SARTORIAL

“You’re looking very sartorial” said The Old Girl to me when we were going out to a wine dinner the other night. This was a surprise as normally she says I dress like a bag of busted arseholes.

Thinking about this today I thought I’d check up on the source of the word ‘sartorial’ and discovered that it’s attributable to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre was a proponent of the concept of existentialism with his most famous work being "L'existentialisme est un humanisme" .

Existentialism is a term used to describe the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. Sartre incorporated atheism and Marxism into his doctrine and later ‘Absurdism’ when a local bishop told him he was being absurd. Sartre, as an atheist, argued we are born without purpose or meaning and that we must accept the freedom and responsibility of our existence and live out our lives so as to create purpose and meaning. So first we come to exist, then we create our essence.  OK?

Sartre was also a ‘bit of a lad’ and put himself out a bit with the eligible ladies around town. He played ‘boomps-a-daisy with Simone de Beauvoir whom he met in Paris in 1929. As Beauvoir explains in "The Prime of Life", "The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves." They had countless affairs, but told each other everything and enjoyed an unconventional relationship.

More importantly though, and this aided Sartre in his chat-ups, was that he was a snappy dresser.

He spent most of his money with fashionable tailors and had a reputation for being well turned out.

“Just like Sartre” was a popular expression when someone dressed up for a dinner party and pretty soon this expression was adopted into the French lingo-"Comme Sartre". The British, when adopting this expression into English as they’ve done with many French terms and words were a bit nervous about the ‘comme’ given the anti-red sentiment of the times (late 1940’s and 1950’s) and preferred ‘Sartre-al which became ‘sartorial’