The Smoking Suit: 1880s

Red velvet smoking suit c. 1880 https://collections.lacma.org/node/222900

It is quite the thing now in English country houses, where the guests are on intimate terms, or where there are no ladies, for the men to come down to dinner in their smoking suits; but then these suits have more silk than smoke about them. In fact, they are more like what one sees on the stage, and in point of richness of material and beauty of color what belonged to the time of the cavaliers. At a country house in Yorkshire, the other day, one man came down in a richly stamped poplin, quilted with satin throughout; another in a suit of a new terra-cotta tint, with quilted black satin collar and cuffs; another, in scarlet plush, with black points; another, in Prussian blue, with orange facings; while another combined the Household Brigade colors of dark blue and red. It is said this style will shortly supersede the present funereal arrangement, and the blue and white and swallow-tail will be relegated to the waiters.

The Argonaut 20 January 1883: p. 2

1870s smoking suit https://collections.lacma.org/node/221447

Why, at Harborow’s they told me that they had just made for a gentleman who liked colour a smoking-suit of crimson plush, lined with yellow satin. Not many go to that length, however. Smoking-jackets are made of plush and silk in the same pattern they were fifteen years ago. Only the materials and the trimmings differ. Silk, plush, or a light cloth, lined with quilted satin, and with quilted satin cuffs and collars, are the best-known materials. The silk jackets cost about £10. Each.

Birmingham [West Midlands England] Daily Post, 25 October 1889: p. 8

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire: Smoking suits, jackets, and caps were designed to keep the smell of tobacco, said to be offensive, particularly to the ladies, off the gentleman’s person. No doubt there were some households where smoking was forbidden and visiting smokers had to lie on their backs and smoke up the chimney, but it is also a fact that many ladies also enjoyed cigarettes in the privacy of their own boudoirs.

The code of the smoking suit was, according to this story, quite severely enforced by one’s peers. One suspects that the tale originated with the makers of such garments.

A Practical Joke.

London Letter to the San Francisco Argonaut. It is the custom at English country houses for the gentlemen who smoke to go to the smoking-room after the ladies have retired, and there, with the accompaniments of spirits and soda water, to smoke and chat as long as they like. On these occasions “smoking suits” are worn. Nearly every man who goes out much has his smoking suit, and some worn by heavy swells are very elaborate and costly. I have heard of one that cost its owner the modest sum of £40. It appears that a certain gentleman was making his first visit to Sandringham, and made his first appearance in the smoking-room in his evening clothes. He was hailed with shouts of derision by all the others, and informed that he must go and put on his smoking suit.

“But I don’t happen to have one,” he quietly replied.

“Not got a smoking suit? What rubbish!” exclaimed a little chap in the Blues; “the idea of a man not having a smoking suit. What shall we have next?”

“Haven’t all the same,” said the other, as he proceeded to fill a pipe and light it.

The others looked from one to the other, as much as to say: Shall we put him out?

“I’ll tell you what, ” said one, “we’ll let him off to-night, but if he comes down to-morrow night in these things, we’ll tear his coat off his back. Hear that old man?”

The man in the plain swallow-tail nodded and smoked on.

The next night he didn’t make his appearance, nor the next, and everybody thought, of course, he had sent up to town to his tailor for a smoking suit.

On the third night, after all the rest of the usual habitues of the tabagie had assembled in their accustomed chairs, in he walked. But deuce the bit of smoking suit had he on. He wore evening clothes as before.

With a shout like so many jackals, the others jumped from their seats, and in a jiffy his coat was split up the back from waist to collar, and dragged off. He stood it quietly without a word until the others sat down. Then, with the ruined coat clutched in his hand, he asked: “Are you quite done, gentlemen?”

There was a chorus of “quite,” embellished with loud and prolonged laughter.

“Because, if you are,” he went on, “I should like to say to you”–and he threw the coat into the lap of the man who had suggested the treatment he had received–“that this is your coat. I went into your room after you had changed your clothes to-night, and put it on. Mine is packed up in my portmanteau, upstairs, and the key is in my servant’s pocket. I dare say you may want a dress coat for dinner to-morrow; I shan’t. I’m going away in the morning; so I’ll advise you to telegraph to your tailor to send you down a ready-made  ‘stop-gap’ till he can make you another. Good-night, I’m on to bed.”

Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester NY] 14 December 1884: p. 8

 

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdote

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.

The Menace of Tight Trousers: 1884

Fifth Avenue from the “World’s Dude” series of cigarette cards, 1888

Tight Trousers.

“Here, conductor, this man’s fainted.” The words were uttered in a tone of excitement by a stout woman about 40 years of age recently in a Columbia-avenue car, and as she spoke a slim youth who was seated beside her in the corner of the car fell forward and dropped in a heap upon the straw.

With the assistance of a gentleman, the conductor lifted the senseless youth on to the seat, and two minutes later, as the car passed a drug store, pulled the bell-strap, and. followed by half a dozen interested passengers, five of whom were women, carried him into the store, where he was placed on a lounge in the back room.

