Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).

Donna Reed as a Yank centerfold.  Reed was well known actress by this time, and is perhaps best known for her role in The Best Years Of Our Lives.  Her actual last name was Mullenger but as she started acting during World War Two, her studio changed it to Reed over her objection.  She became a peace activist during the Vietnam War.

Some time ago we received a comment here from a reader, and the reader emailed me after the recent item on fashion, and reminded me that I said I'd do a threat on the topic.

So here it is.

The threads were these ones:

Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.

The comment was this one:

Anonymous said...

I read this, and your other post on Fran Camuglia. Wow, what a sad life.

I have an observation that I wonder if you would comment on that your post seems to illustrate. The pretty girls of the 50s and 60s looked different than they do now. They were beautiful, but softer, and more natural looking. Even the real dolls like Camuglia, with their exaggerated features, were softer and prettier. Think Marilyn Monroe.

I don't know what's changed it, but maybe the emphasis on "working out" has. Seems like you have really fit girls, and then really out of shape girls, and not much in between.

My replies were:

Thanks for your comment. Her life was tragic.

On your observation, people do indeed look different at different ages in the past, but I haven't really thought of it in this context. Having thought of it now, a little, I think there's something to your observation. As a minor personal observation, "working out" was not really a thing, as you note, in the 70s when I was growing up. Thinking back to high school I can't really think of any overweight kids at all. I'm sure there were some, but it must have been really rare. It seems to me that high schoolers now look older than we did when we were there, but oddly kids of my fathers vintage, who graduated high school in the 40s, looked much more mature. Nobody looked bulked up, or "ripped", or whatever.
This might be worth a post on the site, after I ponder it a bit.

By the way, while I've already noted it in these posts, her life being tragic isn't unique in terms of Playboy centerfolds. Quite a few of their stories are pretty grim, and Playboy contributed to that. In this case, quite frankly, she was off to a really bad start as it was, as she was married absurdly young, divorced very rapidly, and objectified forever when still in her teens.

I noted that it might be worth a post at the time, and then I went on to other things.  The email reminded me of it.

Well, in thinking about it, and I have no real scientific way to discuss this, my observational comment is, on this question, while I think there are some morphological changes we can observe in women, there aren't really that many.

That's probably surprising.

Let's start off with a couple of things, the first being that the first part of our discussion necessarily references young women.  That's important, I think, for reasons that will become clear.

The second observation is that time period and method of illustration matters.  We're not really going to get, for example, very accurate depictions of women, or men, at a certain point in our past.

Let's start with that.

A lot of comments like this, and I've seen them before, are based on photographs.  I.e., in this case, somebody is looking at a photograph of a Playboy model from 1967 and drawing conclusions from that.  But can we?

Probably not.

 Young couple, 1920s. By their dress, this couple was probably at least Middle Class, if not well to do.  Ages, again, are hard to place in photos but even the caption of this photo regards this couple as "young".  My guess would be upper 20s, and that would have been a fairly common marriage age for a couple with means, in this era.

Most early photography was in the category of portraiture.  Old portraits give us a much more realistic idea of what people looked like than "published" photographs do.  And certainly better than pornography does.   Indeed, that's one of the fundamental destructive aspects of pornography, which we'll get into later.  

Anyhow, cameras had to develop for quite some time before snapshots or the like appeared.  In the meantime, illustration really developed and that gives us a pretty good idea of what standards of beauty were up to at least 1920.  Illustration made use of models, who were chosen for their physical appearance, but they rarely strayed massively from the mean. The first real "standard" was Florence Evelyn Nesbit, who became the Gibson Girl.   She was pretty, to be sure, but didn't depart from the mean in a massive fashion

This was equally true of lesser known models, and indeed, it was mostly true for early movie stars as well.

