Many modern commentators on men's dress feel compelled to hark back to the cartoon illustrations of pre-1950 Esquire magazine and Apparel Arts to demonstrate their points. These illustrations were often fashion-house led phantasies and better sources for what real people were wearing in the age in which the modern classics were settled (before the Second World War diverted everyone's attention to simple survival), are the Spy cartoons of the old Vanity Fair, newspaper and magazine photographs and film stills, as in the above still, from the 1937 film, The Prisoner of Zenda, starring Ronald Colman and Madeleine Carroll.
I jest.
But I jest slightly.