LIGHTER SHADE OF MALE

The camel is an ungainly beast. ‘A horse designed by a committee,’ as one proverb goes, it compares to its distant equine cousin as one of The Beatles’ satin Sgt. Pepper suits does to a close-cut, single-breasted in sober graphite from a topnotch Milanese sartoria. When it comes to parents in Windowlicker, Alabama wanting their children to be taught intelligent design in school, lawyers acting for the scientific community should just shelve all paleontological, genetic and zoological evidence, and instead lead an aging Bactrian before the judge.

So it’s richly ironic that the camel hair, and especially its pale, sandy hue, has given so much to the world of menswear design. “All male costume in the west,” the prominent American style commentator G. Bruce Boyer once said, “derives either from warfare or sport” — and in the case of camel hair, that sport is polo (which also