Books: Stripped

MEN CAN TAKE IT—Elizabeth Hawes —Random House ($2).

In her best-selling Fashion Is Spinach, Elizabeth Hawes, petite, snip-witted, 36-year-old Manhattan dress designer, showed a chic hand with the muckrake as well as a sound knowledge of women’s clothes. This time she plays Joan of Arc to clothesbound men. Few years ago Elizabeth Hawes discovered that clothes make the man miserable. She designed some collarless, tieless, pressless, lightweight, colorful models. Men nudged, pointed, but did not buy. In Men Can Take It, Miss Hawes relates with bright disgust what was wrong.

First she polled Harvard and Yale boys, businessmen, wearers of hats, heavy shoes, tight-woven woolens, collars & ties in the dog days. These gentlemen vowed they were quite comfortable, would not admit that their clothes were archaic. Horrified, Hawes (who once fired her obstetrician because he wore a stiff collar) concluded that such clothes were indeed their proper wear.

In spite of men and fashions, however, dogged Elizabeth Hawes goes on plugging such comfortable and colorful creations as these:

1) Matched, two-piece cotton slack suits, now considered acceptable only as “extreme negligee” for beach wear, to sell at around $5 per suit.

2) Kilt-style skirt worn over shorts (already fashionable among Florida’s rich beach boys).

3) Full dress suits, in color, minus collar & tie. Better still, an adaptation of the bullfighter’s cock-o’-the-walk costume.

It took a war to get women out of corsets, says Designer Hawes, and it will take a more drastic upheaval to get men into sensible clothes. Says she, it might be worth it.