Symbolic Usage To Represent Wealth
The wearing of spats is often used as symbolic shorthand to represent wealth, eccentricity or both. Fictional characters such as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, Walt Disney's Scrooge McDuck, Jean de Brunhoff's Babar the Elephant, Jiggs from the comic strip Jiggs and Maggie, Rich Uncle Pennybags the iconic man from the Monopoly board game, the Sixth Doctor from Doctor Who and Bustopher Jones from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, among others, have been depicted as wearing spats. In Some Like It Hot, the mob boss is called "Spats" Colombo, because he regularly wears spats. In some cases, these depictions occur long after spats ceased to be a normal part of everyday menswear: for instance The Penguin from Batman is drawn wearing spats along with a suit with tails. Similarly, Irving Berlin's song "Puttin' on the Ritz" mentions spats along with a variety of other elements of formal clothing that were common when it was written.
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Famous quotes containing the words symbolic, usage, represent and/or wealth:
“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don’t are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn’t put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)
“What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)