Clothes Breaketh The Man

Michael Leunig – September 2006

I was putting on my new trousers last week when I noticed that the manufacturer’s large and colourful tag was still dangling from a belt loop. I froze as it dawned on me that I had worn these same trousers the previous week on a busy visit to the city. Stooped and motionless in the bedroom, trousers suspended in my hands, I tried to retrace in my memory the steps of this recent journey. It’s amazing what you can remember when you put your mind to it – particularly while retracing your steps when the car keys have been lost, for instance – but when it’s about a loss of dignity, the memory plays tricks and makes everything soft and cloudy; it’s a -protective thing. 

Recollections came to me – vague images of strolling down smart boulevards in the sunshine and lingering in the museum of art; there was thoughtful browsing in the serious bookshop and whimsical gliding down bohemian laneways to enjoy a bit of people-watching. 

Had I been forty years younger, my dangling tag would have been perceived as a perky little fashion statement – and quite a nice touch, I dare say – but alas, at my time of life it suggests that I have ‘let myself go’, or that I’m muddled and it’s all getting too much for me, some of which I’m prepared to concede.

So in a chaotic world of overwhelming human suffering, of unspeakable brutality and tragedy, a man lingers in his underpants in a quiet room in a small house in the remote hills, surrounded by forests, way down near the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere – caught in a paralysing personal moment of grief about the tag on his trousers. 

Upon coming back to awareness, I spied, on the upper side of the trouser leg, the manufacturer’s long adhesive strip denoting my waist and length measurements. 

Outside my body everything went on as normal. A magpie warbled beneath the window in the sunshine. I then understood that this was poetic justice – divine punishment for a lifetime spent carelessly wearing my heart on my sleeve, because I was never taught forcefully enough not to do so. 

Clothes have given me trouble over the years and magpies have more than once been part of this misery. As a young child I wore elastic braces to hold up my navy-blue serge pants and I could never work out how to button up those wretched braces; I would always have to ask my mother to do so. On one occasion, after visiting a toilet in a country picnic ground, I was marching back across the football field, holding up my pants, when I was attacked by a magpie. In fear and panic I let go of my clothing to defend myself as I ran for dear life towards the safety of my mother. In this fight for survival, my pants came down and I stumbled and fell, but managed to scramble pitifully onwards as the merciless bird continued to swoop and lacerate my poor persecuted little head.

From this I learnt not only to do up my braces, but that blood and humiliation make a most terrible and indelible mixture. 

Between the ages of eight and ten I wore something called a Jughead hat. I wore it everywhere, including to bed. I loved this hat and had a fetish about it; it was my comfort and security, my magical crown, and in fact it was indeed made (from a salvaged felt hat) to represent a crown, with small zigzag felt points surrounding the dome.

One day during bonfire week, when the children of the neighbourhood were all going about their business letting off fireworks in a normal fashion, I was hanging around with Teddy Johnson, who had a box of matches and a big bag of penny and threepenny bungers – those beautiful red cylindrical explosives with short fuses that made life so good back then. You could buy them at the corner shop, and a threepenny bunger could easily blow up the average letterbox without a problem. It was great. Anyway, we’d got through most of Teddy’s bungers in one way or another until the last one remained, and it seemed more important and precious than all the previous explosions of the afternoon. 

I had long suspected that Teddy secretly envied my Jughead hat, or at least my attachment to it, and he suggested that if we placed the precious hat with a threepenny bunger under it on top of a fire hydrant, the explosion would propel the hat fair up to the telegraph wires and it would all be a wondrous thing – the hat would descend like a flying saucer and be all the more magical and powerful for having made the journey into outer space. 

I thought it was a fantastic idea and soon we were ready for blast-off. There was a mighty blam and my Jughead hat disintegrated – just like that! Small bits of smoking felt lay scattered in the gutter; Teddy made a low, fiendish orgasmic sound and I went into a deep decline from which I have never fully recovered. I learnt nothing from this episode whatsoever.

I don’t know why, but I’ve had no luck with suits and have never found one I would wear. This has caused difficulties. For example, one day I received the strange news that I was to be made a National Living Treasure, and if I presented myself in a monkey suit at the Sydney Town Hall on such-and-such a date – to caper like Bennelong in front of the white folk and the Prime Minister – I could be inducted into the Order of National Living Treasures. I told the organisers that, no disrespect intended, but I was psychologically unable to wear suits – to which they replied they were sorry and would get by without me. So like Cinderella I stayed home on the night of the ball and swept the pantry, but unlike in her story, the good fairy never turned up. She knows what’s good for me.

I made another clothing mistake at the age of sixteen, when I painstakingly stencilled a large red hammer-and-sickle motif on my plain school football pullover and wore it in Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds during the depths of the Cold War. From this I learnt what a middle-aged European woman looks like when she spits at somebody’s feet.

I could tell you much about clothing sadness: how an honourable and civilised man can end up with nothing much in his wardrobe apart from tired old work clothes, how the huge range of new-generation men’s underpants is a weird and frightening modern tragedy, how an audience can be transfixed by the spectacular leaking of a marker pen in your shirt pocket while you’re delivering a public lecture, how the fly can be left undone while you’re giving another public lecture, how yet another serious speech was delivered in a pullover worn inside out, and how easily and -elegantly the back of a brand-new, hand-tailored corduroy jacket can be slashed with a knife from top to bottom at a party when the West Footscray sharpies turn up drunk and violent in 1963.