Clothing

As a collector of odd details for this blog, I'll pick up bits and pieces of something that strike me as worthy of exploration from all over.  One such example is this topic, which occurred to me while listening to Episode 73 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, the Mysterious Death of Somerton Man.

The death is mysterious, that's for sure, but I'm not posting on that. Rather, what I'm posting on is that he noted that all of the decedents clothing tags had been cut out.

Clothing tags?

Yes, clothing tags.

Probably most of us don't own clothing with tags with our name written on them.  I don't.  I think perhaps when I was a little kid some of my clothes did, but that was likely that they didn't get lost at school.

But at one time I noticed that my father's old shirts from his Air Force service had them with his name written in them, or in some cases his name was just written inside the collar.  In asking him about it he indicated that was so that when they went to the laundry they'd know whose shirts they were.  I haven't thought about it since.

Now, to add just a bit, I take my work shirts to the dry cleaners, not to have the dry cleaned, but rather to have them laundered. This is very common for people who wear dress shirts every day as the labor of washing, and then starching them, is an inducement to it.  When I was first practicing law I did that, and only after I got married did I start taking them to the laundry in this fashion. To add a bit to that, when we were first married both my wife and I were working and she asked if she should do my laundry.  I told her no, it hadn't even occurred to me until then, as that didn't seem fair to me.  So I did my own, and for a time after that I continued to wash my own dress shirts and then starch them, which I usually did on a weekend day for all of them at one time.

As time went on, that became a pain.  I don't hugely enjoy ironing shirts (although there are still some that I have that I iron and starch myself), if I'm going to wear them to work, so I followed the lead of my coworkers and started taking them in to be laundered, which I still do, although in writing this it occurs to me that now that the kids are gone, and I wake up at some ridiculously early hour, I should perhaps start considering doing them myself once again.

Anyhow, all of this brings up a couple of things to consider, which are: 1) how cheap, and durable, clothes have become and 2) how convenient laundering now is.

Let's do the second one first.  And let's start with the exciting topic of Water Law as it relates to that.

Water law?

Yes, water law.

As anyone who has practiced law in the West knows, water is a critical factor in everything.  The Wyoming Supreme Court noted early in its history that water was vital to the western economy and not too surprisingly, therefore, steam laundries turn out to be one of the preferential uses of the state's water, as set out statutorily:

41-3-102. Preferred uses; defined; order of preference.

(a) Water rights are hereby defined as follows according to use: preferred uses shall include rights for domestic and transportation purposes, steam power plants, and industrial purposes; existing rights not preferred, may be condemned to supply water for such preferred uses in accordance with the provisions of the law relating to condemnation of property for public and semi-public purposes except as hereinafter provided.

(b) Preferred water uses shall have preference rights in the following order:

(i) Water for drinking purposes for both man and beast;

(ii) Water for municipal purposes;

(iii) Water for the use of steam engines and for general railway use, water for culinary, laundry , bathing, refrigerating (including the manufacture of ice), for steam and hot water heating plants, and steam power plants; and

(iv) Industrial purposes.

(c) The use of water for irrigation shall be superior and preferred to any use where water turbines or impulse water wheels are installed for power purposes; provided, however, that the preferred use of steam power plants and industrial purposes herein granted shall not be construed to give the right of condemnation.

As we've been doing this blog for quite a while now, this in fact turns out to be one of those topics I've addressed before, so I'll link that item in, as I'll often do.

The Journal tapped right into the history of the shirt, partially, and that goes where I want to go a bit here as well.  The Journal observed:

Though the breezily incomplete look also enjoyed a vogue in the bohemian 1970s, its roots go back to the era when collars were starchy, detachable things that men fastened to a basic collarless shirt to appear properly dressed. (The advantage: You could just launder the collars while rewearing a shirt a few times.) That so many contemporary designers are now marketing such shirts to be worn on their own speaks to the steady casualization of modern men’s style. First went the tie, now goes the collar. “Guys just aren’t wearing ties as much,” said Mr. Olberding. “And with a band collar, it’s the anti-tie shirt. You just simply can’t wear [a tie].”

Yep, exactly right (but wait, it's a bit more complicated than that actually).  Hence the scarcity of the shirt type as well.

While the thought of rewearing a shirt, rather than a collar, probably would strike a modern audience as gross, the Journal is right on. We've dealt with it at length in another post, but before the invention of the modern washing machine, people re-wore clothes. They had fewer clothes, they wore quite a bit of wool, and they didn't wash things nearly as often. Frankly, people could do that today, it would not raise a might stench like you might suppose, but people generally don't do that.  I, for one, will toss an Oxford cloth work shirt in the laundry pile after I wear it at a work for one day.  I could, I'm sure, get away with hanging it back up and pressing it for a second, or third, go, but I don't.

But if I had to wash it by hand, I might. And therefore, back in the day, it was easier and practical to have a starched collar that I'd launder first.  Collars get dirty.  And the shirt cold keep on keeping on.  When I was home and not wanting to wear the collar I'd detach it, which of course would give the shirt its casual look by default right then.

 Drew Clothing  Company advertisement for collars, April 1913.  Man, who hasn't had these problems?

When I say "I'd launder", I should note that I mean I'd likely send the collars to the laundry.  Indeed, some laundries advertised this very service.  For example, when Lusk Wyoming had a new laundry come in, prior to World War One, it specifically advertised washing and starting collars.