A doctor was hurriedly summoned, and after a disappearance of about ten minutes the young man and physician came out of the room, which had been kept closed, arm-in-arm. The young man’s face was still pale, and he walked with a very perceptible tremor.

After a few moments’ rest the young man got on another car and went away, and the doctor said: “This is the fourth case this month I have seen of the deadly effect of wearing tight trousers, and had not that young man been attended to promptly he might have been in great danger.” “Tight trousers?” queried a bystander, incredulously.

‘”Yes, sir; tight trousers! Why, you cannot imagine how often we doctors have to treat cases of illness brought on by no other cause. Take that young man, for instance; his trousers were at least four sizes too small for him; not too short, of course, but too tight, and for hours and hours he had been walking about with a pressure of at least 275 pounds to the square inch on his olexii vivisectori arteries, which are situated in the calves of the human leg. This tremendous pressure forces the blood into channels not able to carry it without undue straining, and although the victim feels no pain he is liable at any moment to topple over in a swoon, and unless relief is promptly given a long and serious illness is likely to follow. It is a similar trouble to that experienced when it was the fashion for ladies to wear very tight sleeves, except that in the case of tight trousers the material is heavier, the arteries are larger, and the result apt to be more dangerous and difficult to relieve.”

The Record-Union [Sacramento CA] 5 July 1884: p. 1

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire: It is rather refreshing to see the gentlemen censured for fashionable excesses normally confined to the ladies. Tight-lacing cannot be objectionable if the gentlemen choose to wear tight trousers.

Variations of the tight-trouser craze have come and gone: the well-turned leg revealed in the costume of the Renaissance courtier, the 18th-century macaroni’s breeches, and the “inexpressibles” of the Beau Brummel era, are some early examples. Another revival came in 1913, when this journalist called for resistance against the fashionable trend:

TIGHT TROUSERS? NEVER!

The other day in that windy hot-air city of Chicago a congress of men’s tailors got together and decided that us men must wear tight trousers. Then they adjourned as if the matters were all settled.

Gentlemen, husbands, brothers, sons. shall we meekly submit to this indignity? Are we gonna stand humbly to one side and let our tailor measure us for a pair of glove-fitting pants? No!–1000 (plus) times no! We have become so accustomed to the negligee and commodious trousers of commerce, in which there is room enough to locomote along the street without danger to the fabric thereof, that we do not propose to jump obediently into tight pants at a crack of the whip from a few tailors.

Besides it is a well-known fact which every bow legged man knows and no bow-legged man will admit that the average man is bow-legged. Fancy a man afflicted with bowlegs in a pair of tight fitting trousers. Imagine a man with either extremities like a brace of parentheses dolled up in tight trousers. He’d be a sight, wouldn’t he?

Not only that, but the wearing of tight trousers involves risk in polite society–risk to the trousers and risk to the wearer’s reputation. For instance, if we were to appear in a crowded drawing room wearing a set of skin-fitting trousers, we would remain standing no matter how many empty chairs there might be in the room. This would cause surprise on the part of the hostess. She would say:

“Do sit down, Mr. Newkirk.”

“Thank you awfully,” I would retort, “but I much prefer to stand.”

“How very eccentric!” she would effervesce. “Tell us Mr. Newkirk. why you prefer standing to sitting, do! I know the answer will delight my guests. Come give us the reason. ‘

And there you are! I couldn’t tell the lady that the reason for my obstinacy in standing was due to the fact that if I attempted to sit down these trousers would give way some where or other under their burden of responsibility. I couldn’t tell her that could I? Certainly not! So I would blush like a broiled live lobster, ooze cold heads of anguish, shift from one foot to the other, wring the ends of my coat tails, and at last, I would more than likely dash from the room with an hysterical streak of agony.

If I were wearing a pair of tight trousers on the street and I should pass a dry goods store just as the clerk tore off three yards of denim, I could not continue on my way with any comfort or piece of mind until I had retired to a private doorway and minutely examined those trousers. If a lady dropped her handkerchief, I could not with propriety stoop to pick it up for her. If I did something would bust and I’d prefer the lady to think I had no manners than to have those trousers go back on me in public. Confound a pair of trousers that a man must use a shoe horn to get into!

New Castle [PA] Herald 3 December 1913: p. 4

The inability to sit down in such garments was

A Standing Joke.

Tight trousers are out of fashion, and now it will be necessary to put on more street cars. There won’t be so many young man anxious to stand.

Morris County Enterprise [Parkerville KS] 10 May 1883: p. 4

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdote

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.

The Velvet Coat: 1883

The Velvet Period

A Notable Season in the life of Every Young Man.

A couple of old fellows were standing in front of the Plankington House, smoking five cent cigars, one evening, when a young fellow passed along with a velvet coat on, and before he had got out of sight, an old fellow about sixty years old passed the same place, and he had on a velvet coat. One of the two old fellows knocked the ashes off his cigar, and said: “It catches them all, sooner or later.’ ‘

“What do you mean?” asked the other, as he borrowed his friend’s cigar to light his own.

