Shirts
by simonelli
As a recent essay on Trousers was so well received, I have been urged by my followers to work my way up the human body and discuss shirts.
Shirts are a covering for the upper body for those of us not of the football hooligan fraternity who prefer to remain shirtless at all times.
Two large rectangles of material cover the front and back and two long tubes of material, called ‘sleeves’, cover the arms. This is essential. If you have arms.
There are various types of shirt. The smart shirt, for the busy business executive who is keen to look just like all the other executives in the City, consists of buttons up the front (more on ‘buttons’ in a future blog) and buttons on the ‘cuff’ (more on ‘cuffs’ in a future blog) of the sleeve. Some tailors (a bit like ‘sailors’ without going to sea) don’t add buttons to the cuffs but prefer to fleece their clients of hard earned cash by selling ‘cuff links’ (of which, more etc, etc) which secure the cuffs together with a piece of cheap metal.
For the more impecunious amongst you, there is the polo shirt and the T-Shirt. These garments are short sleeved variants with no buttons, or in the case of Polo shirts, just three. They are called ‘Polo’ shirts because they were standard workwear in the Polo Mint factory which workers would discard at the end of day and put on their Turnbull and Assers to go home in. This prevented them from smelling too minty and infesting their houses with the smell.
The T-Shirt was thought to have been invented by Mr T of the ‘A’ Team, but the person who thought this obviously had no other thoughts and this theory was quickly dismissed.
Wikipedia, which is NOT supposed to make things up, says
“In the seventeenth century men’s shirts were allowed to show, with much the same erotic import as visible underwear today.[4] In the eighteenth century, instead of underpants, men “relied on the long tails of shirts … to serve the function of drawers.”
This situation remains today, in many parts of the Upper Classes. Ask Prince Charles if he’s wearing Y-Fronts (of which more in a future blog…) and he’ll just stare at you uncomprehendingly, thus proving that he uses his shirt tails.
Shirts. Where would we be without them?
