SOCIOLOGY

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 107, 7 May 1923, Page 3

SOCIOLOGY

MORE RATIONAL DRESS

REMARKS OF PROFESSOR

HUNTER.

The Workers' Educational Association class in sociology was addressed by Professor T. A. Hunter in the Education ; Board room on Friday evening. ~" The lectures already given, remarked Professor Hunter, have shown that society is subject to the law of evolution. Man seems to have passed through two great stages—savagery and barbarism—and is now in a third, that we call civilisation. These periods may be subdivided, and investigators have endeavoured to determine the characteristics that mark the development to a higher state, e.g., discovery of fire, the bow and arrow, pottery, domestication of animals, etc. If the theory be true, we ought to find it confirmed, at least in its main features, by corresponding changes in the leading aspects of man's social life, be it his food or clothing; his tools or his habitation; his art or his religion. For the fact on which we base this confirmation, wo may turn to the records to see if our ancestors went through the stages suggested by the theory, to the tribes on the earth today, to see if a classification, of them accords with the theory. 1 The production of the means of existence, said the lecturer, is the most important condition of life and the basis of all other development. Man's advance has depended "on the fact that he has been able to amplify the sources of hie food supply. At the lowest stage man depends wholly on the food supplied by Nature. It is the age- of hunting and fishing, upon which, many of the most primitive of the people on the earth to-day (e.g., the Australian aboriginal) depend. Other tribes, such as the Mongolian and Tarter nomads., depend on the breeding of cattle. But the great mass of mankind depends on husbandry, that exists in' all stages of efficiency, fxoin the most primitive form of hoe-culture to the most developed form of spade-culture (as among the Chinese), or the commerce system of culture, based on international trade, that is found among European races. CHANGES IN CLOTHING. The changes in clothing show a similar development from a natural state of nakedness, with more or less ornamentation by paintjnz and tatooing, and the use of natural materials such as skins, leaves, etc., through dress, simple and durable, but produced artificially from materials, to our own dress of fashion, of great complexity, modelled on the figure and .subject to frequent changes. The origin of dress, he said;,, has been traced to the need of protection, desire For ornament, and the feeling of shame. The history of this .feeling, however, ssems to show that far. from it being the.cause of drese, this latter is one of the causes of the appearance of the feeling of "bodily shame." People readily apply the principle of evolution to. past ages and to the primitive _people on the earth to-day, but they find it difficult to think of themselves as; subject to evolution. Their customs and institutions seem to them tp have a fixity and permanence that all history shows wcus lacking in former times and among other peoples. Thus one writer says of dress : "Our forefathers, the Cimbri, for example, balanced their powerful naked bodies on their huge shields, and went toboganninß over the snow drifts of the Alps into Italy, with shouts of joy. If we think of these naked forerunners, and then of ourselves in 'our respectable, complicated clothing, we see their thoughts and aspirations were as different from ours as was their costume or lacß of it. The extraordinary "changefulness of man and his adaptability give well-grounded expectation that our successors will rejoice in a nobler and more rational dress than that of the twentieth century. A rational dress ought, before everything else, to b§ individual. For this, however, a first era of society must arise, ,a society of free individuals, who dare to wear a dress peculiar to themselves, apart from classes or mas*, restrictions. Uutil then all criticism and dress. reform. are but labour lost." It is only a thorough knowledge of the past lend present that can give -us insight into the future, concluded the lectur.er.