Naked Attire

Naked Attire ©

By

Michael Casey

We are born naked, then we get our bum slapped, we are weighed and washed and then parcelled and given to our mum. Wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger is the most famous birth.

Pink for a girl and blue for a boy, this is the tradition. Though some liberals like to do the opposite, just to prove they are liberal, I even heard one man called his son Sue, or was that Johnny Cash?

In China they have the trap door for children, same as the old long-johns in Westerns. We all dress our kids up to look like this or too look like that. Little caps on their heads too, as posh as Posh Spice’s kids. But she IS a fashion designer, so why should we “punish” our kids by copying those we read about in OK magazine, our little mites must copy the latest reality tv star.

I believe in Victorian times boys were dressed up as girls till a certain age, you can google that for yourselves. Though I do understand the concept of hand me downs, I do have 3 elder brothers. So my first pair of long trousers was in the summer of 1970, an almost worn out pair of puke coloured cords.

My mother sat on an old barn chair in the garden and took them up for my short legs. Then ever so proud I ran up and down the garden with my hands in the pockets, I was so proud and happy.  Prior to that it was shorts and long socks with elastic to hold them up. 

At school is when we all have to dress up the first time. School uniform, though I’m old enough to remember we didn’t really have a uniform in primary school. I cannot remember any particular coloured jumper and so on, though it’s a long time ago so I could be wrong.

At grammar school you have the school tie, and a blazer too, this was a big deal. I know because my one wore out at the cuffs and my mum demanded a replacement. Only they refused to give a bigger size, out of spite. I can just remember a man asking me about the Scouts, I made a very derogatory reply. He asked did I know what this badge meant on his lapel. I did not know, I think later my brother said he was a scout master.

So dress code enters your life, even in summer there was a dress code, as it was hot we could remove the school tie. However shirt collars  had to be splayed open a la Saturday Night Fever, though the film had yet to be produced.

When you leave school you can dress to please yourself. I had always loved ties and worn one in primary school, I had an Aston Villa one, as one of the lodgers gave it to me. Now a “grown-up” I dressed in jeans and a shirt and tie. I could have been a member of Status Que. I do remember Caroline  and so on.

So on to work, and I ended up in a computer room, market research into alcohol sales. There I wore my shirt and tie plus jeans. That was my uniform and brown shoes. I wore brown shoes as they were cheaper than black ones. As we did a lot of paper handling we weren’t forced to wear trousers, our excuse was they would split as we were always moving about and bending to load and unload paper,A3 sized standard continuous listing paper.

When I started to work at a hotel I had to wear a uniform, but thankfully I didn’t in the end. This was due to the fact of having a big aspidistra, if you know what I mean. So I ended up wearing my own trousers, and an old suit jacket I had. Because I was nearly 20 years older than the front desk staff and my white hair everybody assumed I was the manager, until I offered to carry their bags.

Later they found a jacket to fit my chest size, and I had an almost uniform jacket, but my own pants. The thing about working in a hotel for 3 years is that thanks to all the exercise, up to 20 miles a week of walking alone. My chest size went up 2 inches, and as I talked a lot too my neck size went up an inch. So I am 18.5 inch neck size and 46 inch chest. Then there is the 4 star deluxe food, so my belly also went up 2 inches. But in black you can hardly tell.

Finally with regret I left, they messed my shifts, so I left, seeing my toddler children was important to me, more than any job. So I left. Just as I was leaving we were all fitted for a really nice blue suit, I was so pleased with it, we all were. Though I never got to wear it, as I had gone.

For my print room days at a law firm it was business professional, I couldn’t look like a tramp as very important business was being done at the law firm, image was so important. Lawyers wore very expensively nice suits, and the girls wore the female equivalent. I was allowed one concession I could take the tie off while inside the confines of the print room. It was 30degrees in there once all the industrial sized copiers were in use. And we stood all day too. If I left the print room I had to put a tie on. They were a really great company they really looked after their staff.

In my Esol teaching days I wore shirt and tie with trousers, business professional they call it, though I still wore my brown shoes. It’s not too much of an imposition. So that was my teacher look.

Now as you can see from my websites and LinkedIn I wear rugby shirts, very bright rugby shirts. Polos some of them, they are like my like my writing colourful and interesting. Though some may say my writing is like my dress sense, questionable.

So on it goes, attire, how we dress for this and who we dress for that. I did go to a friend’s wedding once, the evening bit, dressed in a black leather jacket. Dave said I looked like Marlon Brando, but I didn’t make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. I did write a poem for his wedding, I later published in Japan but that’s another story.

How we dress makes us feel happy, some may even be Nudists, free to the elements and the wind. I could of course never be a Nudist, I’d fail the physical, and I’d need hair dye all over my body, but not on my head as I’m happy with the colour there.

If you think of fashion the closer you are to being a Nudist, the more fashionable it is. Less is more, as they say, the less material used, the more expensive it is. So if you think of the Emperor’s New Clothes, that really was so so very expensive.

As for Miley Cyrus, she is such a great singer, and I mean that most sincerely as Hughie Green might say, and as she’s so pretty too, so she must know a thing or two about fashion. But she knows nothing about economics or her manager is stealing all her money, cos she can never afford enough clothes.