[Trade Catalogue] Styles for Men and Young Men. The Royal Tailors Inc. in 10,000 Cities. 1932 Fall and Winter 1933

Chicago probably: The Royal Tailors Inc, 1932. Wraps. Stapled. Very Good Plus. A sartorial oasis in the depths of the Depression, in this catalogue for custom tailored men's wear showcasing men's fashion in full color plates. Folio, 35.5 by 24 cm. Unnpaginated, 20 pages, or ten glossy leaves, plus wrap covers of a mid-weight, semi-rigid card stock. Inside wrap covers with substantial content and not counted in our page count. Sixteen of these pages are color plates. Of these, 12 or 14, depending on the strictness of one's criteria, qualify as full color plates, and the remainder -- two or four --then are more partially colored -- in common parlance, these would be labeled tinted. In addition, the catalogue has four black and white plates. Front inside cover has three swatches of material used in the construction of the tailored item, and serve as infrastructural, non-visible, items which nonetheless are critical to the quality -- durability and comfort, of the garment. The color plates all feature a single smartly dressed man, generally portrayed as a young adult, but not always, in the foreground, with a background of a lifestyle scene, and/or one or two other men, or a woman, etc. Sometimes the background figures are posed like the model in the foreground as well. All the plates rely upon drawn illustration, with the models capturing the aesthetic ideals of male beauty at the time, even in the case of the page devoted to the stout, who are only "stout" in comparison to the other elongated slender men rendered in the vein of a Sargent full-bodied portrait. Each of the plates is themed, with categories including such things as "Young Men's Extreme Fashion", this being easily distinguishable from the look of the dominant theme of merely "Young Men's Fashion" but tame in comparison to what such a category would mean today. Another category is "Men's Collegiate Models", which shows suits named "The Dartmouth" and "The Cornell", and the two models holding as props a megaphone and several books under arm. In contrast to the Extreme there are three pages devoted to the conservative, including one entitled "Stylish Conservative Fashion". The "Conservative" dress plates feature slightly older models. The dress shown in this catalogue is dominated by suits and jackets, but it does also include topcoats and also a few tailored women's coats. Compared to custom wear catalogues from just a few years earlier, there is less emphasis on formal wear. Condition: a moderate amount of soiling on the wraps, but we would say few would find what is here disconcerting. The final glossy page has mounted in the middle a slip of paper regarding special young men's pleated trousers, which would cost an extra $1 to make. This slip covers several of the drawings, but obviously, this mounted addition was done by the issuer of the catalogue and thus we don't consider it a defect. Otherwise, the pages are generally quite clean.