TWO

Black Coats and White Collars

It is reasonably easy to give an almost exact guess as to what class of job a person is engaged on from his or her personal appearance. Also a person who takes a pride in this is nearly always found to have a keenness and pride in their work. If they are neat and smartly dressed then they are also usually neat and smart at their work and in their habits. ¹

Mr J.L., a buyer from Birmingham

For the last one hundred years phrases such as ‘black-coated’, ‘white collar’, and ‘white blouse’ have labelled middle-class occupations. The above comment from a 32-year-old buyer from Birmingham in 1939 shows how important it was to ‘dress the part’ for one’s working environment. Similarly, his use of the phrase ‘class of job’ suggests that employment had social as well as economic implications. Whether a man was a lowly clerk or a High Court judge, wearing the ‘correct’ clothing was vital to maintaining his social standing in the employment market-place.

During the early 1920s the tailoring industry felt that the First World War had engendered a relaxation of dress standards. Judging by anxious editorials in journals like the Sartorial Gazette, it seems tailors feared that informality might become the norm.² However, this did not happen. One of the reasons for this is that the perception of increased job insecurity led to the re-embracing of formality. Although many of the middle classes thought they were suffering from the effects of the economic slump in Britain in the early 1930s, the reality was that in material terms salaries and employment remained steady across the middle classes.³

Whatever the job, long-term security was always seen as desirable in employment. While many middle-class careers offered such security, promotion could be slow and domestic budgets tight.⁴ Individuals were reluctant to step out of line for fear of losing their jobs or holding themselves back within their sector. This also involved adhering to the many codes of dress decorum of office life. Thus a man’s choice of wardrobe had to reflect his working environment and aspirations.

By 1938 one in seven working adults was employed in a salaried occupation.⁵ In The New Survey of London Life and Labour, published in 1932, class was defined by the occupation of the head of the household, occasionally using the benchmark of the £250 minimum annual income as well. Therefore, a self-employed man would not be counted as middle class unless his income was over this level. Similarly, while shopkeepers were ranked as middle-class, shop assistants had to have both a managerial or supervisory position and the higher income to qualify as middle class. In the police force, only those holding the rank of inspector or above counted as middle class.⁶

To help establish who was who in the middle-class pecking order, it is useful to look at contemporary business societies at a local level. For many middle-class men across Britain in the 1920s and 1930s social aspirations took the form of membership of local business organisations such as Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Clubs. The latter, many of which were established in the 1920s and 1930s, were important both socially and in allowing networking among other local businessmen, particularly since a man could not apply to join but had to wait to be asked.⁷ In addition, each club maintained a list of acceptable occupations or ‘classifications’ and was supposed to have only one representative from each trade or profession, although this was frequently flouted. ‘If they want you in Rotary, they’ll find a class for you,’ claimed one member.⁸

Significantly, membership was also supposed to be confined to men in ‘executive’ positions but this could, and did, include men running their own small business or a shop. Indeed, the membership list of most Rotary Clubs paints a picture of middle-class society in the 1930s. Two-thirds of the twenty-two founder members of the Rotary Club in Poole, Dorset, were based in the High Street though not all were retailers; the other third included a bank manager, an architect, an inspector of taxes and a mineral water manufacturer.⁹

The classifications show what were considered to be acceptable middle-class occupations. The organisation aimed to recruit ‘men whose occupational interests would inform them of the trends and activities of “big business” without offering the means of controlling events’.¹⁰ The wide range of jobs is significant. Birmingham had nearly two hundred classifications in the early 1930s. Of the initial thirty-eight members of the Rotary Club of Stourbridge in the West Midlands when it was started in 1922 the occupations of twenty-nine are known and are typical of middle-class occupations: there was a group of professionals including an accountant, two architects, a bank manager, a doctor and three solicitors; there was a group representing local retailing, including six shop owners and two estate agents; and finally there were various other disparate local worthies such as a newspaper proprietor and the town clerk.¹¹

In the 1930s there was little difference in the way most middle-class businessmen across the country dressed as they enjoyed the networking opportunities afforded by organisations such as the Newcastle Rotary Club. (Hulton Getty)

There is little evidence that in the 1920s men in business felt the need to compete in terms of appearance. However, as job security became more important in the 1930s the maintenance of standards also strengthened in importance. Men working at managerial level felt duty-bound to present an image of a ‘gentleman’. This was an image that was a ‘clearly identifiable icon of masculinity … it was taken as given that the gentleman always appeared correctly dressed, for clothes were a public sign of social honour’.¹²

In surveys of the middle classes between the wars family incomes were set between £250 per annum to in excess of £700.¹³ Many men within this salary range felt they had a great deal of financial pressure on their wardrobe requirements, in contrast, for example, to the clerks who worked beneath them.

