Advice to Men:
Button Up.
Recently, I bought a pair of lightweight trousers from the clothes’ section of a large supermarket for a paltry ten pounds. They were very likely made in China or Pakistan and I wondered how they could be sold so cheaply. Possibly, the store took 33%, the manufacturer ditto, the transporters the same, leaving the workers who made the garment with what was left, probably about tuppence.
If at first I felt a measure of guilt at being part of the exploiting process it soon evaporated once I tried them on and decided I’d made a bargain. The previous lightweight pair I’d bought cost nearly four times as much and looked only half as good. What delighted me most was that the flies were fastened by buttons, not a zip. Indeed, there were four stout buttons that secured the opening very nicely and in addition some pretty twine that could be tied to a neat bow at the top, a belt optional.
I go back a long way, to a time when buttons along the flies were the normal, no danger then of boys being rushed off to the local hospital’s A & E department because of tender flesh becoming enmeshed in zipper jaws. It may be nostalgia for a lost childhood that makes me appreciate how a slow fastening or unfastening at the openings is preferable to the quick zip up and down. In my lifetime, things have speeded up incredibly and everyone now rushes around at breakneck speed. For example, I had a friend, Reggie, whose dad owned a horse and cart and delivered to local shops. On an average day, the vehicle covered fifteen miles and unloaded goods weighing little more than two or three hundred weight at most. Compare that with the monsters that thunder along our roads day and night and do hundreds of miles. Everyone’s in a hurry. One minute you’re twenty and the next, zip, you’re sixty-five.
Novels once depicted seduction scenes tenderly as couples quietly unbuttoned. Now lovemaking is a quick zip, often described and enacted brutally. That’s sex, and it’s over. Zip, find someone else. Zip, that’s over, too. Zip, you’re dead.
The zipper was invented in the U.S.A. in the nineteenth century but could not be used on clothes until a tab at the top enabled it to be fastened firmly. The device made its universal debut post-1945 and after the first atom bomb had been dropped. Europeans soon incorporated it into their own tongue, called a zip fastener in the U.K., a Reissverschluss in German, a cerniera-lungo in Italian and a fermeture-éclair in French but, interestingly, the Arab world took longer to catch on, their word rarer and difficult for some of us to pronounce.
Essentially part of the nuclear age, the zipper closes down rather than opens up a new period of history. A masculine symbol, the man stands legs apart, thumbs inside his belt, the silver zip on his jeans there for all to see, no evidence of buttons and braces. A sign of power, it matters not who is wearing the trousers. Men and women are equal, provided the female imitates the male and everyone flies the flag of feminism. Soon, we will all have shaven heads, tattooed bodies and zips in our noses.
Since we have discovered to zip up our clothes we have also learned to do the same to the human body. Zip, open the chest and put in a new heart. Zip, rip out your bowels and replace them with plastic tubes. Zip, crack open the head and insert a new brain. Zip, get cloned and live forever.
The buttons of a more leisurely past began to come loose as the skills of using needle and thread declined. Once people become accustomed to rely more on machinery than on the use of their hands, they easily turn into victims of the manipulators. Western leaders in the twentieth century confronted the public with flies undone, everything exposed. Unable to stitch things together in peace they tore people apart in wars. Then came the devastation of victory followed by a standoff where it was more important to look rather than be tough. Zip, you wanna fight me, comrade? Zip, my bombs are bigger than yours. Zip, get your tanks off my lawn, or else. When the Soviets’ trousers fell down they decided they, too, had to have zip fasteners, with a little help from the financial markets. Soon, everyone started to look good and prosperous, with zips on pockets, zips on pullovers, zips on frocks. We were urged to pull up our socks, with zips, of course. Tragically, not everyone wanted to.
In the world of Islam, they don’t go in for zip fasteners. The Qur’an insists on modesty in dress. You must not show off or accentuate your physical shape, hence no zips. Instead, the men wear long flowing robes called thobes and sometimes baggy pants, held up by belts, perhaps. These were the garments worn in Arab countries, a style of dress than went back hundreds of years and has persisted through to modern times, apart from a significant number of poor folk who left their homes and migrated westerly, to more prosperous lands. Some, mainly the men, particularly young men, began to dress like the indigenous inhabitants, but they did not forget the lands of their forefathers and the peoples left behind.
