If, as has been duly pointed out, the epithet functional is wholly out of fashion in the small world of architects, in sartorial circles it has attained prestigious and dizzying heights. Clearly, men's clothing presented a rather vulnerable flank to the onslaught of younger generations.

On the part of the hidebound there has been a signal failure to justify the beauty—or even the utility—of lapels, trouser cuffs, buttons that do not button, the knotted tie, and the hat band (or, as the poet has it, the "frieze of the fedora"). And so the scandalous arbitrariness of such useless embellishments has finally come under the public eye. In this respect, Poblet's J. D. F. Poblet (or Pobblet), b. 1894—translator's note condemnation is unanswerable.

It may be worthy of note that the new order springs from a passage by the Anglo-Saxon Samuel Butler. Butler remarked that the so-called...