Wardrobe confessions of a travelling man, 1965

Anyone who travels has a clothes and packing problem. TOD DRAZ, an internationally busy American fashion artist, draws and describes his own workmanlike solutions.

I am going to outline a two-costume wardrobe. That is to say, one on my back, the other in the bag, the things that go with them, and how it all works. This is the “least common denominator” wardrobe and one I have found works even for longer-than-planned stays. Certainly you are going to have times, as I do, when you want to have more in your bag than one suit, and extensions can be made according to your taste and needs, but when I take more I make sure that the extra clothes really do go with the same shoes. shirts and so on.

My jacket  is a two-button Shetland tweed in a black and white diagonal weave. I find it more elegant than wildly “sport”, and I can wear it and wear it without tiring of it. I like lots of shirt showing at the front and cuff, because I think it gives freshness to dark clothes—especially in this outfit where everything is based mainly on black and dark greys. I never wear Waistcoats. I find them hot and uncomfortable.

Four plain poplin shirts. You have to have at least one white shirt for those times when it’s the only one that will do. I take one pincheck-blue cotton, and one where the check is less pin. Then there is one drip-dry emergency shirt: blue on white Tattersall which wears like iron, dries in a jiffy and has much to recommend it, but I still prefer trafficking with laundry services for my plain poplin ones. If I’m going to have a long day on the train I choose one of the two checked shirts, for there’s no doubt they stay fresh-looking longer than the plain ones.

If you are travelling in cities and staying in reasonably decent hotels you are not going to be washing your shirts out in the bathroom. My emergency shirt usually goes out to the laundry with the others and my experience in general with European laundry services is that they pose little problem and are generally fast, particularly in the sunny countries. If the place you are going to is Roman Catholic and you don’t know their holidays, it’s not a bad idea to check up beforehand so that you don’t arrive in need of services you can’t get.

The dark grey suit. I wear it whenever and wherever I feel I won’t be properly dressed in jacket and trousers—usually for dinners or business luncheons. Being an artist I can get away with a bit of murder in the way of casual dress. Sometimes I wear a black cashmere sleeveless pullover with the dark grey suit when it’s just cool enough to want a bit more weight.

Two pairs of flannel trousers, both dark—one very dark, the other less so. Neither needs a belt, therefore the only belt I need carry is one of good black calf to wear with my dark suit.

Wearing the check shirt with the grey suit dresses it down, the plain ones do the reverse. 

My all-time favourite tie is the black knit—l have them in silk and wool—and will certainly take both with me and probably wear them nine times out of ten. Basic necktie number two is a rather snappy black and white woven check in silk, a classic in London; my socks are all ribbed cotton or thin ribbed wool and eliminate the need for suspenders. Nylon socks are marvellous for travel and if you’re willing to rinse them out daily you can really get along with as few as two pairs.

Handkerchiefs. Plain white ones of course for most purposes. Breast pocket handkerchiefs can add that bit of bravura which lifts our look and spirits. My big black cotton one goes with the tweed jacket and anything I might wear with it. Fine for long dirty train travel as it absolutely refuses to become grubby looking. In hot weather you can actually mop your brow, and this handkerchief will take it and go back into the pocket looking quite decent. 

Another favourite black handkerchief, bought in Rome, has two-inch-wide border bands of a good Italian red and shows a flash or two of that second colour when it’s in the pocket. 

My two polo shirts are long sleeved and are in finely knitted wool. There’s no doubt that synthetics need less care and are thus easier for travel. But I prefer wool. My basic one is black and the second one grey.

I always have two pairs of shoes with me. One pair on the feet, the other in the bag. Both are perfectly plain two-eyelet ties with leather soles. Brown suedes are for travelling, the blacks for wear with the dark suit. When my trip is sure to long and the weather had, I include a third pair in my plan. The brown suédes then go in the bag and the on-feet pair are my rust brown reverse calf chukka boots with thick-looking crépe soles—ankle warmers for damp European climates—and they give more grip, less slip when you’re dashing for that plane, train or bus. 

Pardon a seeming immodesty, but my trench coat is a knockout. Bought in Rome, it. is that palest of beiges, very belted and buckled with a dashing foreign agent look. I love it. I like the pale colour which keeps me from feeling rain clad, and seems best with dark clothes.

Likely extensions of the two-suit wardrobe would probably be a lightweight grey flannel suit and a navy blazer. Both can be worn with just about anything that is already in the bags. These tend towards milder weather and would probably come along in spring or autumn.

My basic luggage consists of three pieces. One good-sized valise which is big enough but not too big, a smaller valise and a hand case. For convenience let’s call them A, B, C.

