Welcome To 1961: Here Are Your Tight Little Male Accessories

Welcome to 1961, and to being a handsome male actor! Thank you for your interest in being a handsome male actor in 1961, where the rule for you is tight, taut, male swaddling! Thank you for coming to us with your fourteen-pushup body and severe close-cropped hairline, your critical neck-tan, lightly-furred wrists and your most jutting chin. We’re going to put the smallest, most-tense things all over your body. Your body! Your swimming-pool novelist body. We’ll ensnug you, egg-drinking fit man, with your celery-stick tie and your Bloody Mary skin. Money-hard shoes, hard and tight and glossy-thick like cockroach wings! Trim-and-terse dress socks, hauled up over your fifty-year-old calves, snapped into knee garters as tight as your own blood vessels. Snap them closed, snap them shut, wear a bear-trap on your apple-pie male feet!

You’ve got to hurry into your sunglasses next! Smoky-dark, eye-tight, temple-pressed! Little puffs of fumed glass, cut-and-stitched across the shapely nose – never take them off! Snug gold ring, one, for your dearest little finger, cigar-chain your knuckle to it, tattoo-clasped! Swift little gator-clasp for your finger-narrow tie, looped close around the just-bulging neck! Tighter and tighter, tauter and tauter! Masculine tension for you, and that’s all of it! Close the buttons on your vest-close suit, all pressed-vest fabric over the languid outdoor muscles of you!

Draw that collar done! Stitch up those cuffs with bone! Gracefully hustle your maleness into a train, and train-tunnel-tighten your slacks till there’s no room for anything but Man inside your clothes! Drop off all superfluous flesh, all that is unnecessary for Man to be, at the next station; someone will be buy to collect, neaten, smarten, folden, tidy, compress it into a briefcase and plash the briefcase into the sea! Tidy, tiny, tight! Slide that crisp quarter-inch of starched handkerchief into your slimmest breast-pocket, slip-yacht your chest, and sail off into the smoothness of Well-Dressed! The temperature of Well-Dressed Man is suavely cool, and all bound up! You will know a man well-dressed by his bindings, by his sweatlessness, by his trim-drawn waist, by the snugness of his socks, by the disciplined dimple in his close-shaved chin, by the neatness of his close-clipped nails. It’s 1961 and we’re binding up our best and tautest men! Collect yourself into neat-strained muscle and bundle yourself over; we’ll wrap you up beautiful and smarten your best with the smallest gleams of pinkie-ring and tie-pin rig! Don’t move your butterfly self, sir, just wriggle-struggle into a waistcoat tight as a masculine handshake and we’ll finish the wrapping for you gorgeous!