Things that time forgot.

[Count Boso]

Semaphore indicators, IIRC.

Trafficators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficators

Five Boys Chocolate. Desperation Pacification Expectation Acclamation Realisation ..... it's Frys!



Sorry, mixed up with the forgotten food

[vinteuil]

.

... yesterday I saw someone with leather elbow-patches on his jacket.

When did I last see such?? Ages and ages ago. Used to be the preserve of seedy schoolmasters, history and geography predominantly, to go along with nauseating pipes.

Or was that just Wiltshire in the 50s and 60s?





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[french frank]

... yesterday I saw someone with leather elbow-patches on his jacket.

When did I last see such?? Ages and ages ago. Used to be the preserve of seedy schoolmasters, history and geography predominantly, to go along with nauseating pipes.

Or was that just Wiltshire in the 50s and 60s?

I had leather cuffs put on my favourite (ailing) travel jacket quite recently. It already had reinforced elbows. But, yes, pipe-smoking schoolmasters with patches on their elderly sports jackets: the days of Make Do And Mend like schoolkids having the toes cut out of their leather sandals.

Our council recycling page says of old clothes: "We can only take usable or wearable textiles." Why would anyone put out wearable clothes for recycling (cue for joke: "What do you do with your old clothes?")?

[Cockney Sparrow]

Its impact on the environment....... Any attempt to increase the useful life of clothes is beneficial. All the better if the wearer can shrug off the disapprobation.......

See here:

https://www.traid.org.uk/

That charity is very London centric and I suspect benefits from upmarket and little used donations. I've had a major clear out and will be getting some of my clothes (quality, not exactly upmarket) to a friend in Traid's area for an arranged collection where several friends and acquaintances are grouping their donations together. We get a lot bags for "charity" collections through the door but I know only a small percentage gets to the charity usually - and if I put the unused bag out, its never collected on collection day.

The TRAID charity sponsors textile worker/industry projects esp. in the sweatshops of the world where most of them are made, and also creative re-making and upcycling workshops and initiatives in the UK.

The rest of my cast offs will go to the fibre recycling at the local tip......

[Zucchini]

You certainly don't see many people wearing gilets with elbow patches these days ...

[Serial_Apologist]

You certainly don't see many people wearing gilets with elbow patches these days ...

Surely gilets are those quilted puffa outfits, uisually in navy blue or dark grey, sometimes armless, sometimes hooded. I've never ever seen one with elbow patches. However Sainsbury's outfitters dept were selling very cheap mock-tweed style sports jackets a few years ago with suede elbow patches already fitted, and I bought two, which surprisingly lasted a few years, if ever more mishapenly.

I think the point about elbow patching up jackets is that the age in which one did this as of norm was one in which clothes were made to last longer, and, in the case of winter wear, to be much better at keeping the cold out than anything but the big michelin man-styled puffa jackets that have now ubiquitously replaced what we would once have defined as "style" with an equivalent of Mao overalls. Central heating was less ubiquitous back then, though.

When my father died aged 92 in 2002 I opened his wardrobe to find within clothing he had been accumulating since before "the War", including what was presumably his demob suit, a thick dark grey pinstripe woolen double breasted one, a set of tails I palmed off on a local amateur theatre group, and a ginger-coloured sports jacket in some coarse kind of material, horsehair? - with those leather buttons. Its only fault was the worn-out lining, which would have once been "quality" compared with the linings that always give out years in advance of the rest of today's product, and it, the jacket once belonging to the much slimmer dad of before my time whose size and proportions I myself had now assumed, proved both warm and comfortable for the few more years it lasted until clothes moths got at it.

The turnover in fashions and styles that came in in the 1960s came to an effective halt when sportswear became the de rigueur of youth apparel in the freedom-loving and spending 1980s, when those behind the Iron Curtain enviously clamoured for the illusions of "choice", which was in truth as much enforced standardisation as the hoodie puffas, baseball caps and trainers of the unending today and the two style alternatives of the demob suit in the 1940s, single-or double-breasted. Yet people matched and patched - anyone doubting this is recommended to watch any footage of the crowds ordinary folk attending the Festival of Britain in still ration-bound London in 1951 for the range of styles, materials, patterns and colours on display. For all the quality availability afforded by charity shops, we men, especially, look as boring sartorially as we did in the early 1960s. But we had some things to rebel against back then, didn't we?

