LAMENT FOR THE PLEAT

The above is not a photograph of me, even as I was in my hey-day. But those are my trousers.

Pleated. Pleated, reader! Pleated as trousers used to be, prior to plebeian flat-fronts which are to trousers what pug noses are to dogs.

They are in a museum now, as soon will I be. We both belong to a more elegant, grander, more spacious epoch, before the advent of casual wear. Imagine Sebastian Flyte pacing the terraces of Brideshead pleatless. Or Gatsby - The Not So Great Gatsby - in crowded-crotch chinos.

I held out for the pleat longer than most men, searching eBay, haunting vintage clothes shops for examples of the genre in any condition and hanging around old people’s homes with a wad of twenty pound notes in my hand. ‘Care to sell me your trousers, old man,’ I’d call out the minute one showed his face, but all that did was to scare him back inside. I even posted cards through the letterboxes of what looked like the houses of the elderly, with the message - RELEASE CASH NOW: YOU MIGHT BE SITTING ON A FORTUNE - until the police caught up with me and issued me with a warning for making lewd suggestions to pensioners.

Nothing I wrote on the subject had any effect either. I railed against the Chatfield Pant - Ralph Lauren’s ‘zippered, flat-fronted chino, clean-fitting, classically perpendicular, of a military design, with not too much roominess in the rise, seat and leg’ - what did Ralph Lauren have against ‘roominess’? - and while I was at it took the opportunity to lambast the same designer for indulging those sad people - not all of them excusably American - who thought it sophisticated to sport an embroidered polo player astride their left nipple.

I attacked the brachycephalic louts who went to the opera in chinos and a stained t-shirts while the women who accompanied them wore cocktail dresses and stoles. For this I was called an elitist, with even the Royal Opera House itself accusing me of sabotaging their efforts to democratise opera-going. You didn’t need pleats to appreciate Verdi, they said. Which missed my point. I wasn’t a high-art snob. I wasn’t calling for jeans to be banned in the presence of serious music. (Though on another day I might have.) I was calling for respect for the women who had gone to lengths to look as though they hadn’t just popped in to see Un Ballo in Maschera in their gardening gear. Respect for occasion and the idea of rising to it. Respect for the principle of distinction and variety. Respect for change. Respect for life.

Well, I lost that one. And now I hear that the trousers I loved are on the way back, the sad part being that I am now too old to climb into them without getting my feet caught in the pleats and falling flat on my face.

I’ve been told that my love of pleats is no more than the longing of a Jew to be an Englishman. This is a calumny. In fact, pleats go far back in my ancestry. Here is an amusing piece I wrote on that very subject. It amuses me anyway.

I am going to make it for paid subscribers only, as I have noticed that readers who might be otherwise circumspect are happy to pay for fashion tips. You may think my advice on how to dress is not worth taking, but look at it the other way: from me you can learn how not to be in the vanguard of fashion.

I am about to lower the paywall. Be bold. Jump over it. And enjoy nor just the piece but other untold advantages. Just be careful you don’t catch your feet in your pleats.