"Master, what about clothes?"
"Clothes, as Wells (Wealth) says, reflect how people wish to be treated. It is rather that all measures for appearance in man serves that goal, the to be 'regarded as ...' When you want to appear crazy before others, you really want to be treated as crazy, hence you dress and behave like a nut. Yet, you must bear in Mind that there is a difference between just absurdity in following fashions, like the servile, the born slave, and the stark crazyness, stupidity, of retarding voluntary to primitive standards."
"I do not understand."
"Well, a higher or lower hem, a so and so waist, the military look, the parrot look, the whatsit look and so forth, they will go away some time, at the whim of some yokel in Paris. Not so with the craze for dirtiness, ragged, bleached, torn and worn workman's clothes. Certainly they 'look' crazy, and you 'want' to be regarded as crazy when wearing them, while you would not dream of doing the actual work for which they are developed, cleaning a sewer or whatever. The dirty craze is therefore different from the fashions that go away sometime, in that it is a retardation from a difficult, slogging, progress in mankind, some millenia old. A progress towards greater Human Dignity, towards finer and higher levels, standards. A throwing away of all that precious effort since the cave-men, who at first could not even think of throwing out the very bones they had used up, is a social relapse, an un-learning of civilisation that, unlike fashion, will not go away. It would have to be re-learned, in, ... millennia."