The Wadsworth dispatch. [volume] (Wadsworth, Nev.) 1892-1899, 1894-05-26
NOT SUITABLE FOR THIS ERA.
Colored Dress Coats Necess;tate Knee
Brooches and silk Stockings.

Colored Dress Coats Necess;tate Knee
Brooches and silk Stockings.
An Englishman declares in Vogue that
there is one reason why the colored dress
coat will never be definitely accepted as
the correct thing. 1t Is solely that a
colored dress coat necessarily entails black
knee brooches and black silk stockings in
lieu of ordinary trousers. Otherwise the
wearers would present h appearance of
footmcn in semilivery. Colored coats can
only be worn with white waistcoats and
knee brooches, and the latter are out of the
question in this democratic era. Brooches
are all very well for men who merely &C to
one dinner or one LII In an evening and
nowhere else. Few, however, restrict them
selves to that nowadays during the crowd
ed season, and q dinner in one house, fol
lowed by a look In at the opera and an APP
pcarance ut two or three dances and posi-
bly, a concert TIRE nothing exceptional.
This involves walking or else the use OF
public -conyeyances, only a small minority
of men being able to indulge in the luxury
of a night broueham, ard they do not care
to keep their horses standing half the night
exposed to all kinds of bad weather. Now,
you cannot walk the streets in knee
breeches and pumps, whereas you can do
SO in trousers. The consequence is that
until we all can afford to keep night
broughams or sedan chairs we will abstain
from wearing knee brooches, and as long
as we abstain from knee brooches we shall
be forced to dispense with the colored dress
coat.
Even royalty has been forced to give way
in the matter of knee brooches. Until tho
early seventies silk stockings and pumps
were de rigueur at all the parties and din
ners given by members of the British royal
family as well as the Tuilerics, and a
great sensation was created when in 1878
tho Prince of Wales give u dinner party,
followed by q reception, at which tho men
were permitted to wear trousers. The in
novation was regarded rs characteristic of
the l~eveling tendency of the age, and when,
later on, the queen even followed suit and
permitted men to attend her dinner par
ties at Windsor in trousers 1t was felt by
tho classes that England was on the eve of
a social cat,clysm. Not altogether an I'M
natural notion when 1t Is borne In mind
that 1t was the great French revolution of
100 years G which i~naugurated tho de-
mocracy of the present century and taught
tho world that all men are equal and at
the same timo introduced the fashion of
wearing trousers. Knee brooches n silk
stockings must BIO regarded to this day, as
they were then, a. defining the gulf which
separates the classes from the masses N
as implying the domination of the silk
stocking aristocracy-or plutocracy-over
tho formerly wooden stockinged and now
trousered bourgeois. 1t Is probably on this
account that Emperor William, who pro
fcsscs more regard for blue blood and an.
Client lineage h any sovereign OF modern
times has ycntured to display, recently
gave orders that all civilians attending en-.
tertainments at tho court of Berlin OF
Potsdam should don knee brooches and
black silk stockings in lieu Of trousers