“I think the jeans can’t smell any worse. You can’t get them any dirtier then what they already are, it’s like salt; you can only dissolve a certain amount of salt in water before the water can’t take any more in. It’s the same with jeans and smells and bacteria, you can only put so […]
Tag: clothes
Van Der Waals bra (new patent)
“[…] brassieres (primarily strapless brassieres and but also those with straps), dresses, swimsuits, socks, tops and other articles of clothing (or the like) have a tendency to fall down or off […]” – explains a new (Aug 2016) US patent. The novel methodology for holding them up makes use of intermolecular electrostatic attractive forces known […]
Applause-banning Ig Nobel Winner Lukashenko and his publicly naked citizens
President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who was awarded the 2013 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for forbidding his citizens to applaud in public, has now induced many of his citizens to publicly display themselves — naked — as they engage in their daily work. The TUT.by web site reports [the text here is auto-translated into English]: Undress and […]
No more disheveled kilts? (new patent)
Attention kilt wearers! Does your kilt sometimes look, well . . . wrinkled, matted or otherwise disheveled? Is it hanging properly? If not, help is at hand from inventor Joseph E. Austin of Las Vegas, US. “Like other garments, kilts have been stored and hanged using conventional hangers. Unfortunately, kilts are not like other garments […]
Button-down shirts, analyzed academically by Nathaniel Weiner
Subculture researcher Nathaniel Weiner, (PhD candidate in York University and Ryerson University’s joint PhD program in Communication and Culture) uses Roland Barthes’ notion of ‘fashion narrative’ to elucidate the close relationship between the button-down shirt and the ‘national imaginaries’ of the United States and Britain, in: Transatlantic Translations of the Button-down Shirt (in the journal […]
The naked truth (estimating body shape under clothing)
Remember ‘X-Ray Specs’? “Look at your friend. Is that really his body you ‘see’ under his clothes?” asked the advertisements. Though no doubt disappointing to some, the answer to the question was of course ‘No’. Since their invention however, progress has been made in computerised body visualisation systems, devices which also can’t ‘see’ under peoples […]
Critical Studies in Men’s Underwear
Issue number 2, volume 1, of the journal Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, might be loosely described as “The Underpants Issue”. See for example the paper ‘What lies beneath? Thoughts on men’s underpants’ by Dr Prudence Black, BA SACAE Hons Macquarie MA UTS PhD Sydney, ARC DECRA Fellow, and colleagues. “This article consists of a […]
Neckties and non-linearity avoidance
If you tie a knot in a necktie, you may have noticed that (in general) there are three major probabilities regarding the outcome. Sometimes the thin end is longer than the wide end, sometimes the wide end is longer than the thin end, and sometimes they are (roughly) equal. In 2010, Tomoyoshi Motohiro of the […]
Trouser (pants) creases – a metrological examination
If you’re one those people who wonders about accurate trouser-crease measurement in woolen trousers (pants), you should perhaps turn to the Textile Research Journal, March 1966 36: pp. 264-272, where R.C. Landwehr (of the Western Regional Research Lab, Albany, California) presented an apparatus and procedures to reliably measure wool creases. The ratio of maximum crease […]
Dr. Reed’s medical codpiece theory
If you were a well-to-do gentleman in 15th or 16th century Europe, your closet might well have sported an exuberant codpiece or two. But were they just a foppish whim, or could there have been an underlying necessity behind the codpiece phenomenon? This question caught the attention of Dr. Con Scott Reed, of Sydney, New […]