Bag A is the main one, twenty-three inches long, nineteen inches high, six inches deep and has a hard frame but soft sides of considerable elasticity. (See sketches for packing technique.) Beware of the big bag. The nuisance of handling it will mean extra tipping. You will always have one broken arm instead of two lame ones and will probably walk with a list for weeks after you get home. 

If at all possible never take more luggage than you can somehow manage to handle yourself—for there are times when you will have to. This is when you will learn the importance of balance of weight. Two medium-sized bags, plus two smaller ones, or one medium-sized bag and two smaller ones can be readily weight-distributed between two arms. The only satisfactory way to carry a huge bag is on your head.

Bag B accepts with glee two pairs of my size 10 D shoes and lots of extras. Bag A is synthetic, B leather, both were bought at the same time and seem to be standing up equally well to the frequent and indifferent handling they get. Bag B has a hard round W frame and soft, bulgy sides. 3 Both these sides have U shape or 'drop seat' zipper closings and a sort of floating divider or fabric floor which moves up with the packing.

I like trees for my shoes, and have found in Paris, featherweight, folding aluminium ones which are hollow and still leave certain stash room in the shoes if things ever get that tight. Also essential are shoe bags—to protect other things rather than the shoes. The ones I use are cheap plastic found in London.

Bag C never leaves my arm. It holds everything of value not in my pockets and everything of immediate need during travel. It’s made of leather reinforced cotton tweed.

It would be an easy rule to say: “pack as you dress.” I don’t quite do it that way, but almost. Start in the bathroom. Anywhere you are, those basic toilet needs are going to be about the same. So I shave, wash and do a general morning pull-together. As it proceeds I chuck the articles used in this performance into my toiletries kit, and by the time I’m through, that packing is almost done. Remember that most European hotels do not supply soap and even when they do their wafer-style cakes are not worth struggling with.

This might be the moment to say a word or two about night things. Take two sets of pyjamas if you use them. You won’t need more as, unlike shirts, you don’t change them every day. While one is in the bed, the other is in the wash. Don’t take a heavy dressing gown as it needs an enormous amount of room. My winter one is a thin navy and red striped wool— durable but not depressing. 

In summer I take a thin cotton one that washes like a handkerchief. For slippers I prefer leather scuffs that shove into each than the travel planned ones, they give me comfort and no more packing problems. The travel outfit of Shetland tweed and flannel is soft and comfortable and will, I think, resist wrinkling as much as anything laced into a tourist class seat for several hours or more. 

Usually I wear my black polo shirt when travelling—n0 tie loosening nonsense—and if I do take 0ff my jacket I don’t feel I’m in shirt sleeves or get that wrinkled, riding-up-out-of-trousers look. 

My shirt, suit and tie are sufficiently comfortable that I can bear them happily without trying to turn my plane seat into a beach chair. On long night jumps, like trans-oceanic ones, almost anything goes; but that seat, despite anything the airlines say, is not a bed and if you try to make one out of it you’re going be the miserable, messy loser.

Copyright 1965. Tod Draz. Reproduced from Men's Journal, 1965.

A Man And His Shoes

Lately I've been collecting a pocket-sized English magazine called Men Only, which I'll write about in more detail later. The name is still used by a soft porn title, but that publication has nothing in common with the periodical which ran from the 1930's through to its takeover in the late 60's.

Men Only gives a fascinating insight into social mores of the day, not least of which concern clothing. I've reproduced some of the adverts which ran in M.O., but here I record in full an article that I found of some interest, called 'A Man And His Shoes'.

Stories concerning so-called 'classics' tend to be reproduced again and again, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. One such legend surrounds the Desert Boot, that ubiquitous piece of soft suede footwear said to have its origin in Nathan Clark's observation of what Monty's 8th Army 'Desert Rats' were buying in the bazaars of Egypt. Clark went on to form the Clarks shoe company and the rest is history.

Though I've often read that story, I've never come across either attribution or corroboration. Equally, I've never seen any archive photographs of soldiers from the eastern theatres wearing said shoes; they appear to have hard leather boots on in every shot I've seen.

For those reasons, I was fascinated to read this piece by Peter Bingham in the January 1948 issue of Men Only. I know nothing more about Bingham than his name. Men Only weren't big on accreditation. They often didn't even bother with a contents list. In it he makes explicit reference to the shoe stalls of Port Said making suede boots up for the soldiers. Alas, there were no pictures accompanying the original piece, but I've included here some archive Clarks advertisements.

SOME men never outgrow a schoolboy craze for model trains. Others prefer to collect first editions, theatre programmes, birds’ eggs, butterflies, stamps, sea-shells, even wives.

My friend, however, collects shoes. He is, as you may guess, a bachelor. Wherever he goes, there also, well polished, well treed, numbered, labelled, and wrapped in layers of tissue-paper, go a contingent of shoes—a whole trunkful. It is more than a hobby with him, more than a craze. He lavishes upon them the care and pride other men bestow on their bow-ties, their suits, their guns: and women bestow on children or lapdogs, They are emotionally part of him. Without at least some of them constantly in the offing he is cantankerous, short-tempered, never at ease.

