Books: Clothes Make Mankind

THE IMPORTANCE OF WEARING CLOTHES (349 pp.) — Lawrence Langner—Hastings House ($7.50).

A Supreme Court Justice in a steam bath is divested not only of shirt, shorts, socks, shoes, pants, and robe of office. but of his authority. So argues Author Lawrence Langner, director of the Theatre Guild, authority on patent law and, in this volume, theorist on the use and abuse of clothes. Writes Langner, with the fervor of a textile magnate enjoying a martini after a board meeting: If it were not for the invention of clothes, “there would be precious little religion, government, society, law and order, [or] morals.”

Author Langner’s point is not that without clothes everyone would be too cold, too hot, or too bug-bitten to worry about such matters. Nor is it entirely that cops would look just like bookies—tattoos could take care of that. The author is a disciple of the late Psychologist Alfred Adler, inventor of the universal inferiority complex. It is Langner’s extrapolation of the master’s work that man clothes himself in order to feel superior—to the beasts by hiding his apparatus for procreation and excretion, and to other men by putting on the dog.

Some of the theoretical garments the author weaves have holes in astonishing places. He speculates, for instance, that the brutish-looking Neanderthalers may have vanished because the wearing of clothes (or animal skins) shifted attention from muscular development to facial beauty. Finding no such refinements in members of their own race, Langner suggests, beauty-conscious Neanderthalers may have mated with other, more comely dawn men. This argument violates the Wart Hog Principle; one Neanderthaler probably looked just dandy to another.

Fortunately, the author has done all his really important theorizing in italics, which makes skipping easy. The book abounds in photographs of such artifacts as farthingales, voodoo masks and inflatable brassieres, and (for scholarly contrast) there are photos showing people wearing no clothes at all. In a memorable chapter, the author decides that nudism is fine for sunbathing, bad for sex; the trouble is that it is all hide, no seek.