This small building in Wheatland, Wyoming is still in use.  A newer sign above the door says "Coin Operated Laundry", so perhaps its still in its original use, although presumably not as a "steam laundry".  Its location is just off of the rail line, which was likely a good location for a laundry, although this is a surprisingly small structure, much smaller than the laundry in Lusk was. Anyhow, while we think of laudrimats as being the domain of students and apartment dwellers today, prior to the invention of the washing machine they were a big deal for regular people.  From Painted Bricks.

Indeed, that laundries would  advertise such a service says a lot about the state of washing prior to the invention of the household washing machine.  Most people don't send routine washing to the laundry unless they live in an apartment or are students. But at that time, they did quite often, as the alternatives were basically non existent. Today, quite a few businessmen and women still retain the practice of having their shirts laundered, I should note, and indeed I do (something I adopted after I got married for some reason, as I used to launder all my shirts myself, but after we had kids, it seemed to be a chore I was happy to omit. . . maybe some things don't change as much as we think).  Laundries were so important at the time that they are specifically given a priority in the state's laws on water appropriation.

41-3-102. Preferred uses; defined; order of preference.

(a) Water rights are hereby defined as follows according to use: preferred uses shall include rights for domestic and transportation purposes, steam power plants, and industrial purposes; existing rights not preferred, may be condemned to supply water for such preferred uses in accordance with the provisions of the law relating to condemnation of property for public and semi-public purposes except as hereinafter provided.

(b) Preferred water uses shall have preference rights in the following order:
(i) Water for drinking purposes for both man and beast;
(ii) Water for municipal purposes;
(iii) Water for the use of steam engines and for general railway use, water for culinary, laundry, bathing, refrigerating (including the manufacture of ice), for steam and hot water heating plants, and steam power plants; and
(iv) Industrial purposes.
(c) The use of water for irrigation shall be superior and preferred to any use where water turbines or impulse water wheels are installed for power purposes; provided, however, that the preferred use of steam power plants and industrial purposes herein granted shall not be construed to give the right of condemnation

So I'm covering old ground here, but a century ago, "steam laundries" were a big deal as they had hot water and steam.  You could create that in your own home, of course, but it was a chore.  A chore, I might note, that many women (and it was mostly women) endured routinely, but many people, for various reasons, made use of steam laundries when they could.

Women working in a commercial laundry.  Laundry workers were often female or, oddly enough, Chinese immigrants.

Working in a laundry, we'd note, was hard grueling work, but it was also one of the few jobs open to women, all lower class economically women, at the time.

Laundry workers and suffragettes marching, 1914.

Of course, women, and again it was mostly women, did do laundry at home as well, which was also hard, grueling, work.

Pearline, a laundry soap, advertisement from the 1910s which urged parents to "train up" children to use it.

In short, washing clothes, as we've dealt with elsewhere in other contexts, was a pain.  That meant you washed less often, quite frankly.

That might not have been that big of a deal, particularly if you could take your clothes to the steam laundry, if you had a lot of clothes, but people didn't.

We've gone through some of this before in terms of the change in styles over the years, but this brings us back to the Mysterious World podcast.  Clothes were expensive, or at least they were considerably more expensive in real terms than they are today, so people had less of them.

Putting this into current economic figures that make sense today is difficult to do, but the cost of clothing in the United States has been dropping for decades.  And while people like to imagine otherwise, with some justification, over the long term, say a century, a much larger percentage of Americans are now middle middle class, upper middle class, or even moderately wealthy, than in prior generations.  A century ago and well into the middle of the 20th Century, most Americans were middle class, but they were lower middle class and in fact lived in constant threat of slipping into poverty.  With less money to go around, and the average cost of many things higher than today in real terms, or taking up a larger percentage of an already stretched budget, all sorts of things simply demanded more of a person's income.  That's one of the things about the "good old days" that people don't recall very accurately.

Starting in the 1970s clothing manufacture started to dramatically depart the American shores and go overseas.  Just in the period from 1994 to 2005 the US lost 900,000 textile jobs to overseas manufacturing, and that doesn't include the tens of thousands of jobs that were lost before that.  Interestingly, it's slightly rebounded quite recently, but clothing made in the US now is actually fairly rare.  The net result has been a massive depression in price in clothing.

At the same time, the inclusion of synthetics, like it or not, has made clothing incredibly durable, although lots of us (myself included) try to avoid synthetics if we can.  The added durability of synthetics is so pronounced that the military purposely uses a cotton synthetic blend in its field clothing, as it makes it tougher, and it is tough.  On a personal level, while I always try to buy cotton work (i.e., office) shirts if I can, I have one button down blended shirt that my wife bought me either when we were first married or maybe even before that I still wear in my shirt rotational line up.  That means that the shirt is now 25 years old and still in good shape, with sharp colors.  I've gone through a lot of good cotton oxford cloth button down shirts in that time that didn't last as long.

By and large, synthetic clothing aside, clothing is just well made now.  Well made and cheap, for the most part.  That means we tend to have quite a bit more of it than we did in earlier eras, which means that all of it in turn last a lot longer than previously. 

Indeed I've heard some people lament the passing of "bespoke" clothing, but by and large, it isn't really necessary now and it can't compete with ready made clothing.

The problem today is that, like food, we tend to have too much clothing.  It's an irony of modern life, and one that makes our appreciation of conditions of the past a bit difficult to grasp based on our common understanding of our own present lives.