Movies began to take over from illustrations as the bearers of standards in the 1920s and certainly had by the 1930s.  Female movie stars began to be more and more chosen for their beauty as well as their acting talents by the late 1930ss, which did result in an exaggerated standard in the sense that not every woman you meet is going to look like a movie start.

Teenage girls with cameras in the 1930s.

Actress Susan Hayword as a Yank centerfold.

But, nonetheless, while they were pretty, only in very rare instances were they somebody whom you might not meet, appearance wise, at the Piggly Wiggly.

Lauren Bacall as a teenager.

It wasn't until the 1950s that this really began to change.  

Starting in the 1950s, and I'll place the date as 1953 when the first issue of Playboy came out, the beauty standard became emphasized and highly exaggerated in terms of physical features.  The first Playboy centerfold was Marilyn Monroe, against her will, and her features in some ways became the standard.

Or rather her imagined features.

Playboy emphaszied the supposed "girl next store" with teh concept htat she'd lost her moral compass, was sterile, stupid, and very top heavy.  Marilyn Monroe's early movies, indeed the bulk of them, portrayed characters just like that.  The funny thing is that Monroe's own early modeling photographs didn't depict her in taht fashion at all

The photos above, from the 1940s, show a young Monroe as an actual sort of girl next door.  Her physical features were no doubt the same as they were in her earliest movies, but they weren't being emphasized.  Soon after these photographs they would be, and in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, they were on display.

Playboy,. as noted, arrived in 1953.  The 1950s gave us a host of actress that were Monroe knockoffs, some with even more exaggerated features. By the early 1960s a wave of Italian and other European actresses hit, all of whom were very topheavy, although they weren't portrayed as dumb.  Playboy and its followers kept on keeping on and if anything exaggerated things more.  Camuglia comes from that era.

Indeed, it was so notable, it made up one of the comedic lines in 1963's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World:

J. Algernon Hawthorne: I must say, if I had the grievous misfortune to be a citizen of this benighted country, I should be the most hesitant at offering any criticism whatever of any other.

J. Russell Finch: Wait a minute, are you knocking this country? Are you saying something against America?

J. Algernon Hawthorne: Against it? I should be positively astounded to hear of anything that could be said FOR it. Why, the whole bloody place is the most unspeakable matriarchy in the whole history of civilization! Look at yourself, and the way your wife and her strumpet of a mother push you through the hoop! As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated. They're like slaves! They die like flies from coronary thrombosis, while their women sit under hairdryers, eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother's Day! And this positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms. In all my time in this wretched, godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything. I'll wager you anything you like: if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight.

In a lot of ways, we're still in it.  It's what's given us plastic surgery and a host of other horrors.

So, overall, what I'm saying is that actual physical appearance didn't change that much, but rather the publicized standards did, to women's detriment.

So what about the gym?

When Camuglia appeared in Playboy in the early 1960s "working out" wasn't a term.  Indeed, gymnasiums were around, but their atmosphere wasn't quite what it is today.  In a lot of places the gym was the YMCA.  Indeed, in this locality, it was for years, before, some time in the 1970s, private gyms began to appear.  

Early gyms really had all the features of moder nones, they were just less used and sort of used by a clas sof urban people who was unusually into physical fitness, save for weight lifters, who are a different class entirely.

Having said all of that, women have been involved in athletics, if not working out per se, for decades.

Australian female Olympic swimmers, 1932.  These women look pretty darned fit.

Girls basketball team, 1907.  Playing basketball while dressed like this must have been a huge pain.

Indeed, nobody was "working out", really, until the 1960s. There wasn't much of a need to.

That doesn't mean that people weren't physically active, however.  Women were involved in Olympic sports right from the onset, for example.  And as late as the 1970s, at least, an incredible number of women engaged in some sports, such as tennis and golf.  My mother, who grew up in the 1930s and 40s, was an avid golfer at one time, and a real fan of tennis. She also constantly rode a bicycle, and she swam nearly daily up until her final decline.  Yes, she's an unusual example, but not that unusual.

