Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 February 1919 — REIGN OF DANDY IS OVER [ARTICLE]

REIGN OF DANDY IS OVER

Present-Day Mode of Dress Gives No Scope to Would-be “Glasses of Fashion.” V ... .. Arthur Symonds says in New Kepublic that it is adeplorable fact hut the reign of the dandy is over. He died with Barbey d’Aurevilly. who had other interests and occupations than his cravats and laces, and was rather an amateur than a practitioner in the art. (Jules Bairbey d’Aurevilly, an eccentric figure .in French literary circles of the nineteenth century.) The cause of a large part of it is the degeneration of costume. A man can be well dressed, in the afternoon if not in the evening;-when the mode leaves only an inch of choice here and there between one curve or another. But variety and elegance have gone wholly out of the best-cut coat, the more carefully calXml a ted trousers. With knee breeches and silk stockings and buckled shoes went every incitement to dress personally and to outdd others in what was not a fixed fashion. What form or substance of things could a dandy in these days find to work 'upon? The tying of a white linen tie is no longer an art; the stock with its dignity 1188 piace to the high, hideous, shining ansl uncomfortable starched collar. And the dullness of the things that men wear—the shapeless black funnel, with its inch of irrelevant brim which we cram diseomfortably over our heads! What dandy dare make himself conspicuous by even the extension of a brim or the loosening of those bandages of cloth vdilch wrap our body with a graceless rigidity. ?.... ~