HEAT AND DRESS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 362, 25 October 1932, Page 7

HEAT AND DRESS

PROBLEMS IN ATTIRE DURING LONDON HEAT WAVE. A remarkable incident of the great heat wave in London on August 19 is related by a writer in the Daily Express. j "I am sorry, but we cannot serve you with an iee cream unless you roll your sleeves down." Merrily the narrator left his seventh city resaurant, with the momentous knowledge that rolled-up shirt sleeves constituted inadequate dress in which a man might eat a twopenny ice in public. He had been told at six other restaurants that a shirt with rolledup sleeves wqs not allowed, but that a shirt which had the sleeves cut off was permitted. The heat wave had perplexed restaujrant managers with dress |problems, but by midday at most places they had evolved a rough code of rules — for men. Thus: Braces, shirt sleeves and collarless shirts were not allowed, but cricket shirts, shorts, shorts and shirts with the sleeves cut off were permitted. The difference between arms when they appeared beneath shirt sleeves rolled up and sleeves cut off at the top remain vague. And so the perplexed man, with thousands of other city workers, encased in well-moistened collars and elbows concealed from the sensitive gaze of restaurant managers, ate j tbeir ices or drank from tall tinkling glasses, with the waitress unshocked by so much as a bare wrist. But the city girls, stockingless, hatless and sleeveless, triumphed over the shimmering heat of the city. Their bare necks, legs and arms were a mockery to us suffocating males. Ip. the West End pyjama girls were allowed in the restaurants, but for men shirt sleeves were^even more strictly forbidden. One manager said: "We can allow a man to. wear an open sports shirt with collar and half-length sleeves. We do not encourage people in hiking dress. Women can wear what they like ; we do not mind women in beach pyjamas and bathing suits so loiig as they are normally respectable." And so the unfashionable sex spent a day of shirt sleeves and suffocation.