“A vest! A vest! My kingdom for a vest!” is something nobody ever said. Apart from being ludicrous, the utterance fails to stir the blood as the subject, ever close to our hearts when worn, touches us not.
Had Mr D’Arcy dived into his duck pond wearing a vest and emerged at the other side with his little string holes clogged up with weed and the odd tadpole, Miss Bennett would have regarded him as an object of pity and they would never have gone on to glorious union producing dozens of snotty brats to slide down his bannisters and fall into the Ha Ha. What he sensibly dived in in was a shirt, a soft, floppy, clingy, diaphanous-when-wet article with self knotting strings to be tugged at and finally ripped asunder from his wet manly frame, glowing with the panting heat of his rippling muscles, shining like a bagful of glossy chestnuts in the late afternoon sun.
You don’t get that with a vest.
Let us be clear at this point that by vest we do not mean to indicate an outer sleeveless garment more properly designated a waistcoat. We do mean the under wear item. The singlet, the singleton, the sad, lonely string or cheap cotton item. String itself is sad, though not incapable of being zhuzzed up a bit, for example StringFellows could be the name of a successful nightclub; call it StringVest Fellows and you couldn’t even run it as a coffee bar. Roadside drinks concession maybe. But only in a layby somewhere industrial. With a pile of grit and some left-over tarmac.
A vest lacks glamour. Although close to the chest it has none of the excitement of a corset. A corset is a pretty thrilling garment. It has lacings, hooks, fastenings. It has shaping, bones, rubber strips, a whiff of bondage. A kiss of perfume. A hint of powder power. It has satin. Satin chases the light slipping round a curve, illuminating a bulging body part by reflection, from below. A corset may gush a froth of lace. Ribbons. Long thin satin ribbons, slipping helplessly through your fingers, yielding, sliding. Red. A corset can cinch like a fist round a roly-poly pudding with endless rows of eyelets, hard metal holes invaded by long satin ribbons. Black shiny long satin ribbons, laced intricately and pulled tight, tight against the heaving chest barely contained in the interwoven, stretched, restraining, silk sateen with the intricate pattern of sibilant susurrating arabesques and flowing curving glisandes that encase the soft, warm, pliant, abundantly giving torso.
Is it just me, or is it getting hot in here?
You don’t get that with a vest.
Another thing about vests is that, sad as they are sleeveless, they’re even more pitiable with sleeves and, sadly, the longer the sleeves, the sadder the wearer. Even when it’s twenty below, the sight of the cuff of a nice woolly vest peeking out of the end of a shirt like a rat out of a bin bag, does not speak of a hero of any sort. I bet he’s wearing grey woolly underpants too. With the vest tucked in. Tucked in, smoothed round and possibly, even, shuddering out of the leg holes a tad.
You don’t get a Mr D’Arcy with that.
The vest things in life are free but you can keep them……… No they’re not, a free vest would be more pathetic than a bought vest. It would be the indication that you had reached the gutter and were sliding down it on your nose in the direction of the drain grating. Free vests would be such bad news, if you were ever gifted a vest it would be time to stop and reconsider your life so far. What have you been doing with your time?? A free vest! Have you no shame? (Probably not, you have no vest. Where did it go? Did you sell it for soup? Did you make soup out of it? And there we have it. A thing worse than a vest. Vest soup.)
One of the many sadnesses about a vest is the singularity of it. There is little about a vest that indicates sociability. Socks as we have seen,(see The Joy of Socks, below) hang around in pairs, with an innate cheerfulness and an inbuilt suggestion of dancing. Plus a sense of devil-may-care in their tendency to slope off alone and have adventures. Vests don’t get lost. They go grey and hang around forever. They are essentially solitary. They don’t have to go with anything and seldom make the effort. They are, in the main, white for about three washes, after which greyness sets in. First round the under arm hole. Just a tinge of off white. Then a definite greyness. Subsequently a sepia greyness shading to seeping orange, then brown, grey and a slight pink tinge. In rings spreading downwards like a contour map of somewhere not very interesting. Long before this stage, it is a garment unfit for public viewing. It’s the sartorial equivalent of greasy hair. Unregrettably, no one cares. Nobody’s mother ever warned them to go out in a clean vest in case they got run over. Clean socks, yes. Clean underpants definitely. A clean hanky to sniff into as they ladle you onto the ambulance, yes please. But a clean vest? Who gives it a thought?