Her mother, I'd note, was also a tennis player.

There's sports, of course, but there's physical work.  And everyone engaged in a lot more physical activity by necessity.

Which catches us back up, sort of, to the 1950s.  As we've discussed here before, domestic machinery really came in after World War Two, and with that, a decline in physical activity.  This meant more women went into office work.

The 1950s also brought the country the "cheap food" policy, and we still live in that era, and that's where things really begin to change.  This was noted the other day on Twitter in a post by O.W. Root

O.W. Root@NecktieSalvage

Currently there are two extremes that didn't really exist en masse before.

1 - Extreme obesity

2 - Extreme gym culture

Maybe one day those extremes will fade and a more  traditional historic norm will replace them.

That pretty much nails it in a way, other than to say lots of people are neither part of a gym culture or obese.

A lot of people are taller, however.  That's been well noted.  It's a nutritional thing, but here's one area where people, including women, have a different morphology than they once typically did.  Contrary to what people tend to think, however, its flatted out since the late 1970s after having really gotten ramped up, around the globe, in the 1890s.

Now, here's one more thing that's changed.  Women in particular used to at one time very much "age" once they hit their 40s.

Contrary to what people think, people don't "live longer" than they once did. Rather, premature mortality has dropped way off.  But people did "age" more quickly.  If you look at photographs of married couples the appearance of women over 40 is often shocking in comparison to now.  Now, for various reasons, women in their 40s are not regarded as old or even middle aged, but often if you go back to mid century they'll have a much older appearance.  I"ve seen photographs of women in their 40s whom you would easily guess were in their 60s.

That's probably all due to the stress of life and hard work.

So, all in all, I don't think the evidence supports the assertion there's been much of a change at all.  I do think that an emphasis on a certain look, or a series of appearances, has changed over time, but more recently its broadened back out, which is a good thing.

Iceland girl delivering milk.

Mexican women in festive dress

Lex Anteinternet: A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .The Thomas Crown Affair.

Eh? 

Allow me to explain.

I posted this yesterday:

Lex Anteinternet: A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .:   Cary Grant and Myrna Loy from  Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. O.W. Root @NecktieSalvage · 1h People think I am exaggerating when I ...

Last night, I tried to watch the Thomas Crown Affair.

I'm generally a fan of older movies, and often watch ones older than this.  But I couldn't make my way through it.  The appearance of the characters and the urban settings were just too much for me.  The thing is, I"m pretty sure it was accurate.

All the office workers and businessmen are dressed in contempoary suits, some of which were quite nice and still would be today.  The hats really stood out, with every man wearing a Trilby, something really identifiable with teh 1960s, but which when we look back on the 60s, is easy to forget.

The 1960s may have been the era of Haight Ashbury and hippies, but it was also the era of men still wearing suits and ties in the office.  It isn't really into the 1970s that this began to change.  The wide lapel  loud color suit came out of the 60s, but it didn't show up until the early 1970s, which is really, culturally, part of the 1960s.  Even so, men were wearing coat and tie in the office.

The other thing I encountered leading to this thread was a link from something on Pininterest, which lead to a set of photos that a high school teacher/photographer, took of high school students in his school in the 1970s.  I'm not going to linke them in, as some of the photos he took were, in my view, a bit lacking in modesty (not anything illegal, but just something I wouldn't really think a person should photograph), but maybe that was his point.

It wasn't that I didn't recogize the photographs.  I really did.  That's the thing.  All the boys and girls in tight fitting t-shirts.

I have my father's high school annual from 1947, and I've written on the appearance of the studends that appear in it before:

Standards of Dress. Attending school

This is a 9th Grade (Freshman) Class in high school, 1946.  Specifically, is the Freshman class at NCHS in 1946 (the Class of 1949).

