THE GLASS OF FASHION

From the comments of those journals whose trinity is Hart. Schaffner and Marx and to whom the reigning dynasty is the House of Kuppenheimer one would gather that the average Harvard undergraduate resembles nothing so much as a cross between Willie Stevens and Sliding William Watson. Yesterday the CRIMSON reprinted an article telling how a moving picture director's desire to embellish "Brown of Harvard" with the proper collegiate fastidiousness led him not to Cambridge but to Brooks Brothers and--New Haven. Today in an adjoining column one may read a direct attack on the current and local mode. The sole remaining course appears to be either an invasion of Fashion Park or that favorite of all souls in distress, the river.

If the critical gentlemen could only realize how much thought over a period of many years has gone into the process of making a Harvard student look like the man who comes for the ashes there would undoubtedly be a greater degree of appreciation betrayed. Those hats over which the conscientious objectors shake their heads are not merely bought, nor are they made: they evolve gradually and it may be said that they are practically never finished. The interesting contrast between a light jacket and dark trousers is not due to chance or the fact that the cleaner has failed to return the others the wearer probably spent hours in trying the effect: quorums and committees may have been assembled to judge the result. And the general shoddiness comes only from a constant attention to details.

The art of deshabille is a difficult one and it is not overstating the case to say that its practioners desire as many rituals to it as does the man who looks as if he had just stepped out of a Fellows advertisement. Therefore all those who pass by the awkward seeming undergraduate might do so with a tribute to an unrecognized artist. He is a product of the ages; he is Sartor Resartus.