Very Rich No Longer Set Fashion Standards - Valley News

On Monday, April 13, 1896, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, returned to London from a trip to the French Riviera, where he had gained a catastrophic 14 pounds.

Doesn’t sound like that much, does it?

But His Highness had left for Cannes standing 5 feet, 5 inches and weighing 182 pounds. He owned 200 suits — made to “fit him like a glove,” in the words of John Edward Barker, a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Herald — and more than 40 distinct military uniforms that cost as much as $1,800 each to make. When he came home weighing 196, none of those suits or uniforms fit. The coats wouldn’t button at all, and he’d been reduced to leaving the bottom buttons of his waistcoats unbuttoned.

In a story in the Herald on May 3, Barker noted that “all the swells who were at Cannes when these calamities happened also left their vests unbuttoned at the bottom to be strictly in fashion.”

As gentlemen still do, though probably not many now know why.

That’s the way it worked then. The tippy-top of the social pyramid set the styles, and those a layer or two or three below followed suit. Keep an eye on what the prince’s tailor (or the queen’s dressmaker, or, eventually, the French couture) was doing and you couldn’t go wrong.

Until the 1920s, ladies aspired to pallor, so farm girls wore sunbonnets outdoors.

Suntans were for field hands. Then Coco Chanel came home from a cruise on a duke’s yacht with a tan and turned the tables. Notice that even under this new dispensation, fashion was top-down: Now a tan meant you’d been yachting, or lolling on the Riviera; now pallor meant you worked indoors all day, in a stuffy office or a factory.

The top-down-ness lasted well into the 1950s. “Esquire’s Encyclopedia of 20th Century Men’s Fashion,” published in 1973, is full of reports of what “they” were wearing at “smart golf resorts” and on Ivy League campuses. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Vogue was still photographing royals and middle-aged millionairesses.

In 1940 in “Kitty Foyle,” Ginger Rogers played a girl from row house Philadelphia who couldn’t wait to read the society page account of which Main Line matron wore what to opening night at the opera.

Fast-forward to now, and how many women can you think of who aspire to dress like the queen of England? Do you know anyone who cares what rich ladies wear to the opera?

True, there was a flurry over the former Kate Middleton, but only a flurry.

Fashion can come from anywhere now, and sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the source. After Karl Lagerfeld borrowed rappers’ big gold chains and medallions and huge gold earrings for his Chanel collection in 1991, you couldn’t always tell whether someone wearing lots of big gold was aping hip-hop style or knocking off Chanel.

The November issue of Lucky had a story on leopard coats; the most persuasive photo showed one that had seen better days — the fur looked as if it has split ends in places — which somehow only added to its raffish charm. It was worn over a man’s shirt with too-long sleeves, cuff buttons left undone, cuffs flapping. The Duchess of Windsor wouldn’t get it.

What’s even more startling: The very rich — the same people who in 1896 jostled to be first in line to have suits made by the tailor who’d made 200 suits for the Prince of Wales — seem to be losing interest. That’s according to a recent essay in The New York Times by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy.

It used to be that rich people felt an obligation — to other rich people? — to maintain a certain style. You could count on them to get out their ermines for the opera, invite 500 people to their daughters’ weddings, and dazzle their dinner guests with a quandary of silver forks lined up next to their plates.

Now, not so much. Currid-Halkett finds that it’s the folks one layer down, people with incomes between $114,000 and $394,000, who are the biggest spenders on silver flatware.

Maybe the 1 percent already have enough silver? Or maybe they have nothing to prove? Or maybe there’s no single style standard to conform to anymore, so people are left to do what they please?

A few years ago, when billionaire Warren Buffett married, instead of staging a wedding-of-the-century, he took his bride out to dinner at a chain seafood restaurant. (Meanwhile, the bridal industry is still persuading struggling young couples that they should spend, on average, $28,000 on a wedding.)

In any case, Currid-Halkett finds that the top 1 percent prefer to spend on luxuries like first-class plane tickets or private jet rentals, nannies, gardeners, private schools and tutors for their children and tuition at selective colleges — things that provide comfort, create leisure time, and improve their children’s prospects in life.

To get back to the Prince of Wales, Barker’s story explained that his weight gain was especially problematic because he was scheduled to represent Great Britain at the coronation of the czar in just three weeks.

The festivities would require many, many changes of clothing. It was too late to order a new wardrobe, so the Prince of Wales went on a strict diet. He was 54 — Queen Victoria lived a long time, remember — so it couldn’t have been easy.

Why the unbuttoned-bottom-button fad stuck around when so many other fashions come and go and leave no trace or memory is a question for another day.

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.

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