CLOTHING FOR MEN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20355, 12 March 1928, Page 13

CLOTHING FOR MEN.

SOME SUGGESTIONS. SPOTLESS LINEN. The first objection to men's clothes is that they are not clean. This is the land and the age of Lister. Knowing what ho learnt and taught, no surgeon to-day—we may even say no barber—thinks himself professionally decent unless he wears a coat which can be and often is washed and even sterilised. But this standard of “ surgical cleanliness ” should teach more than surgeons, writes “ Crusader," in the Spectator. Doctors aro 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 ail? The truth is that we do not think, but are content to foul ourselves. We froqucnly change our shirts, often white -*nd readily “ ahowing the dirt "; and we regard his spotless linen, as part of the hall-mark of the gentleman. We refrain and had better refraia 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 imagina our black coats in white and the rest is obvious to anyone. Much more is obvious to the entomologists and bacteriologist, who know the habiis of the domestic fly and the horribly, disgustingly infected condition of the feet wherewith it alights upon our clothes. Most of the clothes of the cleanest, host-groomed, best-valeted man ara 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 hy muscular action. At a daaca in an overheated and crowded ballroom, a man properly produces much sweat. Tha ardent advertisers of woollen underwear urge us to wear thick layers of absorbent wool—which, of course, are purely injurious except when we are 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. Hern they remain, for no one takes any steps to remove them—except in so far as the mere water alone escapes by airing. Tire girl with whom the wretched man was dancing is clothed as if she were a totally different kind of creature, governed by utterly coni frary physiological laws; yet the problem of all men and women everywhere, to maintain the temperature of the blood at the same right and constant level, never too high and never too low, is exactly the same and can only bo solved in exactly the same way, fay 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 fime should speedily come when a man is allowed to ddnee in some such washable garment jis a Russian blouse. PERSONAL VENTILATION. 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 t> rise. At the neck we may do as we please: we may provide an aperture through which the rising warm air may escape, thus providing that invaluable desideratum—personal ventilation; or we may clone tha 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, m conditions of cold, that we are kept warm, and saved from chill, to a degree wnich 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 *o keep warm 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 atmosphere 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 *n Germany, men are freeing their neck*, as they should, weaving a “ Byron collar " or the like. They are not effeminate in pearance, 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 this wellmade masculine neck, the muscles of which have never been atrophied in the modern pillory called a collar—or fauxcol, 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. AIDS TO RESPIRATION. The physiologist who* studies and values tne 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—nuking a box or chest both rigid and flexible, strong and delicate, mechanically superb, vitally adaptable and beautiful. And both physiologist 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 'erf nn to questions of ventilation, and thence to questions of movement. No one today defends the old corset; it impeded respiration, it, tended to displace vital internal organs, and its fundamental vioo was that it was hard. No clothing should bo haid 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-ninrned hat is injurious to the health of the scalp, including the hairfollicles, partly by interference with tha return of the blond through the compressed surface veins, and partly because the. pressure is injurious to the nerves wh'oh supply the scale ami which have,. like nerves everywhere, trophic or nutritive as well as their familiar motor and sensory functions. Also the onaoue hat obstructs the ultra-violet rays which arc, incomparably, without anv remote rival, the best stimulants of the fair-follicles. In respect of h-iir and sculp. women have begun to do far better for themselves; but men have still everything to learn. The present-day contrast between tha sexes begins in childhood. The mothers begin it. I cannot do better than quote in- friend Dr Tamnarcl Hill, the acknowledge:! master of this subject, who declares that mothers arc coddling their boys, but giving their girls the air and light which will make of them a race of Amazons that may rule the world,. At the recent meeting of the British Association exact evdenca was brought forward showing that- our girls aro rapidly becoming taller, but our boys are not. Quito so.