The misfits

[229 Bowery, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The arrow points to no. 229, N. Levin Office Furniture, but more interesting possibilities await to the north and south. To the north, The Bowery Mission, which today includes no. 229. Click for large and you’ll see a small bit of the mission’s sign. To the south, a dog going about, as W.H. Auden says in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” its “doggy life,” and nos. 231 and 233, housing a men’s clothing store. You’ll have to (again) click for large to see what first caught my eye there: “Men’s and Youngmen’s Misfit Suits.”

So what’s a misfit suit?

The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition of the noun misfit (noun) that might seem to (ahem) fit: “a garment or other article which does not fit (or occasionally suit) the person for whom it is intended.” But I doubt that a Bowery clothing store would have a considerable inventory of bespoke or altered suits that didn’t fit the men they were meant for.

I looked at Google Books, where the transcript of a 1941 trial almost gives an answer:

Q. Now, you have just told us what — tell me again about the misfit suits? A. Mismatched and misfit suits were picked up in New York City.

Q. What do you mean by mismatched suits? A. Mismatched and misfits.

A column from The Clothier & Furnisher (1884) gives a clearer picture. It begins,

[Click for a larger view.]

And a 1907 advertisement for Sincerity Clothes suggests that a misfit suit is a matter of shoddy tailoring:

You've been a Victim of the great Misfit evil, haven't you, Reader?

You've joined the procession of Slaves before the Tyrant of Tailoring Incompetence, Indifference, Ignorance and Love of Gain, haven't you —

Pretty nearly Everybody has —

Maybe you belong now?

An OED citation for the noun misfit from George Bernard Shaw (1891) gives a sense of what it might be like to go about in a misfit suit: “He was put out of countenance from the beginning by being clothed in a seedy misfit which made him look lamentably down on his luck.” No wonder Google Books has a number of comic plays whose casts include characters wearing misfit suits. And thanks to another item at Google Books I know that Shaw was reviewing a performance of Don Giovanni. See? Everything makes sense.

Today nos. 231 and 233 are gone, replaced by something new, the New Museum. And today we refer to irregular and slightly irregular garments, the stuff of outlet malls and Filene’s Basement.

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