“Why, the velvet coat period,” said the first man, as he took his cigar back, and puffed on it to keep it going. “Every man, some time in his life, either as boy or man, sees a time when he thinks the world will cease to revolve on its axis if he does not have a velvet coat, and he is bound to have one if he has to steal the money to buy it. It is bad enough for a boy to have the period come on, but it is infinitely worse to escape it in youth and have it attack a man in middle life, but it always hits them, some time. Now, you wouldn’t think, to look at me that I ever had the velvet coat fever, but I had it once in its most violent form.

“About twenty years ago, at the time of the oil excitement, I made a little money in oil, and I got to thinking how I could show how I was no ordinary son of man, and all at once it struck me that a velvet coat could do it for me, and 1 had a surveyor measure me, and had a velvet coat made. I was anxious to have it done so I could put it on and go around among the boys, but when it was done and had been brought home, I all at once lost my grip, and could hardly get up courage to put it on. I let it lay for a week, until my people got to making fun of me about being afraid to wear it, and finally I put it on and wore it down town after dark. Only a few people saw it, and I went home feeling satisfied that the worst was over. What I wanted was to have the community get accustomed to it gradually.  After a while I wore it to my office on days that I was to be busy, so I knew I wouldn’t have to go around town. After the boys in the office got so they could witness my coat without going behind a partition to laugh at me, I concluded to wear it on the street.

“Well, there was an organ grinder with a monkey, out on the sidewalk, when I went out, and the beastly Italian had on an old velvet coat, like mine, only soiled. The monkey was jumping around, picking up pennies, and all at once he saw me. I shall never forget the expression on that monkey’s face. He seemed to take me for his master, and clearly realized that his master had procured a new coat without asking the consent of his little brother. There was a look of pain, as though the monkey felt hurt that such duplicity had been practiced on him, and then the monkey would look at the clothes in which he was dressed up with contempt, and then he would look at my coat with envy. I never felt so sorry for a monkey in all my life. I could stand it to hear strangers say, as I passed by, ‘What fool is that?’ but to see that poor monkey grieve over the style I was putting on was too much, and I resolved if I ever got that coat home I would put it where it could never be seen again. The organ-grinder became alarmed at the actions of the monkey, and jerked on the chain, causing the monkey to tum a back summersault, and the poor animal came up standing in front of his master. He looked at him, and seemed to be at once reassured, and to feel that the apparition was only a horrid dream, and then he looked over his shoulder toward where I had stood, to make sure, and there I was in all my glory. Then the monkey was mad and began to make up faces at me, and I got out of there and went home, with shouts of the monkey’s audience sounding in my ears, and I took off that coat and gave it to the man that took care of my horse, and I never see a velvet coat, either on a boy or man, but I think of what a confounded fool I made of myself in my Oscar Wilde days. If you have a boy, teach him to go through the velvet coat period young, and he will thank his stars.’–Peck’s Sun.

The True Southron [Sumter, SC] 6 November 1883: p. 1

Mrs Daffodil’s Aide-memoire: “Oscar Wilde days,” indeed. Mrs Daffodil has known two gentlemen who went through a velvet coat period: one was an elegant professor of French, whose students all sighed for him; the other was a fair young man with the pale tresses and long nose of a borzoi. The garments are undoubtedly becoming to their owners, and young ladies seem desirous of petting them, but too often a velvet coat brands a young man as “artistic,” with all the opprobrium so frequently directed at that species by doting Papas. Still, many gentlemen remember their velvet coats fondly. Mrs Daffodil appends a poem of nostalgia for such a garment:

My Old Coat

Mortimer Collins

This old velvet coat has grown queer, I admit,
And changed is the colour and loose is the fit;
Though to beauty it certainly cannot aspire,
’Tis a cosy old coat for a seat by the fire.

II.

When I first put it on, it was awfully swell,
I went to a pic-nic, met Lucy Lepel;
Made a hole in the heart of that sweet little girl,
And disjointed the nose of her lover, the earl.

III.

We rambled away o’er moorland together,
My coat was bright purple, and so was the heather;
And so was the sunset that blazed in the west,
As Lucy’s fair tresses were laid on my breast.

IV.

We plighted our troth ’neath that sunset aflame,
But Lucy returned to her earl all the same;
She’s a grandmamma now and is going downhill,
But my old velvet coat is a friend to me still.

V.

It was built by -a tailor of mighty renown,
Whose art is no longer the talk of the town;
A magical picture my memory weaves
When I thrust my tired arms through its easy old sleeves.

VI.

I see in the fire, through the smoke of my pipe,
Sweet maidens of old that are long over ripe;
And a troop of old cronies, right gay cavaliers,
Whose guineas paid well for champagne at Watier’s.

VII.

A strong generation, who drank, fought, and kissed,
Whose hands never trembled, whose shots never missed;
Who lived a quick life, for their pulses beat high,
We remember them well, sir, my old coat and I.

VIII.

Ah, gone is the age of wild doings at Court,
Rotten boroughs, knee-breeches, hair-triggers, and port;
Still I’ve got a magnum to moisten my throat,
And I’ll drink to the past in my old tattered coat.

Modern Merry Men: Authors in the Lighter Vein in the Victorian Era, William Andrews 1904

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdotes

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.