Even in what might have been expected to be the more relaxed atmosphere of a national newspaper press room, journalists at the Daily Express stuck to the traditional suit, collar and tie with not a shirtsleeve in sight. (Hulton Getty)

Those whose wage is … £100–130 often do not require to keep up appearances to the same extent [as us] and can therefore manage with one very good suit and wear for everyday a selection of reach-me-downs or odd garments, whereas the necessity to attend important meetings and the feeling that one must not ‘let the side down’ means that such as I must have at least 1 good suit for special occasions, one ‘decent’ suit for every-day business wear, 1 good looking heavy overcoat and a rain-coat.¹⁴

An insurance agent vented his frustration on what he saw as the main pressure on his clothing budget. ‘BUSINESS demands that I dress well. That is why I do … My profession makes it necessary for me to be always well-dressed.’¹⁵ Even a Mass-Observation respondent who was a journalist, a less traditional profession, noted that he was expected to wear ‘a darkish respectable suit at the office’, a version of the by now ubiquitous lounge suit.¹⁶

While ‘shabbiness’ was unacceptable, overly new clothes also drew suspicion that the wearer might be too concerned about his appearance, prompting accusations of dandyism and effeminacy. (Estate of H.M. Bateman)

The lounge suit, that is matching jacket and trousers, was thought by the tailoring trade to be the instigator of slovenly dressing, and was initially associated with a derogatory vocabulary of, ‘lounge ’abits, lounge lizards and dole drawers’.¹⁷ Because it was seen as a suit for ‘everyman’, magazines such as the Sartorial Gazette, the self-appointed purveyors of ‘good taste’, suggested that the lounge suit was contributing to the lowering of class barriers which in turn would damage the mystique surrounding the bespoke tailoring business.

Correct dressing did not end with the purchase of the correct suit. Ostentatious newness could draw mockery. Razor-sharp creases in the trousers might come with a new suit but might also convey the message that the wearer was trying too hard. Subjective comments by the Mass-Observation team show the ease with which a man might be misjudged. In the hand-written notes made on the survey of clothing, one analyst has written ‘dandy?’ next to the entry for one respondent, Mr A., who owned six suits. Mr A. was, in fact, a chemist who felt he was ‘conservative in matters of male fashions and only modest changes made in what I consider “good taste” find favour with me’.¹⁸ The selection of clothes for work by the man in the middle range of the middle classes is exemplified by the sentiments of a 28-year-old office worker from Manchester, who chose ‘quiet clothes, chosen to be in keeping with the position in life of the wearer, and not with the purpose of trying to appear what one is not’.¹⁹

By the end of the 1930s, among middle-class men working in business, with the exception of the professions, the difference was in quality rather than styling. Occasionally, a small degree of freedom was allowed depending on the occupation. Note the relative flexibility enjoyed by an analytical chemist:

The middle-class man must be a ‘black coated’ worker, he must be able to maintain a ‘respectable’ appearance, I mean that the type of work must be such as to allow him to do so even if he does not always present such an appearance. For example, I often go to work in the summer in an open-necked shirt, flannels, no socks and sandals (hardly ‘black coated’) but even so, I present a different appearance to the ordinary workman – my clothes are newer, I am not so dirty and so on.²⁰

Similarly, the self-employed businessman or shopkeeper was answerable only to himself (or his wife) and could therefore show a degree of individualism not available to the company man. Writer Eric Newby recalls his father, the owner of a large ladies’ clothes manufacturing company in London, always being immaculately dressed. ‘None of the clothes made by his tailor ever wore out. They belong to a period before the First World War when a button once put on was on for ever.’²¹

