WHAT WE WEAR

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 126, 25 February 1928, Page 24

WHAT WE WEAR

SENSIBLE CLOTHING FOR MEN

The first objection to men’s clothes is that they are not clean. This is the land and the age of Lister Knowing what he learnt and taught, no surgeon to-day—we may even say no barber—thinks himself professionally decent unless lie wears a coat which can be and often is washed and even sterilised. But this standard of "surgical cleanliless” should teach more than surgeons. Doctors are still content to visit their patients, passing from a scarlet fever case to an expectant mother, or a susceptible child, wearing the same most-decent-looking black coat all the time and day after day—cleaned when and how if at all ? The truth is that we do not think, but are content to fool ourselves (says Crusader in tlie “Spectator”) . We frequently change our shirts, often white and readily "showing the dirt”; and we regard his spotless linen as part of the hallmark of the gentleman. We refrain and had better refrain from asking how many spots—not necessarily visible—are on the cuffs' and sleeves of the same unwashed coat, whether morning coat or dinner jacket or dress coat, which he puts on over the newly cleansed cuffs of his shirt. We have only to imagine our black coats in white and the rest is obvious to anyone. Much more is obvious to the entomologist and bacteriologist, who knows the habits of the domestic fly and the horribly, disgusting!}’ infected condition of the feet wherewith it alights upon our clothes. Most of the clothes of the cleanest, best-groomed, best-valeted man are dangerously dirty.

They are liable to be made dirty from within. If the skin is normal and active, it secretes perspiration—well, the readers of the “Spectator” are above the snobbery which rejects good English, and I will say, the skin secretes sweat in order to keep the blood cool when heat is being rapidly produced by muscular action. At a dance in an overheated and crowded ballroom, a man properly produces much sweat. The ardent advertisers of woollen underwear urge us to wear thick layers of absorbent wool—which, of course, are purely injurious except when we are in danger from external cold. If we are reasonably dressed underneath, the sweat and its contents partly escape into, for instance, the lining of the waistcoat and of the sleeves. Here they remain, for no one takes any steps to remove them—except in so far as the mere water alone escapes by airing. The girl with whom the wretched man was dancing is clothed as if she were a totally different kind of creature, governed by utterly contrary physiological laws: yet the problem of all men and women everywhere, to maintain the temperature of the blood at tlie same right and constant level, never too high and never too low, is exactly the same and can only be solved in exactly the same way, by all of us at all times. In this instance, evidently either the man or the woman is clothed like a fool; and it is not the woman.

There is much more to say about cleanliness, but I must pass on, merely repeating my suggestion of some years past, that the time should speedilv come when a man is allowed to dance in some much washable garment as a Russian blouse.

The garment thus hoped for would have an immense merit, taken for granted in women’s clothes to-day. For though we all know that warm air ascends, we do not act on our knowledge. In our ordinary clothing much warm air is constantly being produced, of course, and it tends to rise. At the neck we may do as we please; we may provide an aperture through which the rising warm air mav escape, thus providing that invaluable disideratum, personal ventilation; or we may close the aperture by various means, a muffler or

a sable necklet, or what not, thereby imprisoning the warm air, arresting the upward flow, with the result, in conditions of cold, that we are kept warm, and saved from chill, to a. degree which many times that extra weight of clothing would not achieve if used in any other way. Thus, we can serve ourselves easily and pleasantly, alike when we wish to keep w’arm and when we wish to keep cool, by closing or opening the aperture through which our blood-warmed air seeks to ascend. Women use this principle. In closed atmospheres they open the neck and are cooled; going out they encircle the neck and are kept warm. Men, however, wear grotesquely stupid collars, of various kinds at almost all times,. interfere with their personal ventilation, and suffer accordingly. At any rate, men do so in England. But everyone who visits the Continent, and tries to learn even whilst he is on holiday, knows that, especially in Germany, men are freeing their necks, as they should, wearing a “Byron collar” or the like. They are not effeminate in appearance, except to the conventionally stupid eye for the first day; after that even such an eye begins to see naturally, and soon learns to admire and respect the well-made masculine neck, the muscles of which have never been atrophied in the modern pillory called a collar—or faux-col, in the French, a mot juste indeed—but have been used and exposed to air and light, so that one’s recollections of the neck of the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican are not affronted by any contrast.

The physiologist who studies and values the thermostatic apparatus whereby, under the direction of at. least three nervous centres in the brain, the blood is maintained at its just temperature, condemns the collar. When he contemplates the starched shirt-front he is joined by the anatomist, who studies the arrangement of the ribs in exquisite relation for the achievement of respiration —making a box or chest both rigid and flexible, strong and delicate, mechanically superb, vitally adaptable, and beautiful. And both psysiologist and anatomist condemn that insult to the chest, a starched shirt-front. Starch is a valuable food; but I, for one, detest food upon my clothes. Beginning with cleanliness, we were led on to questions of ventilation, and thence to questions of movement. No one to-day defends the old corset; it impeded respiration, it tended to displace vital internal organs, and its fundamental vice was that it was hard. No clothing should be hard or tight. To-day we know much, comparatively new about baldness, on which it would be easy to write many articles; but here I will merely observe that a hard-rimmed hat is injurious to the health of the scalp, including tlie hair-follicles, partly by interference with the return of the blood through the compressed surface veins, and partly because the pressure is injurious to the nerves which supply the scalp and which have, like nerves everywhere, trophic or nutritive as well as their familiar motor and sensory functions. Also the opaque hat obstructs the ultra-violet rays which are, incomparably without any remote rival, the best stimulants of the hair-follicles. In respect of hair and scalp, women have begun to do far better for themselves; but men have still everything to learn. The present-day contrast between the sexes begins in childhood. The mothers begin it. I cannot do better than quote my friend Dr. Leonard Hill, the acknowledged master of this subject, who declares that mothers are coddling their boys, but giving their girls the air and light which will make them a race of Amazons that may rule the world. At the recent meeting of the British Association exact evidence was brought forward showing that our girls are rapidly becoming taller, but our boys are not Quite so.