Suit Yourself

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

—Henry David Thoreau

IN a little piece titled “On the Custom of Wearing Clothes” Michel de Montaigne relates an observation passed down from Herodotus concerning the comparative hardness of the skulls of certain dead Egyptian soldiers found on a battlefield and those of their equally dead Persian adversaries. Herodotus, he tells us, attributes the difference to the Egyptians’ habit of going about bareheaded, while the Persians were known from an early age to cover their heads with bonnets and turbans. Montaigne draws no conclusions from this. He just leaves it out there for us to ponder—along with the additional fact that, according to Suetonius, Caesar himself “always advanced at the head of his army, and generally on foot, with his head bare, whether in sunshine or rain; and the same is said of Hannibal.”

When I was a boy all the men in America wore hats. But then John F. Kennedy came along and refused one on his inauguration day, and now no male in America wears them. Are our skulls harder as a result? Probably. But I’m not sure what good it’s done us.

Clothes make the man, it is said. One of the hottest items on the samizdat circuit when I was in high school was a calendar featuring a nude Marilyn Monroe stretched out enticingly in the manner of the hood ornament on the old Auburn automobile. The picture was taken early in Marilyn’s career. Soon she would be a star. In that case at least, did a lack of clothes make the woman?

At about the same time the Marilyn calendar was circulating, the young Tony Curtis, recently pegged along with Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter as a Hollywood up-and-comer, revealed in an interview in one of the movie magazines of the day that he never wore the same pair of socks twice. He started off each morning, he said, with a freshly unwrapped pair. And for a while that became for me the very definition of making it—to be able to begin each day wearing brand-new socks!

Money was tight in our house as I was growing up. Mother used to order my school clothes from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. I remember the pleasure of poring over the pages of the catalog, trying to decide between this interestingly patterned cheap cotton shirt or that one—the cowboys-and-Indians motif or the baseballers—and then checking the right boxes for size and color before putting the order in the mail. Waiting for its arrival was tantalizing, patience-testing. But the sight of old Mr. McGibbony, our postman, lugging that cardboard box up the sidewalk made it all worthwhile. Christmas in September! I tore into that box with all the avidity of a starving castaway, and I wore my new Sears shirts and jeans to school with unalloyed pride.

There was a period in the early fifties when each year got assigned a color of its own by the nation’s tastemakers—probably by the Detroit automakers: they were all-powerful back then. It was the era of “accent panels” on Dodges and Fords and Chevrolets. I remember that avocado was the in-color for major kitchen appliances one year, followed the next year by a sort of golden brown. The year I was graduated from high school, 1954, the color for some reason was pink. All the new black Ford Victorias had pink trim. I got three pink dress shirts and two pink knit ties as graduation presents. I even got a skinny little pink suede belt. The next year the color was chartreuse, and the year after that heliotrope, a sort of pale, washed-out purple.

I went into the U.S. Marine Corps in 1955 wearing a handsome gray shirt with orange plaid trim that a woman named Nell Rose Worley made for me. I had met Nell Rose while working as a soda jerk at a neighborhood drugstore in Marshall, Texas, where I grew up. She used to come in the store in the afternoons and sit and...