Similarly, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard’s father, who worked for the family timber-merchants business in the City, owned ‘many and varied’ suits, ‘beautifully-cut – with an enormous silk handkerchief in the breast pocket’.²² Historian Richard Cobb remembers Mr Edwards who ran a prestigious sports shop in his home town of Tunbridge Wells, ‘not quite a shopkeeper, certainly not just a shopkeeper’. He wore a blazer in his shop ‘as if he were just looking in between two games, so that one felt rather apologetic about catching him on the wing and keeping him from playing for Kent or Sussex, or both’.²³

By the late 1920s men working in the City or central London expected to wear a version of ‘London clothes … a very dark suit and overcoat worn with bowler hat, black or very dark brown shoes, crook-handled umbrella and light gloves’.²⁴ Morning suits were not commonly worn outside the professions or the City however high a man’s status. The clothes of politician and ‘man of the people’ Stanley Baldwin epitomised the complexities of middle-class masculinity. In public his appearance, always correct with no hint of flamboyance, supported Baldwin’s ‘national persona of imperturbable trustworthiness’, a persona many middle-class men were striving to achieve in their own business and professional worlds.²⁵ Yet he did not dress to impress and the American press felt that ‘in baggy clothes, smoking his inevitable pipe and wearing that look of detachment’ it could have been interpreted that Baldwin, a Midlands industrialist’s son, would have preferred ‘being a drowsy country squire in Worcester, tending to pigs’.²⁶

The middle-class look of another Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, grandson of a shopkeeper and son of politician ‘Radical Joe’ Chamberlain (noted for always wearing an orchid in his buttonhole), was also part of his popularity.²⁷

The ordinary Englishman sees in him an ordinary Englishman like himself; one who has been in business in a small way and has made a little – but not much – money; one who has been happily married and brought up a family of which the world knows little; one who wears the same business-suit every day, the black coat and vest, the striped trousers, the laced boots, and carries the same umbrella whether he is walking on a cloudless morning in the Park with Mrs Chamberlain (which he does every day at the same hour) or whether he is flying across Europe to meet the dictator to settle the affairs of nations.²⁸

Even in these pre-television days politicians’ appearance was important and commented on.

Large towns and cities in the north were not so strict in following the rules of ‘London’ clothing conventions, to the despair of the tailoring industry. Interviewed in the Manchester Evening News in 1933, an optimistic tailor predicted a revival of the ‘black-jacket-and-striped-trousers rule’, seeing this as the optimum choice. ‘Sooner or later … business chiefs will realise that clothes are an advertisement, and will issue an edict that all their employees must wear black coats and striped trousers … if women can go to so much trouble over their clothes why don’t men?’²⁹

However, photographs that appeared in the Manchester Evening News indicate that few businessmen in the north-west actually wore morning suits. Standard wear appears to be the classic three-piece pinstripe suit as worn by Major J. Becke, Chief Constable of Cheshire, when he was photographed for the Manchester Evening News.³⁰ Indeed, across the north it appears that businessmen other than professionals such as doctors, solicitors and bank managers rarely wore morning suits. However, they differed from the city gentlemen of the south-east in sartorial touches such as the patterned tie and tiepin worn by Mr William Sucksmith, senior partner of the Valley Scouring Company, wool scourers and carbonisers, of Shipley, in a photograph in the Bradford Times & Argus.³¹ Wealthy northern businessmen and entrepreneurs appeared to prefer the flamboyance of the flowery buttonhole, the silk handkerchief or the gold watch-chain, echoing the Edwardian period and T.S. Eliot’s ‘silk hat of the Bradford millionaire’, to the sombre suiting of the professional.³² They clearly did not feel the need to adopt ‘London’ clothes among northern society.

MARKING OUT THE PROFESSIONAL

It was left to the professionals – doctors, lawyers and the like – to develop a recognisable dress code that set them apart from other middle-class men. Professional men have long been central to the identity of the British middle classes despite being only a relatively small section of it. It has always been difficult to dissect the various sectors of the professions. The dictionary definition of a ‘professional’ as a person ‘engaged in a profession, especially one requiring advanced knowledge or training’ is of little help in distinguishing the multitude of occupations that the label could cover.

In 1851 twenty-two different professional occupations could be identified ranging from civil servants (the largest number) to scientists (the smallest).³³ By 1931 twenty-seven occupations were listed as ‘professions’, including new categories such as librarians, laboratory assistants and industrial and trade association officials.³⁴ Teaching and medicine were the largest professions closely followed by engineering and other sciences, law and architecture. Significantly, classifications were not made through ‘amount of income or possession of wealth’.³⁵ Men in business often earned more than doctors, for instance.

