A phenomenally busy week, so I’m short on time. I’ll be back at the weekend, but in the meantime have a guess who this elegantly dressed fellow is. His whiskers should give you a clue…

And as it’s Wednesday, who better than the elegantly dressed Max Raabe singing Klonen Kann Sich Lohnen (”Cloning Could Be Worth It”).

I discovered Raabe last week, thanks to August sending me a link to this fine performance by the Bratislava Hot Serenaders. A couple more hours of browsing and I’d uncovered the witty, dry - almost serpentine - Raabe, and laughed my face off to his 30s-style covers of Britney Spears’s Oops I did it Again, and Tom Jones’s Sex Bomb.

So, August: thanks. This week’s EDW is for you.

If you want a window on a man’s soul, or at the very least his inner elegance, sling him a monocle and ask him to screw it into his eye-socket.

You’ll be surprised at the result. So surprised, in fact, that you will start inking eyeglasses onto photos of your friends and enemies, the better to understand their real characters.

It’s too simple to dismiss the monocle-wearer as a chinless fop or a grouchy old reactionary. Besides, Patrick Moore doesn’t look ridiculous because he’s wearing a monocle, but because he seems to have a weird habit of combing his eyebrow over the top of it. Either that or he goes to bed wearing the thing, which rather misses the point.

The monocle developed from the dandy’s quizzing glass. Looking at someone through a ‘quizzer’ was known as ‘quizzing’, defined rather ably by Thomas Wright in his 1865 Royal Dictionary Cyclopedia of Universal Reference as

The act of mocking by a narrow examination through a quizzing-glass or by pretended seriousness of discourse.

The best quizzer of the lot was Old Q, 4th Duke of Queensberry, seen here “Quiz-zing a Filly” whilst playing with something in his trousers.

For the quizzing glass or the monocle to work properly, you have to maintain a near-indefinable aura of mockery. That way lies elegance. If you don’t and - worse - you take yourself seriously, the eyeglass becomes a little window through which people stare at you whilst laughing, pointing and (depending on the sort of company you keep) dropping their breeches.

J.A.M. Whistler, above, had no such trouble. If memory serves me well, and the person who told me the story wasn’t lying, Whistler not only had monocle-wearing in his blood, but he used to wear watch-glasses instead of the proper optical instrument. It was even more disconcerting. If you bored the man, he was likely to lift his eyebrow and let the watch-glass smash on the floor. As you stammered, he would nonchalently draw another from his pocket and screw it in his eye socket.

Bravo. Other people didn’t quite understand this incredible finesse, as you can see:

It’s not hard to spot the problem, is it? The fellow took himself far too seriously. As a result, we laugh at him for being the sort of man who owns two copies - but has never read - Marius the Epicurian. We chuckle because we can look through his eyeglass and into his soul, where we learn to our distaste that he clips his toenails every Monday evening before sallying forth to seduce stormtroopers.*

Anyway, he had no excuse. Rupert Ingalese published his Juggling as early as 1921. No monocle wearer from that point on had any excuse not to be adept at the Eyeglass Trick, as here illustrated.

Elegance in its purest form. When done properly, the monocle is stylish, witty, pleasing to the eye, and ever so slightly disarming. And lest anyone thought the prop was the preserve of the gentlemen, here’s one for the ladies:

Incomparable. Screw one in today.

*In-joke. Skip it or ask Dornan for a gloss.

Better described in these cuttings than in my prose, this was one of my great-great aunts. I’ve no idea whether she is the woman on the horse - though horses and dogs were twin obsessions. That said, she is superbly well-dressed in the photo below (she’s the girl on the right), even if she and her younger sisters bear a passing resemblance to meerkats.

Not to mention Klaus Tennstedt, the crazy-haired conductor of genius.

Last week’s EDW was Osbert Lancaster. I’ll tell you more about him when I’m less busy and not quite so ill.

(UPDATE. Bill writes: You might have acknowledged that I’d recognised Osbert Lancaster, you fecker. Happy to oblige, Bill, and I hope everyone will now head over to your blog and pat your head.)

I’ve been out for most of today, so today’s EDW comes with no explanatory gloss - or even a name.

As soon as someone correctly guesses the identity of the dapper man above, I’ll tell you all about him.

’nuff said.

I’ve just spent a lot more time that I can afford lost in this wonderful historic opera site. It’s chock full of old postcards, photographs and sheet music covers and you trip over elegantly dressed folk on almost every page.

Two of my favourite images so far are the ones above. On the left is Maria Kuznetsova as Cléopâtre in Massenet’s opera of that name; and on the right is Bernardo De Muro as Folco, the falconer, in Mascagni’s Isabeau. Very different roles, but I thought the two of them looked very good together.

[By the way, the ‘recent comments’ thingy in the menu bar broke. I’ll put it back the moment I’ve worked out how to mend it].

He looks a fool, but no-one can guess his identity; and there’s a sort of elegance in that.

Okay, I’m talking rubbish. I’ve had a busy couple of days and I wanted to use this photo I took on the way home. Here it is.

‘When Marshy was picked for England,’ Best jokes, ‘he told the manager, Sir Alf Ramsay, that he wasn’t 100% fit. “Don’t worry,” said Sir Alf. “I’ll pull you off at half time.” “Great,” said Marshy. “At Queen’s Park Rangers we just get half an orange.”‘

(Gag pinched from here).

Back in 1967, only months before he was bludgeoned to death by lover Kenneth Halliwell, playwright Joe Orton was given a fur coat by agent Peggy Ramsay. It cost her just £13 15/- and, as Orton wrote in his diary:

You look very pretty in that fur coat you’re wearing’, Oscar Lewenstein said as we stood on the corner before going our separate ways. I said, ‘Peggy bought it me. It was thirteen pounds fifteen.’ ‘Very cheap,’ Michael White said. ‘Yes, I’ve discovered I look better in cheap clothes.’ ‘I wonder what the significance of that is?’ Oscar said. ‘I’m from the gutter,’ I said. ‘And don’t you ever forget it because I wont’.

What I didn’t know, though, was that Orton also looked good in cheap chairs. That seat in which he is posing, now on display in the V&A, was a cheap imitation of the Arne Jacobsen model 3107 chair, picked up by photographer Lewis Morley in Heal’s for only five shillings.

And yes, it is that chair, in which 1960s femme fatale Christine Keeler posed. What’s less known is that Morley also photographed himself, David Frost and - erm - Dame Edna Everage sitting on the thing (though not at the same time).

So, this week, here’s to cheap clothes that look good and elegantly cheap chairs.

Will you sit to that?

An object of great beauty: we’ve lost a lot in the computer age. The office used to be a stimulating environment in which to work.

If you’re interested in typewriter erotica (of course you are) then visit this page.

The most beautifully dressed periodical of the 19th century.

Elegantly Dressed Wednesday has reached the Portuguese speaking world, though my Portuguese is so bad (non-existent) I don’t know quite where. However, the two torchbearers for a sartorially savvy mid-week are here and here.

(PS, the phenomenally dressy woman above is Portuguese/Mozambiquian singer Mariza.)

UPDATE: Okay, it’s Brazil. But you needn’t think I’m taking that picture down.

I know little enough about Venezuelan star Raquel Castaño, but I know even less about the elegantly dressed chap on her left. But who cares: he’s this week’s nomination for EDW. Feel free to invent amusing captions.

There are some more, rather excellent photos of Raquel here.