the visitor in the clothing worn at "The Grove." Some items are homemade, but most have come from Italy, France, the Orient, Helsinki or L. A. In effect, Cherry Grove is a kind of try-out or open-air rehearsal for next year's fashions. Many male models (professional or otherwise) exhibit custom-made shoes, trousers, trunks, sweaters and so on from bar to beach, from house to house and from hour to hour. These styles, such as the cut of Western Levi's, are taken up by the small specialty stores that have sprung up in east side New York and Greenwich Village in the last ten years-the shops that cater to the well kept male physique and which stock size 28 as a matter of course where 30 is the smallest waist size one can find readymade anywhere else in the city.

Worn to the offices on Madison Avenue and Wall Street, and to the club-type bars, the less flamboyant styles are soon adopted by the suburanites who still want to be cosmopolitan, and then by the more expensive outlets, such as the institutionalized six-story clothing store, the small upstairs university outfitters and the conventional Madison Avenue clothes shops. The new style is now called the Western look, the Italian cut, or English tailoring, according to the kind of snob appeal the particular store encourages. But whatever the origin of a style, it is probable that it had its taste and/or popularity tested at Cherry Grove by those who have the cash, the intellectual independence, and the flair (or foolhardiness) to avoid the conventional. And so the hip-hugging slack, loafers, below-thenaval swim trunks, the bikini-type underwear, the form-fitting T shirt along with grey-flannel, the Italian leg, and the cowboy pocket penetrate to the far purlieus of Grand Island, Nebraska, under the staid auspices of nationally-known brand names, and, finally, become acceptable to the august pages of the Sears, Roebuck cata-

logues. And the young adventurer fresh out of the hinterlands brings his body to fabled Cherry Grove dressed in the very clothes his hosts. wore and in the styles they helped set some five or ten years earlier.

While the rest of the world is quick to pick up a fashion, it is at Cherry Grove where they most often begin. This is, I think, because (despite their egoistic clothes consciousness) the people of Cherry Grove couldn't care less about being correctly and properly in fashion, conventionally speaking.

The same spirit that prompted a group of individuals to settle on this last frontier, in what had previously been considered a waste land in the middle of a cold ocean, still continues

as it always does continue in creative activity-in an atmosphere that is primarily humanistic rather than commercial or conventional.

It is always amusing in the light of this to hear a conservative dresser deplore "all that flamboyance at The Grove," when the very details in his own apparel, which he accepts, more than likely were originally used to shock, or at least to attract a sensual kind of attention. But now this same fellow uses these same styles as a kind of universally accepted mask for his own unacknowledged preoccupations when he goes to the office, visits his home town, or the like, and wishes to show how a dignified conservative person dresses, never, we can be sure, having ever set foot on that island of tasteless sartorial display, Cherry Grove.

the show

The Cherry Grove Reviews are a unique institution. Like most community playhouses, it exists, practically speaking, to pay for community expenses; at Cherry Grove it may be for boardwalk repairs, firefighting equipment or the up-keep of

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