Professionals have been seen as a ‘maverick fourth class’ who ‘rightly, or wrongly, see themselves as above the main economic battle’.³⁶ All professional men and their families would have been acutely aware of the differences within their social networks and outlook. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that ‘barristers and solicitors inhabited separate universes, the one a refuge for impecunious gentlemen, the other a summit of ambition for the tradesman’s brightest son’.³⁷ These disparities were increasingly used by mid-ranking professionals to distinguish themselves from differing segments within their own class group.³⁸

The tailoring trade put pressure particularly on the professions who dealt directly with the public, such as doctors, solicitors and bank managers, to use dress to distinguish their status from those in ‘trade’ – or indeed in other professions, which were seen as less highly skilled. Increasingly during the late 1920s many complied and wore the distinctive morning suit and bowler hat associated with the City of London until well into the 1960s.

In 1935 Style Guide, a menswear trade magazine, featured a highly stylised version of the look they felt professional men such as doctors, lawyers and solicitors should aim for. Note the rolled umbrella and Homburg hat neatly placed on the desk. (Style Guide, 1935)

The wearing of morning suits by non-professionals or City businessmen was seen as presumptuous although it did happen. Mr and Mrs Tom Hendrick of Ealing remember their fathers, a commercial traveller and a shop manager respectively, always wearing spats, pinstriped trousers with a black jacket and ‘the mandatory brolly’ for work in the 1930s.³⁹ ‘Morning suits’, noted a 29-year-old clerk from Newcastle, ‘are suitable for business men, solicitors, and others who hold responsible positions [original italics] but appear unnecessary and rather snobbish when worn by clerks generally.’⁴⁰ His comment shows that ‘businessmen’ at top managerial level, such as company directors, used the morning suit as a dress code to reinforce their positions of responsibility. It also suggests that men in these groups felt threatened by men of lesser status attempting to emulate their style of dress. Some ‘junior clerks’ did attempt to emulate senior figures in the way they dressed but may have been let down by the quality of their outfits.

The tailoring industry insisted that the key to suitable dressing was quality. The editorial in Style Guide shows a highly idealised version of the look they felt professional men should aim for. ‘There is, of course,’ runs the caption,

a kind of junior-clerk version of the black-jacket ensemble, but there is no fear of confusing it with this, which can be seen at a glance to belong in the large room with the pile carpet, often distinguished by a neat card on the door marked ‘In Conference’. It blends just as well with a Harley St. address as with Throgmorton St., or, for that matter, the Inns of Court.⁴¹

Tailors actively encouraged a wider embrace of this formal style of clothing confirming the morning suit, that is black jacket without tails and ‘sponge-bag’ striped trousers, as a visual uniform for professionals and businessmen. The Style Guide makes it clear that there ought to be no comparison between this outfit and the cheaper version of the black jacket ensemble:

Doctors, dentists, opticians, bankers, company directors and heads of firms in general should all dress severely and with care. In the first place, because serious matters and weighty responsibilities call for a serious demeanour. Secondly, to set an example to their employees and the public in general. Thirdly, as a continual reminder to themselves should their thoughts tend to wander from their ordained paths.⁴²

The clothes worn by the harassed doctor in Pont’s cartoon are clearly a cut above those of his waiting patients. They are typical of those worn by fee-earning GPs at this time. (Punch, 27 July 1938 © Punch Ltd)

The tailoring industry implied that if a doctor wore a lounge suit instead of a morning coat, he would be bringing himself ‘down to the level of “the man in the street”’. Similarly, the trade warned the solicitor that paying clients would be less likely to part with their money to a lawyer in a jacket than to one who dressed the part.⁴³

The implication that professional men needed to dress well rippled out from the traditional professions. In 1939, a 40-year-old osteopath from Birmingham felt that 6 guineas was ‘the cheapest figure at which I can get a suit that will pass muster in a first-class hotel or in the company of well-to-do people’. He stressed that he was ‘careful’ with his appearance because his job demanded that he wore ‘decent’ clothes, ‘the general inference being’, he continued, ‘that a man cannot give a really skilled osteopathic treatment if he cannot afford to wear the “right” clothes’.⁴⁴