Really, they didn’t much like western dress, especially that of women, and although they wore zips like everyone else, slowly their minds zipped up as well. Everyone in such apparel, including themselves, should be destroyed, they decided. Zip, the bombs went off, killing men, women, children, Muslims, Christians, atheists and those of no address, or redress. An ancient culture in turmoil confronting a flourishing but newer, albeit decadent one, sees suicide as the only solution. It used not to be like this.
It’s become a sad fact in the West that only the old remember the past. It wasn’t better then, of course, and even if it was you can’t go back. In that we have no choice but in other respects we do. Somehow, the idea has become prevalent that for our ancestors life was short, nasty and mainly brutish. We would do better, however, to feel the cloth not measure the length if we wish to know how people coped in the past. The idea that everyone was oppressed, miserable and exploited is a particularly distorted version that derives largely from those in the present who feel unhappy with their current lot and possibly want modernity to hand them out on a plate an easy life.
If we express the way we feel about ourselves and others in the style of attire we wear, perhaps we should begin to wrap ourselves round with clothes that suppose delicacy, tenderness, privacy and intimacy are the norms and not cut loose in order to let everything hang out. The zip, like convenience food, lacks proper taste; it opens and shuts with an awful finality, quite exclusive of anything subtle.
Was not always thus. Indeed, where now the ubiquitous zip rules supreme there was once far greater variety. The lederhosen of the Bavarian hunting fraternity, for example, their knickerbockers were made of stout leather kept up by buttons, made of rough-hewn Elkhorn, leather braces ditto, what they call suspenders in the USA. Or consider the kilt which folds around the legs in swathes of pleated cloth, not even a button required, just a belt or buckle round the waist. As for buttons themselves, they come in all shapes and design, the Pearly King’s costume a good example, and can be made of many kinds of exquisite material. A row of pretty buttons or bows on a lady’s dress can look much more alluring than broad stretches of exposed flesh. Once upon a time soldiers would array their tunics with a display of the most gloriously shaped and coloured buttons as a sign of their manliness and charm. Possibly the Victorians gave buttons a bad name; their tight-fitting jackets from waist to neck are now seen as a sign that they were too buttoned-up, a state diagnosed as being without spontaneity and dash.
The Victorians were not all that bad but have suffered a rather bad press. For example, we forget they favoured good manners. This meant people were polite to one another and courteous in relationships. It is said they were hypocrites, not practising what they preached, or rather hiding from sight many of their darker practices. Not like us who go zip and seal ourselves off so completely we can’t even pass the time of day with each other. Zip, lonely inside our cars we race around the country, encased within little boxes. Same at home, becoming more like Plato’s cave, as we stare constantly at flickering pictures on the walls. Zip, you are free to do and be what you like and I am free to hate you for it. Who lives next door? No idea and don’t want to know. What do we think of each other? Zip, “All politicians are out to feather their own nests.” Zip, life is unfair because we are oppressed, abused, discriminated against, cheated and not told the truth. Zip, we all want to be famous and rich and then enjoy a state of schadenfreude when those who enduring this unhappy state become exposed as cheats and liars.
Can we, then, really put down all the ills of society to the zip fastener? Absolutely. No matter if, like me, you have arthritic fingers and find it time-consuming to button up at the start of day. Carefully push the button on the shirt or trousers into its buttonhole, knowing that fresh air circulates between the gaps, and you are fit to face the world. Say “Good Morning,” to your neighbour when you meet him along the street, even if he is wearing cufflinks. With a button on your cap, raise the headgear to his lady wife as she smiles upon you. Make sure that three buttons are required to fasten your jacket but leave the top one undone. Above all, insist that your tailor places buttons along the flies and keep them well secure, except in an emergency. By all means, use a belt or braces and when you see a pretty button adorning a lady’s blouse always compliment her. As for zippers, leave them to be used to fasten the lips of those who say and do ugly things.