Now, some will know NCHS who might read this, others will not. But in 1946 this class attended school in a city that had under 30,000 residents.  It was a city, but it was a city vastly surrounded by the country, as it still somewhat is. This class of boys (there were more in it than those just in this photograph) were from the town and the country.  None of them were big city kids. Some were ranch kids.  I recognize one of them who was.. Some came from families that were doing okay, some from families that were poor.

So how do we see them dressed?  One is wearing a striped t-shirt.  Exactly one.  Every other boy here is wearing a button up long sleeved shirt.  Of those, all but one are wearing ties.

One of the ones wearing a tie is one of my uncles.

Did they turn out with ties just for their photographs that day?  Probably they did.  I suspect so, but even at that, they all actually could come up with ties.  And somebody knew hot to tie them.  None of these boys appears to be enormously uncomfortable wearing a tie.

 

NCHS Juniors in 1946, this is therefore the Class of 1947.

Here's a few of the boys in the Junior class that year.  Here too, this is probably a bit different depiction of high school aged boys than we'd see today. For one thing, a lot of them are in uniform. As already mentioned in the thread on JrROTC, it was mandatory at the school.  Based upon the appearances of the boys at the time the photograph was taken, this probably reflects relatively common daily male dress at NC.  Most of the boys are in uniform.  Of those who are not, most are wearing button up shirts, but no ties.  A couple have t-shirts.  Nobody's appearance is outlandish in any fashion, and nobody is seeking to make a statement with their appearance.

NCHS girls, Class of 1947, as Juniors in 1946.

Here are the Junior girls that year.  As can be seen, NCHS had a uniform for girls at that time, which appears to have been some sort of wool skirt and a white button up shirt.  They appear to have worn their uniform everyday, as opposed to the boys who must not have.

Uniforms at schools are a popular thing to debate in some circles, and I'm not intending to do that.  Rather, this simply points out the huge evolution in the standards of youth dress over the years.  This is s cross section of students from a Western town.  The people depicted in it had fathers who were lawyers, doctors, packing house employees, ranchers and refinery workers.  They're all dress in a pretty similar fashion, and the dress is relatively plan really.  No t-shirts declaring anything, as t-shirts of that type weren't really around. And no effort to really make a personal statement through dress, or even to really stand out by appearance.

I don't know that things had changed enormously by the mid 1950s.

Kids still new how to dress fairly formally, by contemporary standards, and girls are always shown wearing relatively long skirts and blouses.  Boy nearly are always wearing button up shirts, not t-shirts.  For something more formal boys still appear quite often in jacket and tie, or suit and tie. Consider the school dance here from the 1950s:

Dance.

Not ties in a quick review, but still pretty cleanly dressed for the boys and very well dressed for the girls.

By the 60s, things were evolving.

Linked in from original site under Fair Use exception.

And by the 1970s, they had really changed.

And not really for the good.

In the 70s, men still wore coat and tie to the office, but the trend line is pretty obvious. 

If anything, youth dress hit rock bottom in the 1970s.  It's intersting that office dress has hit rock bottom, right now.

And, like Atticus Finch noted, dress does matter. 

A Nation of Slobs. But then. . .

 

Cary Grant and Myrna Loy from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

O.W. Root

@NecktieSalvage

·

1h

People think I am exaggerating when I say 50% of people's problems, strife and anger would go away if they just started dressing well, but I'm not. Dressing in a way that makes you feel good about yourself will make you feel better about others and the world too.

This is both a revived thread, and a new one.  It's one of many topics that shows up here in one way or another, including in stored drafts that I start off on, and then fail to finish. 

This one started:  I wrote my first entry here and put it up for posting to be run yesterday.

Then I read this on Twitter:

Atticus Finch (of Georgia) 

@Atticus59914029

·

46m

I had an attorney I had never met show up at my office to take a deposition one day in blue jeans - blue jeans! I was insulted and lost respect for that attorney. How we dress does matter. It is a form of manners.

I agree with that comment in that how we dress, matters.