[oddoneout]

You certainly don't see many people wearing gilets with elbow patches these days ...

Or any other days surely as gilets don't have arms to sew the patches to. Or perhaps you were making ze yolk?

[Zucchini]

Or any other days surely as gilets don't have arms to sew the patches to. Or perhaps you were making ze yolk?

... bravo! yes

[oddoneout]

I had leather cuffs put on my favourite (ailing) travel jacket quite recently. It already had reinforced elbows. But, yes, pipe-smoking schoolmasters with patches on their elderly sports jackets: the days of Make Do And Mend like schoolkids having the toes cut out of their leather sandals.

Our council recycling page says of old clothes: "We can only take usable or wearable textiles." Why would anyone put out wearable clothes for recycling (cue for joke: "What do you do with your old clothes?")?

Presumably because they are selling them to firms that deal with clothes rather than rags - same as those supposed charity fund-raising doorstep collections which go to a company which donates a small amount to the named charity. Sadly, too may people think the donated goods go to the charity shops.
The trade in used clothes/textiles is another which has been hit by post-Brexit problems. I don't know if they have been solved yet (to do with fibre content and country of manufacture declarations needed to export to the eastern European countries which do the sorting for onward sale) or whether councils are facing difficulties as the traders won't take the clothes, or perhaps not in the same quantities as previously. The demand from Africa has also changed I believe which will have a knock-on effect.

[eighthobstruction]

we had some things to rebel against back then, didn't we?

....and a problem was (due to lack of money) once you bought new clothes in 60/70's and found them impractical/uncomfortable/immediately not in fashion/just plain stupid or horrible colour/ washed incredibly badly.....you still had to wear them........but they did provide photo albums full of snaps for my children to laugh at....

....clogs....

[oddoneout]

....and a problem was (due to lack of money) once you bought new clothes in 60/70's and found them impractical/uncomfortable/immediately not in fashion/just plain stupid or horrible colour/ washed incredibly badly.....you still had to wear them........but they did provide photo albums full of snaps for my children to laugh at....

....clogs....

Now called crocs...

[teamsaint]

Platform tickets ?

[french frank]

Presumably because they are selling them to firms that deal with clothes rather than rags

I wasn't so much querying why the council might want textiles to be usable or wearable as why people wouldn't be using or wearing them rather than putting them in a recycling box. I don't call giving away wearable cast-offs 'recycling'.

My new repairs man, Hamid, has just put a very professional patch on the knee of my jeans. I was interested to see that he put a circular patch on the inside over the hole rather than my old repairs man who put a rectangular patch on the outside over the hole. I shan't know what to do with them when the other knee gets a hole as the council will be even less likely to take them. It will be an endless round of right knee patch, left knee patch, right knee patch, left … Now the young things buy their jeans new with ready-made rips to save them time.

[Serial_Apologist]

....and a problem was (due to lack of money) once you bought new clothes in 60/70's and found them impractical/uncomfortable/immediately not in fashion/just plain stupid or horrible colour/ washed incredibly badly.....you still had to wear them........but they did provide photo albums full of snaps for my children to laugh at....

....clogs....

One pretty well universal opinion young women had about Mary Quant's outfits and hairdos was how practical and comfortable they were, compared with their parent's generation's acquiescence with the notion that one just carried on wearing the sorts of clothes and styles Mum and Dad had accepted. Indeed all preceding generations. I don't think Mary Quant was in any way to blame for the way in which big business took over the fashion business by the mid-60s, thereby ensuring poor quality materials and styles changing every year to make sure one had to completely ditch last year's image for this year's, but any cultural figure with influence on the young in that period tends to be blamed for consumerism in the form it quickly took on. The hippy thing was very much about making one's own styles, awakening into the beauties of the non-Western, and questioning stereotypical role models and the wastefulness of consumer culture along the way. The laughter that came after re-assured the man and woman in the Clapham omnibus that all was well, and nothing had really changed apart from the desirability of substances and sensory obliteration to alleviate the mental consequences of what lay ever further beyond the power of the individual to remedy, or in whose existence the individual was complicit, eg the role of cocaine in stimulating activity in the financial sector.

[JimD]

Soor Plooms