reach-me-down

All this might have created a reach-me-down revolutionary.

As he did so the eternal feminine rejoiced at his tall, straight, cleanly handsomeness, in spite of the reach-me-down which clothed it.

She would know what life meant to that skimpy woman in the green plaid, would inspect that new specimen, the jaunty boy who made his good clothes look like an ordinary "reach-me-down."

There might have been a far-away reminiscence of Perthshire moors clinging to them, or earlier memories of a famous creator in Bond Street; but suggestion of the reach-me-down shops from which New York clerks clothe themselves there was none.

Yet sentence after sentence in the dialogue is so well-worn that it's threadbare: a patchwork of salt-of-the-earth, reach-me-down cockney phrases.