But it does show the regional nature of things, but still we should consider this carefully.

I've posted on this before, but I used to wear dark black Levi's or Lees to court on occasion, combined with a sports coat and a tie.  When I did that, I'd wear cowboy boots as well.  Wearing cowboy boots to court is isn't unusual here.  I've seen it done a lot. 

In retrospect, I haven't seen the jeans, such as I noted, with sports coat and tie all that often, but I have seen it.  I very rarely do that anymore, however.  Part of the reason I do not, however, is that I don't travel nearly as much as I used to, thanks to COVID 19 and its impact on travel and the law.  Travel was routine, COVID came in, and hard behind COVID were Zoom and Teams.

Indeed, I've appeared in a few Teams hearing recently in which the Judge was in the same town as me.  Prior to Teams and Zoom, we had a few telephonic hearings we'd do, but if we were in town, we were expected to show up.  

Not anymore.

Anyhow, I've seen a lawyer wear blue jeans in court exactly once.  That particular lawyer was a working stockman and was appearing in the court in the county in which he lived.  Nobody said anything.  He was otherwise in jacket and tie.  I have seen lawyers in blue jeans in depositions plenty of times, however.  Most of the time prior to COVID it was in combination with jacket and tie, but even in the couple of years before COVID this was changing.

I still wear a tie.

I had some lawyers from Texas show up a while back and they were in jeans and new cowboy boots.  There's working cowboy boots (all of mine are of that type), "ropers", which aren't cowboy boots, dress boots that locals wear, and then the weird dress boots that locals don't wear, but Texans do.  

I don't get that kind.

Anyhow, in order to wear cowboy boots as dress shoes, you have to know how to wear cowboy boots.  Some people affect a high water appearance with their dress shoes, and frankly do so on purpose.  Men's trousers are supposed to "break" over the shoes.  I.e., you aren't supposed to see the socks.  But for some odd reason, some Ivy League educated people wear their trousers "high water" so you can always see their socks.

Stockmen, Sheridan Wyoming, 1944.  This is an interesting photograph and it must have been taken as something was going on in the town where the photo was taken, Sheridan Wyoming.  The clean white shirts are a pretty typical semi formal dress for ranchers.  All the hats are good (clean).  Only he older rancher with the beat up Montana Peak hat is wearing a suit.  The stockman on the left is wearing baggy jeans that drape over his heels, still a very common way to wear them amongst working stockmen.  All of the visible heels are "doggin' heels" which are common only amongst working stockmen.

Cowboy boots, properly worn, are never ever worn high water.

Anyhow, it's interesting to note, note that Atticus does, that years ago I went to a Federal Trial in Cheyenne in which I was making a very limited appearance. After the day I had dinner with the defendant, who had been a Supreme Court Justice in Montana (where they are elected).  The main lawyer in the matter wore a suit every day, but he wore dress cowboy boots with them.  The retired S.Ct justice, when that lawyer got up to do something, turned to me with real anger and noted, as I was wearing a suit with wingtips, that "I'm glad to see somebody dresses like a lawyer around here".

Given that at that time I often wore cowboy boots at work and even at court it was quite ironic.

The last time I wore cowboy boots in a trial was over a decade ago, I'm sure.*  It was a relatively long trial and I'd basically cycled through my dress clothes so I wore a sports coat, black Levi's and my cowboy boots.  Nobody said anything, but later the plaintiff's lawyer grieved the judge over something in another case and claimed, referring to this one, that he had favored me as he hadn't said anything about it while he had, she claimed, about her shoes.  I don't recall anything ever being said about her shoes.

That was the last time.  I didn't want to be seen to be inappropriate in any fashion, again.

That does bring up suits, however.

