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.

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.

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.

I was much taken with Glamourpuss’s EDW this week, which rather successfully managed to dress up Father Christmas in louche and well-cut clothes. He would look the better for them.

The only thing I can think of that might match both elements of grace and surprise is this picture of Ivor Novello and a shapely leg. It comes from the original (1928) film of The Constant Nymph. I found the book in a Rutland second-hand shop when I was a teenager and adored it, but I’ve never seen any of the films. (Incidentally, just over seventy years ago, my grandfather managed to enrol almost all the other boys at his school in its branch of the League of Nations Club by block-booking the local cinema and offering all LoN members a free viewing of the 1933 version of the film. Everybody joined. His headmaster was furious.)

So, if anyone has a copy of any of the three versions they’re willing to lend…

I don’t know why, but there’s often something magical about those women in whom France and England collide.

Take Jane Birkin, the London girl who performed the notoriously orgasmic Je t’aime… moi non plus with husband Serge Gainsbourg, and whose great-aunt Freda Dudley Ward (later the Marquesa de Casa Maury), was a mistress of Edward VIII. Or the bewitching Jeanne Moreau, daughter of the Lancashire dancer Katherine Buckley, who performed at the Folies Bergère and married the restaurateur, Anatole-Désiré Moreau.

Although images of both women have been pinned to hundreds of thousands of bedroom walls either side of the English Channel, even their astonishing power over the lovelorn was as nothing when compared to that of 19th-century demimondaine Cora Pearl.

In the tradition of modern day porn stars, Cora Pearl had a rather more prosaic birth name - in her case (the arguably more appropriate) Emma Crouch. Born in something like 1835, she was the daughter of the composer and cellist Frederick Nicholls Crouch and spent the early days of career selling her body in London. She was good at it and her convent-school manners were a turn on for many rich men.

Although she took a bit of time to get rich, she took the sensible line of spending more than she earned on beautiful dresses and costumes. Her thinking was that these would help her hook chaps who also had swollen bank balances.

They did. She was taken up by the Victor Massena, Duke of Rivoli, who helped her to develop a gambling habit. He also got bored of paying her bills, but by then Cora was unstoppable: her subsequent lovers included “Prince Willem of Orange, son of King William III of the Netherlands; Prince Achille Murat, grandson of Joachim Murat; and the Duc de Morny, Napoleon III’s half-brother. Morny, described by one historian as “a taller, handsomer edition of the Emperor,” has been said to be the most intelligent and distinguished of her lovers, with an insatiable sexual appetite”.

Being cheap on such a scale was an incredibly expensive business: one of Cora’s bills for lingerie alone came to more than £18,000. She also had to put up with weirdos, of whom the most persistent was Alexandre Duval, a man cast in the wealthy-but-neurotic mould. When Cora put a firm end to their unwanted relationship, he turned up on Cora’s doorstep and shot himself. Cora, suitably unimpressed, returned to bed without bothering to alert the authorities.

Stupidly, this was the incident that finished her. After that, hardly any rich man would touch her, forcing her to sell her possessions and retreat into a more humble kind of prostitution. She died alone in a shabby rooming house, unnoticed and a barely recognisable shadow of her former, elegant self.

I think shoes are the most important element of any costume. Forget them at your peril, or you’ll end up like the man I saw in well-known Edinburgh tailor’s shop wearing a splendid hand-made suit, underlined by a pair of cheap and battered brogues. Good shoes ennoble even the shabbiest rags. Choose the right footwear and the effect, on wearer and admirer, should be something like this (sadly it won’t let me display it on this page).

There’s also the pleasure and excitement of knowing you’ve acquired exactly the right pair of plank cosies. Good old Lulu knew this only too well, and I have to say I think those shoes she’s sporting (and to a lesser extent the boots) are damned fine, even now.

I’m quite a big fan of the way in which my Chassidic neighbours dress. I love the simplicity of wearing black with white, just as I think it looks marvellous when people are wearing evening dress. I also like the subtle gradations in costume, meaningless to most outsiders, but which indicate all sorts of things to those in the know: the length of coat, the shape of hat, whether trousers are tucked into socks, whether socks are white or black, velvet on the collar and cuffs, type of shtreimel and so forth.

I’m not in the know, and the little I do know makes my head reel. But to return to the point, most combinations look good to me. Although, once in a while, you see something that’s really dressy, like this picture of the late Grand Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum of Satmar dancing at a wedding. I think eschewing a patterned coat (as worn by some Grand Rabbis) in favour of a plain white one is a brilliant bit of wardrobe savvy.

That notwithstanding, I’ve been poring over photos of distinguished Chassidim to find the ones that are in my opinion - that of a complete outsider - the most elegantly dressed. And whilst I would dearly have liked to have seen more of the costume that belonged to this man…

…Rabbi Chaim Hager of Ottynia, I felt that I couldn’t award the Elegantly Dressed Wednesday gong to someone whose clothes I could barely make out, no matter how Churchillian their owner looked. So I’m nominating the man at the top of this page: Grand Rabbi Yaakov Yisroel Korff of Zvhil-Mezhbizh, Boston.

Of course, my neighbours will be incensed that I’ve chosen an American, but I really do think the black and white coat, coupled with the black beard and white hair is a stroke of genius. I am, though, happy to receive nominations for a future EDW, especially as there must be so many pictures of sartorially snappy Chassidim that I could not possibly know about, let alone have seen.

It’s Elegantly Dressed Wednesday and, because I have a 13-month-old boy asleep on one arm, I can’t type sufficiently well to tell you about the man above.

So, it’s competition time. Who is this superbly-attired poet? No prize, just praise.

Answers in the comments below, please.

No greater love Romeo and Juliet
But Shakespeare died and years passed by
Juliet knows everything about Romeo
Except why he tells her no at night

Was Romeo Really a Jerk? Emir Kusturica and The No Smoking Orchestra

Emir Kusturica is handed this week’s gong for proving there’s an important distinction between “dressed” and “clothed”. If you’re going to be elegantly clothed, go get a good tailor or dressmaker. If you’d rather be elegantly dressed, grab attitude instead.

Attitude is something that Emir Kusturica has in spadefuls, and he needs it to propel an un-ironed shirt and slightly unwashed mullet into a sartorially savvy combo. But he does it, and does it well. The cigar helps.

So who is he? Well, he’s principally known as a phenomenally successful Bosnian Serb filmaker, with two Cannes Palmes D’Or to his credit. I know him best, though, as a member of the band The No Smoking Orchestra, with whom he performs, writes songs and creates Punk Opera. Unsurprisingly, being a Balkan band, it has a complex history of splits and changes. So, just in case you’re interested, Emir works with the Belgrade band and not the Sarajevo one. It’s all here if you care enough.

I don’t. What I like is style and panache, and this is a man who has them both. It’s also pretty handy for his band that he’s such a fine film director - watch this:

My word, who is this elegantly dressed fellow? Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Mswati III of Swaziland, second son of Sobhuza II and Africa’s last unconstitutional monarch. It will not surprise you to learn that he is a public school man.

Aged 39, Mswati has a respectable 13 wives and 27 children. He hand-picks many of the former at the annual Umhlanga Reed Dance, when about 20,000 topless young maidens bring along 4 metre reeds to present to the Queen Mother.

In a country that is characterised by the world’s second worst AIDS problem, rural poverty and a massive income gap between rich and poor, Mswati keeps his people’s aspirations alive by spending his cash on items like a $500,000 luxury car. And rightly so: a man of his elegance needs suitable surroundings both at home and on the road.

I’m sure you agree.