This photo of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi was taken, I’m guessing, right after the 1931 debuts of James Whale‘s Frankenstein and Tod Browning‘s Dracula, which put both middle-aged men on the map. (Born in 1887, Karloff was 44 when Frankenstein made him a star; Lugosi, born in 1882, was nearly 50 when Dracula premiered.) They were obviously at a formal gathering of some kind, but who wears gray socks with a tuxedo? I’m presuming that Karloff realized as he was dressing earlier that evening that his one lonely pair of black evening socks were being laundered — this in itself tells you his financial ship hadn’t yet come in. Lugosi’s sin is almost as bad — black evening socks that aren’t high enough or held up by leg garters, thereby revealing Lugosi’s bare calf. For men of that era, there were few sartorial failings worse than these.