Books: Clothes

NARCISSUS, AN ANATOMY OF CLOTHES—Gerald Heard—Dutton ($1). Evolution raised man from the red earth naked. He looked at himself and knew shame; he felt the wind, was cold. Therefore he stole from the beasts their striped or tawny elegance, he scooped the rock and lived within it. Clothing and architecture developed together like concentric cortices of a springing rod. Architecture is the outer whorl; its fashions make their impress on clothes, the inner. Tailors snip and snip, masons slap on their lime; steeples and toppers affront the sky, eaves overhang, tails droop decorously down. Ingeniously, out of a wide scholarship, Author Heard traces the homologous development of caps and cathedrals, mitres and mosques—15,000 years in a book of 150 pages that scholars will find an interesting tour-de-force, men of letters a most scholarly little tract. And the end? Clothes, like the appendix, are a useless relic of evolution. For modesty, for protection, for display, we dress. These purposes are outworn. The new man will be naked as Heaven’s cherubim; he will build towers to which the Spire of Salisbury were but a wand!