"Now I've shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat.”
Neil Munro "Bunny" RogerJune 18, 1911
There have always been queens, but few compared to the glib, quick-witted Bunny Roger. He was a war hero, yet his most notable contribution was his 1949 invention – Capri pants! He lived his life courageously and consistently; a man who knew who, what, and why he existed. Born in London, he was the most eccentric of three life-long "bachelor" brothers.
Here's an anecdote: Roger got out of a taxi and powdered his nose, when his driver said: "You've dropped your diamond necklace!" Roger replied: "Diamonds? With tweed? Never!"
He influenced how men of his era dressed. As a main character in the neo-Edwardian movement in the 1950s, he brought back the precise tailoring of the turn of the century, influencing the Teddy Boys (Google it).
Once, when Cecil Beaton was photographing him, he asked Roger to step off the sidewalk into the gutter and Roger's retort was: "Not on your life! We've spent two generations getting out of the gutter!"
I don't understand how he had the time to be a hero in World War II, when he was busy as a full-time fop on the verge of becoming an important fashion designer. He died a few days before his 86th birthday, partying until right before entering the hospital for cancer treatment. He bragged at the time that he and Princess Diana had the same waist measurement.
The son of a self-made tycoon, as a youth, he taunted his conservative father by bleaching his hair and wearing a bit of rouge. He was expelled from Oxford for his indiscrete queerness. Undaunted, he started his own fashion house at 26 years old, and his first client was Vivien Leigh.
Five years later, Roger was fighting Nazis in Italy and North Africa. He was noted for his courage under fire while still wearing chiffon scarves. He saved a wounded fellow officer from a building that had been bombed. Roger claimed to have gone into a battle brandishing a rolled-up copy of VOGUE and commanding: "When in doubt, powder heavily!" Perhaps meaning gun powder, or maybe not.
After the war, he was hired to take over the couture department at an upscale London department store. He also invested in fashion house of Bunny's buddy, Hardy Amies (1909 – 2003), a discreetly gay fashionista who designed for the Queen. Roger's money revived the House of Hardy Amies, and when it was sold, it gave him enough funds to retire in comfort and pursue his favorite activities: socializing and buying clothes.
He spent tens of thousands of pounds every year on his wardrobe. His signature look was bowler hat paired with extraordinary shoes that he polished himself using a concoction of beeswax and natural dyes, which he customized by adding red laces to compliment his ruby cufflinks. For each of his suits he had four pairs of shoes made to maximize the number of looks. He owned over 150 Savile Row suits, so it was not a small shoe collection, made larger because had several pairs of the same shoe made when he found a favorite style.
Roger hosted outrageous themed soirées. There were Diamond, Amethyst, and Flame Balls held to celebrate his 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays. He wore an exotic mauve catsuit with a feather headdress at his Amethyst 70th birthday ball in 1981. At his 80th, he wore a catsuit made of scarlet sequins with a cape of orange organza, casually greeting his 400 guests from behind a wall of fire to the applause of all. His parties were covered by spreads in the newspapers, including a New Year's Eve Fetish Ball where half the guests were of the stiff upper-class, while the other half wore rubber S/M gear and high heels while being led by women tethered in chains. This outraged his father who seemed to have had no sense of humor, although when Roger was a teenager, he had asked for a doll's house as a reward for being selected for a sports team, and his father gave it to him.
When he was six years old his mother gave him a fairy costume with diaphanous skirts and butterfly wings. When he got a little older, Roger plucked his eyebrows to look like Marlene Dietrich, whom he adored. When he visited Hollywood, he was disappointed that he was compared to actor George Arliss and not Dietrich. In his later years his face was what he described as "much-lifted".
He lived with his gay brothers at their estate in Scotland, which Roger furnished with elaborate Gothic furniture, carved with bull and goat motifs, symbols of male sexuality.
There is that old-timey euphemism for his type of queer: "…a little light in the loafers". Well, Roger loved to dance and by all accounts he was a little light in his perfect size-seven loafers. From his London Times obituary: "Beneath his mauve mannerisms, Bunny was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates, a life enhancer and exemplary friend."
Now I struggled to find a source or writer of this fine bio but the closest I came was to the Army wiki page devoted to ahem, stories about the Army that may be apocryphal . . . . I choose to believe its true
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