A popular formal alternative to the black jacket and ‘sponge-bag’ trousers was the chalk pinstripe suit. Balfour Barwise, a dentist with a practice in central Oxford during the 1930s, wore a dark blue three-piece pinstriped suit every day until the 1950s. It was made for him by Shepherd & Woodward, Oxford’s leading tailors, and Mr Barwise would wear it without the jacket for work, the waistcoat and watch-chain covered by his short white dentist’s robe. ‘He was always dapper, a neat and smart man with neat and tidy clothes.’⁴⁵

ACADEMIC ALTERNATIVES

Not all professionals dressed in such a conventional manner. The formality of morning dress was in clear contrast to the relatively relaxed attitude to clothes taken by most male academics for example. R.H. Tawney, Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics, was known in the 1930s for carelessly emptying his pipe into the cuff of his tweed trousers.⁴⁶ Sir Frederick Hopkins, a scientist and President of the Royal Society from 1935 to 1940, chose to wear for his portrait by Meredith Frampton in 1938 a pale cream jacket, blue shirt and green tie and waistcoat without robes standing at a laboratory workbench.⁴⁷ This is in marked contrast to a portrait of Reginald McKenna, Chairman of the Midland Bank from 1918 to 1943.⁴⁸ He is wearing a morning suit of black jacket and waistcoat together with dark pinstripe trousers and a barely visible discreet watch-chain. These clothes are clearly part of the banker’s ‘uniform’ and can be seen as representing respectability and status in contrast to the academic’s degree of individuality. The clothes chosen for portraits often reveal the persona the sitter wants to present. It is no surprise that most boardroom portraits followed a predictably familiar format.

Teachers also had a degree of flexibility depending on their level of income and their interest in clothes. Wilfred Blunt describes an eccentric maths teacher at Haileybury public school in the 1930s (where Blunt was himself a teacher), who wore ‘clod-hopper boots, trousers too short, a four-inch collar and a five-buttoned coat. Every four or five years a postcard inscribed “same again please” brought another identical ill-fitting suit from his tailor.’⁴⁹

In contrast, Mr R.B., a 45-year-old teacher from Liverpool, spent the considerable sum of 14 guineas on his new suits, which he had made in London. His wardrobe always included one morning suit with black and white ‘shepherd’s plaid’ or ‘sponge-bag’ striped trousers. However, since Mr R.B. describes his suits as being kept for interviews and social occasions, the assumption must be that he wore one of several pairs of grey flannel trousers and a sports jacket for work under the usual black academic gown worn by teachers, since he lists these as being ‘everyday wear’.⁵⁰

Similarly, a 25-year-old chemistry teacher from Leicester owned three suits, the newest being kept for ‘best’, the second, a two-year-old suit, ‘used weekdays’ for work, and the third ‘is not used, although it is by no means thread-bare, but merely shabby’.⁵¹ At the lower end of the scale academic Bryan Magee remembers that his teachers in Hoxton, in London’s East End, ‘always wore suits, because it was expected of them, but with most of them it was the same very cheap suit every day, bagging and shiny at the joint’.⁵²

Whether teacher or salesman, ‘shabbiness’ was something to be avoided at all costs without the security of academic tenure. ‘Lack of money does not necessarily mean that a man should dress shabbily,’ pontificated a respondent, while another felt that ‘having out of necessity to wear shabby clothes has a demoralising effect’.⁵³ Several Mass-Observation respondents, including the young teacher from Leicester, admitted that they were more concerned about having a clean collar and shirt together with a ‘tidy’ tie and handkerchief than whether their trousers were creased.⁵⁴ Thus the standard cliché of cleanliness equalling respectability was still in evidence and more important than sartorial detail. Cleanliness also firmly distinguished the blue-collar worker from the higher status white-collar worker.⁵⁵

CLERKS: THE WHITE-COLLAR PROLETARIAT

Many young men from the lower middle classes started their careers as clerks in a variety of business environments. These were the young men who, prior to the First World War, formed ‘part of [a] large, shifting, single-male population … fac[ing] the material consequences of keeping up appearances on a minimal income’.⁵⁶

