Clothes Make the Communist

Personally, said an elegant young London editor last week, "we feel that the greatest possible service to world peace would be the exporting to the Soviet Union of large quantities of American drape shapes, with a stock of the strange ties from Charing Cross Road. Once Russia saw its population trotting about in these ridiculous costumes, its sense of humor would be restored, and the sartorially resplendent nations of East & West would stroll hand in hand into the garmental adventure of the future."

Dandified John Taylor was musing over the fashion findings turned up in the current issue of his magazine Tailor & Cutter. The sprightliest of all British trade papers, outspoken Tailor & Cutter (circ. 16,000) has been scolding the sloppy dressers of the world since the 1860s when it found that the "beauty and symmetry" of American frock coats were being "nullified through advancing the scye [i.e., armhole] beyond a point absolutely required by the form and size of the figure." In recent years it has turned its batteries of disapproval on the baggy pants of some of Britain's top Socialist ministers. Nothing, however, that Tailor & Cutter discerned in Westminster or the wastes of the U.S. could quite equal the awful abyss it found in Moscow.

Riffling through a stack of photographs of Soviet bigwigs, the current Tailor & Cutter is driven to the inescapable conclusion that "fashion in Russia died with the aristocrats. The class having been so successfully destroyed, it was natural that all its facets should disappear. And so the Soviet leaders cling grimly to the clothes of the period that saw the birth of their administration."

Andrei Gromyko, the sharpest dresser of them all according to T & C, "commits the sartorial crime of tying his evening bow behind the points of his wing collar. He also affects the American habit of pressing a crease in his sleeve." Ex-Ambassador Maisky "makes the mistake of fastening his bottom waistcoat button" --a mistake, admits T & C, that might be accounted for by the class-conscious fact that "the leave-it-undone style was created by royalty."

Almost forgotten Maxim Litvinov "looks as if his braces had broken." Only portly Andrei Vishinsky finds any favor at all. "We don't know," says Tailor & Cutter "what kind of a uniform he's wearing, but it is probably the only one in the world that allows the wearing of a fancy tie. The general effect is most impressive."

In ignoring style changes, says the magazine in summation, the Russian "has made a defiant gesture at class consciousness that fails absolutely. Actually he would be a great deal wiser to follow modern fashion in its entirety or invent a completely different form of dress. His humdrum neatness, coupled with naive mistakes, merely gives him a bourgeois look."

Only Stalin escapes this effect. "Perhaps," reflects T & C, his "plain* uniforms, quite unrelieved by any insignia . . . are studiedly symbolic of the wastes of vast Siberia . . . a perennial reminder of the Russian military might or might-not, a sort of sartorial sabre rattle."

* The Marshal's austere appearance in pictures may have deceived even sharp-eyed Tailor &Cutter. "His well-known tunic," wrote Wendell Willkie in One World, "is of finely woven material, and is apt to be a soft green or a delicate pink; his trousers a light tannish yellow or blue."

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