Dress Down Sunday: Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn

published 1967  chapter 2

LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES

There was a stack of Vogue and Queen magazines on the bedside table. [Bob] picked one of them up, and began to study the advertisements of underclothing and support garments. The women in the photographs all appeared to combine education and breeding with stunted pelvic development. Their eyes were soft and remote with the contemplation of spiritual things, and they seemed unaware of Bob’s sleepy libidinous eyes following them as they wandered through the long summer grass in nothing but their matching sky-blue underwear, or magnolia pink roll-on and crossed arms. They didn’t have bottoms. Well, all right, they had bottoms, but bottoms with sunken cheeks and spiritual expressions. A woman like that to grill his pork chops, thought Bob, and he would be reasonably content.

observations: What is it with these men and the underwear adverts? Recently we had the slightly loopy older gents of the Last Tresilians having a good chat about them, and here, a couple of years later, comes Bob, a bachelor pushing 40 – why is he even reading Vogue and Queen? His neighbour, Mrs Mounce, a bored married woman, is cooking his supper at the moment:

rolling her bottom importantly…. [she] emerged from the kitchenette, and glided about the room, her cigarette still up by her right ear, a fish slice in her left hand.

Later, she will meet Bob’s actual girlfriend and think to herself ‘A little of the old black-coffee-and-orange-juice, and a good roll-on, and she really wouldn’t look too awful.’ That means a diet, and a girdle like the ones above, for anyone in any doubt. Mrs Mounce is one of the better female characters, but she seems to belong in a Restoration Comedy.

In a previous entry I expressed doubts about how funny this cult book, by a very well-respected writer, actually is. The disastrous appearances on TV, the set-piece about a junket abroad with other PR people and journalists, the dire social events, and of course the women whose only interest is men – all left me cold. There is some entertainment: the man who is convinced the letter sacking him is a practical joke, the search for an up-and-coming area that you can just afford, and hoping that one day SW23 will become fashionable. But historical interest only, really, and not inclining you to mourn the loss of the good old days.

The pictures are, exactly, fashion adverts of the era.