'over-tailored'
Only two rules. Dress like they do. Dress simply.
The English are conformists. If you play golf in jodhpurs, if you turn up for a regimental dinner in shorts, you will shock and sadden them. But you’ll shock them even more if you have the bad taste to be overdressed.
None of your clothes should be over-tailored, nor your shoes over-new. Miss Jane Harrison, in her Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, described the pleasure that she felt watching the Duke of Devonshire, at Cambridge, receive an honorary doctorate with his socks showing through the holes in his shoes.
‘Right down to the holes in his shoes,’ she says, ‘I recognized that he was truly a Duke.’
Don’t think that in London you must dress as the English do when abroad. In London, an Englishman ceases to be abroad. Imitate him. Dress as if in Paris.
Mikes again… he reckoned that the British were such good and considerate drivers because of the shockin’ state of their underwear, which they would be extremely loth to have revealed by the medicos after a motor accident.
Which, if so, means that the Brits have started taking more care of their undies in latter years.
Mikes’s bestselling How to Be an Alien was published in 1946. Eight years after Maurois.
It had the advantage of being in English, and therefore accessible to the notoriously monoglot English reading public. Mikes just elaborated a little on what Maurois had already written. You read it here first. Actually, you didn’t. You read it in Mikes first – such is the injustice of the literary life.
Having Nicholas Bentley draw the pictures was a bit of an asset too. However, I am very much liking the Maurois, thank you very nice, and shall make no further reference to the upstarted Hungarian.