My legal assistant dresses professionally every day.  I really should.  I do a lot, as there are things I go to constantly in which I appear as a lawyer, and I feel that I should dress as a lawyer is expected to, when I do, which involves at least wearing a button down shirt (usually white) and a tie

I do the same for depositions, but I"m almost the only one anymore.  I'll go to a deposition and everyone is dressed down in blue jeans and the like.  People actually comment as I'm not dressed in that fashion.

Indeed, I went to the eye doctor's the other day and was dressed for work, which on that occasion was khaki trousers, button down shirt, and a tie.  The person who checked me in joked that "I was too fancy to be there".

Times have really changed.  I recall a time when you went to the doctor's office and the doctors where wearing ties, or alternatively a smock that buttoned to the neck.

Physicians in the 1940s

Dentist into the 1980s, which I know due to my household, wore a dress shirt and sports coat to work, then a dental smock at work.  My father preferred clip on ties, probably has he had to change back and forth.

When I was growing up, I didn't know how to tie a tie.

Probably a lot of kids in my generational cohort didn't.  I didn't wear ties growing up. I never went to a school that had uniforms, and the dress code, to the extent there was one, seems to have largely pertained to junior high, where (boys) were not allowed to wear t-shirs advertising beer, and girls were not allowed to wear halter tops.  I can recall a boy being sent to the office once for wearing a beer t-shirt, although he'd worn it before, and a girl being sent for wearing a halter top that was quite a bit too less, so to speak.

Junior high and high school here were like the Wild West when I attended and by high school the authorities had simply given up on dress codes, I think.  We were largely self policing however, as by that time self appearance standards start to awkwardly kick in.  Kid from ranches dressed lake cowboys of the era and they were the real deal.  Otherwise we wore typical clothing of the era, which often involved t-shirts, which is odd to look back on now as I'm always cold and I never just wear a t-shirt anymore (I've had people comment on that).    Girls had generally become quite self conscious and therefore wore nicer clothes than boys as a rule, although the code, to the extent there was one, had clearly been suspended to the extent that I recall being confronted in a crowded hall by an amply endowed girl I did not know who had chosen to come to school in a very thing t-shirt and no brassier, which would have gotten a person sent home in any other era.**  It was shocking enough that I recall it even now, over 40 years later.

Events, I'd note, largely didn't require a tie.  I.e., school events.  We didn't dress up for nearly anything.  More significant social events, however were different, such as weddings or funerals, which is tough if you don't actually own any dress clothes and you've never had to wear them, particularly in the 1970s.  The 70s were a black hole for dress clothes with awful suits and loud or pastel colors.  I recall my father and I having to go out to get some dress trousers for me for a wedding and ending up with pastel light blue polyester dress pants, a true horror.  I hated them then, and I still do.

Anyhow, a self declared position of mine in my late teens was that I was never going to have a job in which I had to wear a tie every day.  It was arrogant and naive, but it did express my career goals quite well.  I thought at the time I'd work outdoors in one of the sciences.

Be that as it may, soon after high school I attended basic training, and learned how to tie a tie there.  The Army still issues ties.  I still tie a tie the way I learned at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.

Even as a geology student I started to learn how to dress more formally, and thankfully the horrific polyester era was over.  For the most part I dressed every day as geologist in the field do.  I wore L. L. Bean chamois shirts in the winter and t-shirts in the summer.  By that time, however, I was gravitating strongly back to the rural dress patter, reinforced by basic training, where we the original patter heavy BDU shirt every day, unless it was the surface temperature of the sun, at which point we could go down to t-shirts.  Cowboys, you'll note, almost always ear long sleeve shirts and frankly anymore, I do too.  Just recently, in fact, somebody asked me "do you ever wear a t-shirt".  I truthfully answered, "yes, underneath a long sleeve shirt".

My parents taught me well, but it took some time for me to learn.

In law school our professors dressed professionally every day.  Men wore jacket and tie every day, and one professor, our business law professor, wore a suit every day.,  Oddly, it didn't make an impression on me at the time, but it sunk enough, I guess, that by the time I was getting ready to graduate I knew how to dress like a lawyer.  By the summer before I graduated I owned two Brooks Brothers suits, one bought for a wedding, and two Brooks Brothers ties.  I still have one of the ties.