After 1918 clerks were still comparatively poorly paid in jobs such as local government and insurance, but about 90 per cent were earning more than £150 a year in 1924.⁵⁷ With a great deal of overlap between clerks from the traditionally white-collar lower middle class and the aspiring working class, it is clear that many young men felt that by donning a suit and tie they were elevating themselves socially. So it is not surprising that they frequently held strong ‘middle-class’ attitudes since ‘they stood in the front line of the class war’.⁵⁸

In 1935, when reviewing the employment conditions of clerks, Klingender pointed out it was a mistake to assume, because clerks appeared to be higher up the social scale than skilled workers, that they were better off. Not only were they likely to be earning less than skilled workers, they also had to pay more for their ‘outward signs of respectability’ such as clothing.⁵⁹ One young man confided in his Mass-Observation reply that ‘my job as a clerk necessitates that I look tidy so that I am unable to economise below a certain limit in the matter of clothes’.⁶⁰ A 26-year-old clerk from central London who spent the large amount of 7 guineas on his suits confirms this. ‘Wanting to get on in my job I cannot afford to be ill-dressed.’⁶¹ Even a respondent who spent only 3 guineas on his suits thought, ‘there is no possible excuse for economising on clothes; a man should spend all he can afford on his wardrobe. Appearances are everything – a man with money will naturally dress well, being able to afford it; lack of money does not necessarily mean that a man should dress shabbily.’⁶²

Tailors played on their young customers’ social insecurities. A pamphlet on salesmanship included advertisements from a small London tailoring business: ‘It is no use going to a New Job with poor clothes/You get the job and leave the clothes to me.’⁶³ The Sartorial Gazette offered advertising aphorisms to encourage sales such as ‘As people cannot see our characters or abilities, they judge us by our clothes’, ‘Dressing correctly and well commands respect’ and ‘You too can win your chief’s approval and secure that better job if you dress with good taste as well as prove a good worker’.⁶⁴

In spite of the need to look tidy and respectable for work and the increased availability of cheaper suits through tailoring chains such as Burton’s, young men were surprisingly reluctant to wear their new suits for work. Many respondents call their newest suit their ‘best’, worn for social occasions, while the second best becomes the office suit. One youth quantifies this: ‘Usually a suit is best for 6 months, then work for 9 months.’⁶⁵ One man who had four suits all bought for under £4 thought two were ‘as good as new’ while two were ‘only suitable for office’.⁶⁶ As one Mass-Observation respondent commented, ‘I have to choose a cloth & style [of suit] that will not date quickly & that will be suitable for office wear later in its life.’⁶⁷

From the end of the nineteenth century clerical work had increasingly been seen as ‘unmanly’. By the end of the First World War more women were going into office jobs and the threat of women’s presence in the office was a recurring theme in the trade press:⁶⁸

Never forget that the modern girl, who is your competitor in business nowadays, takes [her appearance] most seriously. She realises that she has to if she wants to get on, and you’d better realise you have to if you want to get on. It costs you rather more for one rig-out than it does her, because all your clothes are tailor-mades; but she needs more variety in dress than you do, so you and she start more or less even.⁶⁹

The male respondents for Mass-Observation did not mention this as a strong concern yet spoke of other influences in their choice of clothes. A 19-year-old planning assistant from York voiced the feelings of many when he said he regarded ‘personal appearance as a definite social and business help, in addition to which it gives me a clean and respectable feeling to be smartly (tho’ not ostentatiously) dressed’.⁷⁰ A 22-year-old clerk from north London noted that although he was ‘a long long way from being rich’, he failed to see that ‘that was a reason why the appearance [he presented] to the community should not be one of pleasantness and general correctness’.⁷¹

In 1930 psychologist J.C. Flugel published his significant work pronouncing that ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation’, the move of men’s clothes from ideals of beauty to the purely practical, had started at the end of the eighteenth century. Flugel may have been wrong about when the ‘Great Renunciation’ began but he was writing quite accurately about his own time when he said in 1930, ‘So far as clothes remained of importance to [man], his utmost endeavours could only lie in the direction of being “correctly” attired, not of being elegantly or elaborately attired.’⁷² He reiterated this in 1934, adding ‘modern clothing … allows few outlets for personal vanity among men; to be dressed “correctly or in good taste is the utmost that a modern man can hope for”’.⁷³ While there were no doubt exceptions among the young, on the whole, whatever style of suit was worn, at work ‘correctness’ reigned supreme for all interwar middle-class men.