Consider as well the other circumstances in which the vest is ignored, left out, off the list. Did anyone’s bridal trousseau include: vests, white, half a dozen? Stop any bride anywhere in the course of chucking the bouquet to ask what she is thinking and I bet you not one in a million will sigh and say dreamily ‘Vests!’
What happens to old vests? Part of me longs to spin you a yarn about vests by the seaside, lying on the edge of the breakwater, dangling their hems in the sea. I ache to tell you of the midnight vest spotted climbing the tower with a knife grasped in its armhole and righteousness in its heart. I pine to relate the tale of the group of breakaway rebel vests in the echoing metal corridor shoulder to shoulder as the guards bear down on them with staccato guns and very small hats. I strain to spin you the saga of the lone vest piloting the embattled space ship pluckily against a sky pitted with alien laser fighters. But we both know it would be fiction. A lie. Something not very true and a bit shabby round the edges and grubby elsewhere. Vest like.
There is only one instance of the glory of the vest and that was Freddie Mercury, who took the garment and made it his own. His vests were so white it hurt to look at them. There is no proof but the whiteness of his vests almost certainly helped the singing. He was, alas, a flash in the pan of vest-wearing as a popular sport, hobby or smart career move. In fact if you aren’t Freddie Mercury vests are anything but a career enhancer, for example never appear at an interview for the position of bank manager clad mainly in a vest. Do not swan up to Buckingham Palace for a garden party wearing mostly a vest. Don’t go to a religious ceremony solely in a vest, no matter how strong your belief that your Maker sees all.
The curious thing is that vests are pretty much a universal human garment throughout history for both sexes. You can see ancient Egyptian maidens in them on tomb walls, and warriors and the odd captured Hittite. Farm workers toil in them in the margins of mediaeval books. Chinese tapestries detail courtiers donning them. Indian artefacts depict characters wearing them. Mayan carvings show vest-wearing mythical creatures. Tarzan had one. I bet it needed washing.
Yet all these are practical narrative requirements. The vests are less than heroic. They are just there. In a few cinematic instances the hero is envested but only on purpose so that he can be seen later in a vest gone raggy to show how hard he’s trying. Yes, a vest is a cheap wardrobe item to trash for effect. You can almost hear the budget conference ‘So we’ll spend ten thousand on the sets to blow up, fifty thousand on the car with the technical gadgets, sixty thousand on location shooting and twenty on hiring the girls.’ ‘What about the wardrobe of the hero? He has to have eighteen changes throughout the action. What can we dress him in that will fit if he puts on weight, will fit if he loses weight, and won’t be expensive to trash in the explosion scene?’ ‘Uum. A vest?’
In addition to being lonely, grey and depressing a vest is now defined as being cheap. Let’s face it, this garment is the armpit of fashion. Somewhere there probably exists a religion in which the good guy invented underpants and for lo! Ebor came among them bearing the bifurcated garment of righteousness that did cover their shame and soak up the dribbles a treat but wicked black Owlite did take the bifurcated garment and substituted for it a vest. And the people lost their knickers and wandered round in their vests and the kingdom went to the dogs and was overtaken by a foreign power and they were cast out. In vests.
It is the garment of one. It is the garment of lonely. It is the garment of not going out on a Saturday night but staying in scrubbing the porridge off the old pan till it’s shiny apart from the rust. It is the garment of choice when knitting curtains from unravelled brown and beige beanie hats. It is waiting around on a Friday for the phone to ring accompanied by a cut-price packet of broken biscuits. It is the ideal apparel for sitting in a rented flat on a mended deckchair listening to the bloke upstairs practise the tambourine. Badly. And thus it has ever been.
Hence the term vestal virgins. The fact that they all had faces like gibbon’s bottoms is mere coincidence.
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JaneLaverick.com – interested in clothing.