I don't have either suit.  Suits, I've found cause an odd waist line expansion on me such that all I have to do in order to gain weight is buy a suit.  In fairness, at the time I bought the first two I was incredibly, probably dangerously, think. There's a long story behind that, but I'm not naturally really thin.  My father and grandfather were stout.  Not fat, but stout.  My mother was think, and seemingly everyone in her entire family is.  I seem to fit in somewhere in between, but having been a bit stout when I was in junior high and the first two years of high school (and then having rocketed to thin), I've always been a bit conscious of it and I do tend to watch my weight.  I'm as heavy now as I've ever been, but I'm still not approaching stout.

When I was first practicing law, the rules of dressing were made plain to me on day one.  In the winter we wore shirt and tie every day.  In the summer, we could wear polo shirts in the office.  Court rules had at one time provided that during the summer lawyers could wear short sleeved dress shirts and ties, and dispense with jackets, and the "Summer Rules" were still cited, even though they were no longer published as they had been.  I've never owned a short sleeved dress shirt and I've never appeared in court without a jacket.  About fifteen years after that a new district court judge imposed new rules, which included no khaki trousers in court.

Still, even before COVID, things were really changing.  You'd see lawyers wearing ties in their offices less and less.  Levi's began to appear.  And COVID just put things in the basement.  Lawyers will now appear in Zoom meetings with the Court without jacket and tie (not me).  I had one senior Court lawyer hold a meeting in which he didn't have one.  It's been odd.

And I dress way down in the office if I don't have to meet anyone.

I presently have two suits, only one of which I really like.  I wish I had a double breasted suit like two Brooks Brothers suits I've owned in the past.  They seem really hard to get now. The good one I have is a heavy wool suit. I have a grey wool suit that's just too thin.  I need to have, really, at least two more suits but I haven't had a long trial since COVID and I keep thinking, at age 61, that I only have a few more years of practice and I don't want to invest in work clothing that will likely outlast me.

The other one now has some very tiny holes, which would likely indicate some moths got to it at some time.  It's hard to notice, but there there.  It's embarrassing.

So I need to get some new suits, I guess.

And not just that

Ties I've had from the first years of my practice have really lasted, but I'm starting to throw them out as worn.  I can't really ignore that any longer.  And having waited to long, the bill for suiting back up is going to be monstrous, and at age 62, sort of a bad, if necessary, investment.  I'll have to practice until I"m 80, or start wearing ties to Mass or something, to make that pay off.

Footnotes

*I've never had a pair of "dress cowboy boots", like many people do.  I've had cowboy boots for a long time, of course, but never a fancy pair.  Every pair I've ever owned was a working pair, even if they were reserved for office and town wear at first.

 My regular cowboy boots.  The ones I wear to work, when I wear cowboy boots to work.

My working cowboy boots.

I wear cowboy boots in the office less than I used to for a couple of reasons.  One is that I often wear a pair of "ropers" that were bought for my son.  They're Ariats and really comfortable, and look Western.  The other is that I have arthritis in my right foot from an accident years ago, and my old cowboy boots sometimes get uncomfortable, and sometimes they don't, at the office.

**

"Mr. Bernstein: A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

Citizen Kane.  

I have found this observation from this movie to be really true.  The fact that I can recall the incident clearly is something I find curious.  That was the one and only time I ever encountered the girl noted, and I'm not pining for her, nor even proud of the recollection, but it's really clear.  I stepped around a student and she was right there.  She was short and Hispanic and looked up at me, but she was really showing, and probably conscious of it and embarrassed.  I was too.  It was only a very brief encounter, but for whatever reason, I can still recall it pretty readily, but I don't think about it every month.

Memory is interesting.