Designed to vex the mortal frame

There are of course also free men, and not a few of them, who, in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire, transgress the theoretical line between man's and woman's dress, to the extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the mortal frame; but everyone recognizes without hesitation that such apparel for men is a departure from the normal. We are in the habit of saying that such dress is "effeminate"; and one sometimes hears the remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman.

Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, Chapter 7: Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture

I am saddened to admit that it has been some time since I have seen a gentleman as well dressed as a footman. But then it has also been some time since it was common to write as elegantly as Veblen does - not in a showy or especially talented way, but rather as you or I might with a decent education and a justified assumption that our readers expected our sentences not only to be sturdy enough to support our arguments but also to serve as ornaments. But whatevs; there's no point trying to emulate the leisure class circa 1899. As Swinburne said around the same time (well, probably not that close in time) in an essay on Shakespeare:

Each century or so, if we accept the convenient and casual division of manners and of styles by the rough and ready reckoning of successive dates, has its own natural conventions of life and art, from which none can entirely escape but by servile affectation of an obsolete manner or fatuous affectation of an unnatural style.

And since there can be few things worse than servility, fatuousness and affectation I'm going to have to refrain from using the expression "designed to vex the mortal frame" in conversation, but have been unable to refrain from typing it no less than three times in this post.