at preventing - and in this matter the quasi-neurotic asceticism of men's dress seems to be a social counterpart of the excessive repressions so characteristic of individual neuroses. In the second place, it is undoubtedly possible to devise garments that would be comfortable, hygienic, and attractive without arousing an high degree of sexual jealousy or social emulation; indeed, a general change to looser and lighter clothes would be a democratic move, inasmuch as it would tend to diminish the social differentiation due to expert and expensive tailoring. The present 'suit' requires to be made by those possessing special skill if it is to look at all presentable.