SHIRT FASHIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 April 1942, Page 4

SHIRT FASHIONS

OLDER WAYS RECALLED. Sir Herbert Morgan’s suggestion that men should use dress shirts for ordinary day wear is being received as if it were something entirely hovel .in the history of Costume, a conception. Which will sound amusing enough to men who ren/ember the last century. In the nineties and even later it used to be the ordinary custom for men to wear shirts with stiff fronts and starched cuffs as a matter of course for their daily ;work in the City and elsewhere. One may be pretty sure, for instance, that in the great private banks of the last century no clerk "■would have thought of being otherwise dressed, and the same was true at least, of the Stock Exchange and the higher branches of the Civil Service. A soft front was certainly “undress.” Careful clerks used to wear protectors for their cuffs while at work. For those who dor one reason or another did not work habitually in stiff white shirts there were certain subterfuges. There was a thing of which one hears little today called a dickey, which was a detachable starched front that could be worn over a flannel shirt with detachable cuffs. But soft shirts, whether white or coloured, in anything but flannel are surely quite a modern development.— “Manchester Guardian” Miscellany.