All that music, perfume, science, hygiene, and cosmetics can do is done to create an evasive, womblike world of comfort and soft sympathy. "Home was never like this." Death is thus brought within the orbit of the basic attitudes of a consumer world and is neutralized by absorption into irrelevant patterns of thought, feeling, and technique. The solid comforts and security missed in this life are to be enjoyed in the next.

I understand that the manufacturers of men's and boys' clothing are fretting right smart these days because Paw and Sonny are not buying enough wearing garments. they note that in the past 10 years spending for autos has increased 133 per cent and for male clothing only four per cent.

So they have got themselves organized and are blowing in all kinds of cash trying to educate the menfolks on the value of being properly garbed.

They are running ads, for instance, showing Teenage Daughter appealing tearfully to Mom: "Couldn't Daddy stay upstairs when Jimmy comes for me?" Or Young Husband telling his smock-clad wife, "I didn't get the promotion, Tom did." Or Big Boss saying earnestly, "John we are putting a new man in your territory."

Frankly, I think this is Grade A garbage, and I predict the pants peddlers are going to find the American male is tough to brainwash. Hit him with the slogan, "You can't afford not to dress right," and he'll come back with one of his own: "You can't suit everyone."

In the first place, a lot of men don't care how their clothes look. They are dogs and they are satisified if you toss them an old herringbone now and then. You won't change them any more than you will make a clotheshorse out of the boy who hasn't yet found out that girls can be more interesting than frogs and fishhooks.

In the second place, papa's pocketbook is taking a bigger beating than ever before from the piper, the baker, the hair dresser, the TV repairman, the grocer, etc. He's having to make that 1954 suit do from necessity. And if there should be anything left over, he'd a sight rather blow it on a new spinning reel than an Ivy League jacket.

My advice to the hungry haberdashery huckster is to get out of men's wear into something feminine. Our lady folk, bless them, will buy a bundle of glad rags quicker than you can say "20 per cent off." And Daddy-O will growl but he'll love 'em for it.

"LAZY BONES" . . . Dreamed up as an advertising stunt by the proprietor of a Berlin linen shop, this display draws big crowds daily. The girl in bed, caressed by the firm's fine linen, is Thea, a Berlin dancer, who "sleeps" in the store window for about five hours a day. During her sojourn in the window, the sidewalk out front is jammed with people, but most of them are men who come, not to admire the sheets, but to admire the occupant.
Edinburg Daily Courier - Mar 21, 1950

As curious Washingtonians peer through a downtown store window, Mary Jane Hayes, "Miss Washington," feigns sleep in demonstrating a "sleep learning" gadget in the capital city yesterday. P.S. — She wore a strapless nightgown.
-Cumberland Evening Times - Mar 9, 1950