PKD Fashion

This post is part of a collection on Obscurities.

Philip K. Dick's Ubik has many entertaining and prescient episodes, but one that stuck with me was the description of a particularly ridiculous outfit:

A solar-battery-powered chopper marked BELOVED BRETHREN MORATORIUM waited at the edge of the Zurich field. Beside it stood a beetle-like individual wearing a Continental outfit: tweed toga, loafers, crimson sash and a purple airplane-propeller beanie. The proprietor of the moratorium minced toward Joe Chip, his gloved hand extended, as Joe stepped from the ship's ramp onto the flat ground of Earth.

When I first read it I assumed a tweed toga was simple a Roman-style toga made out of tweed, but when I tried a search to see if anyone had ever actually made something like that I was surprised to turn up a hit much older than Ubik. This "tweed toga" is from 1943, and is a lot more modern looking than what I had in mind.

It's not clear it was ever mass-produced, so it's doubtful PKD had this particular design in mind, but who knows. Ψ