Adjusting

After living in the relatively informal Sarasota, we found ourselves in a bastion of Britain, rather than in the relaxed tropics we expected.

In Sarasota among our informal Siesta Key friends, one wore one’s “best” shorts and shirt, and possibly not even shoes, if it was just a matter of a couple, or two or three couples, gathering at a friend’s home. I took a limited wardrobe for my presumably brief visit to Belize. It was instantly apparent that I need not even unpack my shorts, except for boat trips. They were inappropriate around the hotel and unthinkable on the street. Bucher’s wardrobe was long on washable slacks and shirts (fortunately, because there was no dry cleaner) and short on dress shirts and suits.

Almost immediately upon settling in at the Fort George Hotel, we found that interpreting Belize dress codes was a frustrating puzzle. Our gaffes were many and mortifying.

We made our first misjudgment the evening we invited three couples to have dinner with us in the hotel. Bucher wore fresh sport shirt and slacks and I chose a crisp new cotton, bought for the trip. It could have gone almost anywhere on Siesta Key, but obviously had no business going to dinner in the finest hotel in Belize. Our guests arrived in suit-and-tie (men) and elegant cocktail dresses (women). I felt like Cinderella, especially since my dress was brown, a favorite color that, set off by white, had felt crisply smart until we were joined by our dinner guests.

 

Another evening soon after our arrival, Bucher came back to the hotel to say that a new friend, Russell Grant, had asked us to stop by for a drink around 6:30 pm. Russell was an affable Scot whose family had been in Belize for years. His delightful wife Lois had grown up in Belize, the daughter of a British couple who were in business in the Colony. (In the 1960’s Russell had to return to Scotland to manage the Grant family’s distilleries.)

When we approached the Grant home facing the sea on the northern shore of the peninsula that is Belize City, we saw the house ablaze with lights, cars lining both sides of the street and, most ominous of all, policemen in white uniforms on guard alongside the governor’s vehicle.

Thinking quickly, sport-shirted Bucher drove past the house, around the first corner, and back to the hotel where he quickly put on his best suit. I felt adequately gowned, considering my deficient wardrobe, in a new two-piece Guatemalan dress with elaborate embroidery shot with gold, copper, and brass threads (on brown, of course).

We returned as quickly as we could to park at some distance from the Grant’s home, aware that to arrive after the Governor was a major social sin, but realizing that for Bucher to have shown up in a sport shirt would have been worse. We slipped through the door as unobtrusively as possible and apologized to our forgiving hosts who thought the contretemps highly amusing.

Much as we appreciated Russell’s gracious invitation to newcomers, we wished we had known that we would be two-among-a-hundred instead of just an informal foursome.

 

We were caught out only once more; this time Ford Young was having a business cocktail party. Again, it was a matter of our having been invited verbally at the last minute. Party invitations normally arrived far ahead of an event on formally printed cards.

For the Youngs’ we’re-having-a-few-people-in evening, Bucher discreetly wore a suit and I selected a new dress, designed and made by one of the most highly recommended of Belize’s many talented seamstresses. I rode to the Young’s home in a glow of smug satisfaction at finally having guessed right.

We arrived. It was an enormous party. I took one look at the gowns worn by the other feminine guests, far more elaborate than most I wore even in Atlanta, and made my way, as quickly as I graciously could, to the veranda that ran across the full front of the house. Other guests were out there to enjoy the sea breeze; I sought the dark. Bucher brought me a drink, laughed in amusement at my cowering, and returned to the lively group inside the house. To my delight, dimly seen people on the veranda introduced themselves in what I hoped was complete obliviousness to my garb, and ensured that I enjoyed the evening fully, making new friends and learning more about life in our new town.

 

Once I accepted how dressy Belize was, I enjoyed returning to a style of attire I had left behind in Atlanta when we moved south to Florida to live on the beach.

Through the years, Belize fashion changed. Gradually, British governors were brave enough to put climate before tradition, and made it acceptable for men to wear shirt-and-tie, without a coat, to certain parties. Then some, with Bucher in the vanguard, adopted the handsome, cool guayabera worn by our Latin neighbors, fine embroidery and tucking compensating in elegance for the casual comfort of an open collar.

The Seventies brought an incongruous fashion era in which women wore long, often low-cut gowns, and men, sport shirts, for cocktail parties. It was a little like make-believe. Still, what woman doesn’t enjoy a chance to float formally in floor-length skirts, the short, feeling taller; the stout, slimmer; all, more glamorous.

By the time long-skirts-for-cocktails gave way to the more traditional short party dresses, Belize hostesses were in a panic over their printed invitations. The discreet “Black Tie” note in lower left-hand corner of invitations for a formal dinner or dance was adapted to the cocktail-party invitation in a futile attempt to give guests some idea of the degree of formality desired by the hostess.

Notations became:

Formal (coat and tie)

Informal (tie without coat, guayabera)

Casual ( ? )

Plantation ( ? )

Leisure ( ? )

No one had any idea what any of the terms really meant, as eclectic as dress had become. In the end the men who preferred suits, wore them. Those who felt undressed without ties, wore them, even when they deferred to the tropical temperatures by forgoing suit jackets. Those who liked guayaberas, long-sleeved or short, felt well-dressed regardless of what the invitation said. And the rest appeared in sport-shirted comfort, secure in the knowledge that the Colonial era had ended.

The women, meanwhile, fitted their costumes to 1) their assessment of the formality of a particular party, or 2) their fashion impulse of the moment. From the most elaborate cocktail dress to the skimpiest sun dress, from a smart pants suit to the most flamboyant of trousered garb, almost anything was acceptable and almost nothing raised eyebrows. I would have been perfectly comfortable in the dresses that had so embarrassed me at my first Belize parties.