Of course, the idea of Charles entering a shop, any shop, and buying a pair at random is not to be entertained. His shoes are made for him by a skilled craftsman of St. James’s. St. James’s we know as the world of men, the inviolate and close preserve of the well appointed, the nicely groomed, the quietly but exquisitely dressed, the last domain of the autocrat of distinction. There slumber the clubs to whose inner sanctums no woman has ever penetrated, where the only sound that discreetly disturbs a primaeval peace is the subdued, rhythmic murmur of post-prandial respiration and the rustle of The Times as it slides gently from inert hands to a deep-carpeted floor. Even the snoring is discriminate.

But in St. James’s are also to be found the most exclusive of everything, barring woman, that can please the heart and minister to the needs of man. There you may find walking-sticks that come nicely to the most critical hand, sporting guns that will be worth double their price a hundred years from now (tailored to your requirements for £250 a pair),  fishing-rods on which the most fastidious of fish might well be proud to be hooked, and in St. James’s, too, the gourmet may make the acquaintance of the subtlest shell-fish in the world

The proprietors of one shop we know have been hatting fathers and sons, sons and fathers, for three centuries. So you will not be surprised that it is these purlieus that my friend goes for his shoes. They are marshalled in rows on the floor of a special room kept for them alone—some sixty pairs in all. This is not as extravagant as it might seem, for a new pair is bought at least every year and the same pair is never worn two days running, so that some are many, many years old. There are shoes for all occasions: riding boots; plain black shoes for town wear, brogues for the country, half-brogues for semi-casual occasions, and suede shoes for the informal moment. Every kind of leather is displayed, and carefully preserved by trees moulded to the original lasts. Truly no mean array.

No minion ever applies brush or cloth to Charles’s beloved shoes. He polishes two pairs himself nearly every evening, working through them in strict rotation. He finds it a wonderful relaxation, an ambrosia sweeter than nectar and almost as effective as Scotch. When he gets the sack from the Foreign Office, he’s going to be a boots and write slim volumes on leather as a sideline.

There are different treatments, of course, for different styles of shoe: dark tan for military shoes, paler shades for less formal creations, plain liquid cream for others. The polish must be worked well into the leather, allowed to stand and ooze into the pores, and then the hard, supple surface shine gradually boned up, finishing off with a soft cloth.

Some of Charles’s shoes have been round the world with him. There is one pair which is as a child to him — a pair of half-brogues, one of twenty pairs made in Switzerland for a Maharaja, each in a different style. This noble princelet presented all but five pairs to the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay with instructions that they should be sold only to British officers and not to Indians, the proceeds to go to NAAFI. The uppers are smooth and supple and exquisitely stitched: the soles as hard as iron.

Suede shoes, however, are Charles’s abiding passion. The desire for these came upon him one night in the Red Sea going out to the Far East in 1944. At Port Said a whole crowd of chaps embarked who had just spent two years in Iraq. They were shod to a man in vintage bootees of a delicate fawn-ginger colour made pale by the blazing sun. This was too much for Charles, and it was all he could do to keep his hands off them. Whenever a pair descended a companion-way or advanced at the shuffle along the deck, Charles’s gaze followed them, his eyes caressing them covetously.

The moment everyone disembarked at Colombo, off he went the Petta, ordering five pairs of suéde boots in different shops. As he had progressed down the street, each wily, brown-skinned proprietor seemed to have more beautiful shades of suéde to offer, and thicker, scrunchier crépe for the bottoms.

Charles was fascinated too by their workshops. A generation’s trimmings, and bits of old shoes, old lasts, threads, waxes, and nails covered the earthen floor. The head man squatted in the midst of this indescribable pile of debris, shaping, peeling, thinning leather, occasionally aiming a well-directed stream of scarlet betel juice through the door at some friend in the street. The rest of the family variously sewed the uppers and trimmed off the final product.

The price was twenty chips (about thirty bob), although thirty was originally asked. If the poor man didn’t produce the goods in three days—he always worked three weeks behind schedule—five chips were knocked off for every day overdue. They were invariably ready that afternoon. . . . One of these shoemakers created a new fashion by making the uppers out of bush hats which everyone had been issued with but had never worn.

Charles still has many of these delightful Eastern bootees, and wears them negligently with white socks for afternoon tea. He says it gives just that travelled touch, because no one west of Cairo can make Suéde shoes like them. Deep bottle green, light ginger, chestnut brown . . .

But, oh, delight of delights, the palest, sandy, faded fawn.

Copyright 1948. Peter Bingham. Reproduced from Men Only magazine, January 1948.