Inside the trunk lay a bloomer costume with documents indicating that it had been owned by Meriva Carpenter, a resident of Homer, New York City. In 1994, the Cortland County Historical Society received a phone call from the Homer National Bank about a trunk that had been stored there for an unknown interval. Main concern of the MDRP was that men’s clothes were plenty of events.
a series of rallies were organised during which prizes were to be awarded for the most imaginative reform attire worn by a man, Employers were urged to allow their workers to wear reform dress for the day.
Indeed the summer rallies of the MDRP became regular events throughout the 1930s and the event of 1931, staged at the Suffolk Street Galleries, was attended by about a thousand people, including Wells. Men’s Dress Reform Day, that was to be free of processions and ceremonies but was to be ‘merely the wearing of hygienic dress in wn the entire day by all who will’. Now this article is reproduced from an original post on the Cost of Living Blog, as part of our ‘inter network’ collaboration. By the way, the movement generated considerable press interest and its activities were covered in The Times, The Evening Standard, The Daily Sketch and The Morning Post. You should take it into account. With sandals, two women were in creamcoloured trousers, and a man wore a garment which was a cross between a skirt and a kilt’. First rally of the MDRP attracted around 150 people quite a few whom ‘wore short trousers, tennis shirts, woollen stockings, and ordinary lounge jackets.
As one correspondent said ‘the desire of men for beauty is just as strong as the desire for comfort, correspondence on The Times letters page questioned if the aims of the party went far enough if this artistic desire be ignored, the new party could be sacrificing half of its possible supporters’.
Activities of the MDRP continued throughout the 1930s but the Party became subject to an increasing degree of popular ridicule.
The final events of the MDRP was the Coronation Dress Reform Competition staged at Alexandra Palace in 1937 and covered not only in the press but also on radio and the newly established BBC television service. Despite the novelty of being televised, BBC publications lampooned the men attending the event. Whether man’s lower limbs look their best encased in slightly flattened parallel tubes can be open to doubt, at least there seems no great aesthetic advantage in cutting the tubes short at the knee… provided viewers with an entertaining ten minutes and lots of laughter.
It may seem bizarre that the institution of marriage, and middle class breeding, was seen to be threatened by men’s lack of sartorial elegance and beauty. In retrospect perhaps these fears were no less demented than the arguments currently put forward by those who seek to oppose equal marriage rights for gay couples. Did you know that the MDRP emerged out of the Sunlight League and New Health Society and was founded by Alfred Jordan, an internationally renowned radiologist. While something that in this period was sufficiently unusual to generate press interest, jordan was principally known for wearing shorts in his professional life.
I am sure that the formation of the MDRP was announced, gether with publication of their manifesto, in the journal of the Sunlight League and the Times.
Included, the actual demands of the new party were somewhat diffuse.
It was stressed that the MDRP was open to all classes of men, from the ‘working chap to the peer’s son’ and that it was not a ‘crank or a faddist’ organisation. Others for brighter colours; Basically the villain of the piece is the ‘collar stud’, Some plead for less heavy materials and less padding. Man is clutching at his throat and crying, A wail has gone up throughout the land.
Few for the kilt; nearly all hate trousers, Most members wish for shorts.
Much was written on the social hygiene movement but one often overlooked offshoot was the Men’s Dress Reform Party established in 1929 -a lobbying group formed by prominent eugenicists who wanted to change male fashion in case you are going to make men more ‘beautiful’.
These ideas were underpinned with fears that the middle classes were in decline while ‘degenerates’ were on the ascendant. One group that sought to steer a brand new direction in public health was the social hygiene movement -a fusion of evolutionary, eugenic and sociological theories that sought to draw a connection between poverty, ill health and inadequate breeding. Changing ideas about medicine and public health were never more in flux than the two decades before the Second World War. Now look, the mass produced clothing trade was now able to offer new garments created out of lighter washable fabrics and these were promoted with adverts that blended quasiscientific jargon with the language of fashion, aesthetics and athleticism. After this the dress reform movement became increasingly irrelevant.
Some have argued that the MDRP failed to appreciate what was already happening to men’s fashions in the 1930s.
The clothes used techniques that were more often found in women’s clothes and associated with feminine styles of dressmaking.
Did you know that the ‘liberationist’ reform language used by the MDRP appeared bizarre in comparison. There were quite a few reasons for this. Generally, with their ‘homemade’ clothing designs, in addition the MDRP, seemed amateurish and eccentric. Actually the eccentric artist, Richard Sickert who had already established a reputation for dressing incongruously, often appearing at formal occasions wearing slippers and ‘loud’ checked suits; I am sure that the actor Ernest Thesiger; headmaster of University College School, Guy Kendal; and Caleb Saleeby the founder of the Sunlight League, Dean of St Paul’s, WR Inge, a ‘well known’ eugenicist who had written on the decline of the ‘white race’.