OFFICE CLOTHES

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 208, 29 May 1926, Page 17

OFFICE CLOTHES

PROBLEM OF THE WOMAN WORKER

In spite of the enormous improvement in the dress of women typists, office workers, and clerks generally, how is it that there is still such a suggestion of "bittiness” about their clothes? One feels that they were all bought separately, or possibly to match one particular hat or jumper, and when that hat or jumper was worn out the other things had to go on with compardons for whom they were never intended. It may be the craze for particular colours that comes over the feminine brain at intervals, which is apt to wreck the best-laid dress schemes, or it may be that the office worker always has to buy her clothes in a hurry, and if what she wants is not available she takes the second best and dashes off to the office. We know, who have only the hour in the mornings when shop assistants are busy with their own shopping and dusting, checking and chat, and the half-hour or quarter of an hour in the evening before closing time when they are dead tired and very cross, what it is to try and shop. It becomes impossible to b'uv anything unless one starts out knowing exactly what one wants There is no opportunity for looking round, no chance of a comparijon or a trying-on, no "trying somewhere else and coming back if I can’t get it, and; you’ll keep it aside for me” that saves the leisured shopper from making hideous mistakes that have to be worn but. There are very few employers who will allow their women employees time off for shopping, on the ground that they do not allow their male clerks off for the same purpose, and one wonders when men do their shopping. Ties, socks, gloves, collars, and handkerchiefs have all to •be bought some time or other, but much of it. is done in the luncheon hour, and more still by mothers and wives at home in the suburbs. The Prevailing Dirt. There is much to be said for the little dressmaker who realises that women office workers have to have special clothes. The ready-made de-

partments of big stores do not cater to the same extent for women who have to look smart, and yet who sit and walk about offices where dirt soils a clean piece of paper in two minutes, where all the chairs and tables are covered with a film of coal dust. They make clothes for the more leisured woman, who goes about in reasonably clean places. As a matter of fact, I think that most city offices arc cleaner than they were, and that is very Inrgelv due io the efforts of the women workers, who were not content that they should remain in blissful filth. And possibly in ten years’ time there will be no' need for women clerks, secretaries, and clerical workers to wear a uniform of black or deep brown, green, or red, and to eschew even the dainty collar and cuff that would have to be washed every day under present conditions. In the winter it is not so difficult (or the woman worker to be well dressed, and to keep her clothes apparently clean, for heavy materials and furs are generally worn and keep dark colours But in the summer it is a real problem bow the city worker shall dress and remain cool and clean. Black, is hot wear and looks dustv and shiny in the heat, unless it is of very good quality. There remains Mack and white, black and grey, black and biege (but if there is much, biege it will require constant washing and cleaning), deep green, dark grey, and naw blue.

Many women workers have to go about among people who can afford better clothes, and among people who arc not obliged to wear a working uniform. and it is extraordinary how little provision is made in most offices for wardrobes and cupboards. If women could have anv sort of wardrobe or chest, where a change of shoes, . a dress, and a hat could be kept, with light gloves, light silk stockings, and make-up articles, how much easier life would be in the summer in the city, and how much more attractive and well groomed the office worker. The majority of offices are still planned for men, and men only. Lavatory accommodation for women is. too often primitive and scanty, mirrors, arc luxuries, light is bad, and there is the eternal war that has to be waged against dirt.—Audrcv Wrangham, in the "Manchester Guardian.”