#distractability

i’ve already done a text post on ladies’ undergarments here, and people can look here and here for all my photo posts on men’s and women’s undergarments, respectively. but some more text info on men’s:

the things closest to the skin we’ll see are the shirt and the drawers/underpants, so that’s what i’ll be talking about. 

shirts were made very simply, just out of simple rectangles sewn together. since the majority of the shirt would be hidden beneath the trousers and the waistcoat, it really didn’t need to hug every curve, just for the lengths of the torso, sleeves, and collar to be appropriate. most often they were made of linen, but cotton ones could be found too! they tended to look like this:

key notes on the shirts:

the extent of the ruffles and the height of the collar could vary (many many shirts had no ruffles at all, especially the later you get into the decade!), but fashionable ones usually had fancier ruffles and higher collars! higher collars made more room for fancier cravats/stocks, as well as an attractively long neck. the collars on both of these ones are folded down, but when properly worn they’d be straight up. and because waistcoats at this point cut pretty low on the chest, there ought to be something to fill up the empty space in the outfit there, and ruffles work well! fancy pleats were also an option, more than vaguely reminiscent of the shirts we wear with tuxedos today! but i like the ruffles better, and it turns out it’s very difficult to find a nice extant pleated example for some reason????

good sleeves would be pretty poofy, within reason. pleats are thus gathered at the shoulder and cuff. but look how the shoulder pleats hang a little low in order to lengthen and slope down the shoulder silhouette there! isn’t that neat! you can’t see it too well in the photos, but hopefully you get the idea.

you’ll notice how very low the shirt hangs down to -- that’s because drawers weren’t always a necessity! good shirts could cover up the privates well enough. i can’t attest to how comfortable that would be, but i guess if it was a thing like that it can’t have been too bad!

when drawers were worn, they’d for the most part look more or less like this:

though there are less common examples that look like this:

and quite rare, but ultimately still more or less sensible examples like this just for fun (linking cause there’s also a brief semi-explanation of the shape there & at the source, and i’ll save everyone’s dashboards by not making this post even longer. plus i’m too lazy to copy and paste sometimes so sue me)

i’d be very remiss not to link ellie valsin’s much nicer, more detailed post on all this here! give that a read!

the convenient thing about all that underwear is that it’s a really great segue into sleepwear!

the thing is with sleepwear is that it didn’t necessarily have to be entirely different stuff from underwear! if you didn’t have the money to buy entirely different clothes just for sleeping, men and women could pretty easily just sleep in their shirts and chemises. it might get a little bit cold, but still comfortable enough.

for people who did have the money, there were a few key differences! nightclothes might be made of cotton instead of linen, if it’s particularly cold. since bedrooms often didn’t have their own fireplace, that was very possible! the shape was also a little different; like, compare this chemise:

to these nightgowns:

longer hem and sleeves, higher collar, lots of buttons! these weren’t rules so much as patterns, but worth noting.

and compare one of the shirts seen above to this nightshirt:

and while drawers were possible for men’s just general underwear, there was really no reason to wear them to bed.

men’s trousers followed the general shape of the drawers (or, rather, the drawers followed the trousers) in that the butt needed to be quite baggy in order to move properly, but otherwise different in color, waist height, leg length, and amount of buttons. also probably more factors worth mentioning but as of now for me it’s like 3:30 am and my racing thoughts are not letting me think of more so instead MOVING ON TO PICTURES:

i’m missing some pics here of the other colors trousers could come in -- grey and bluish grey were popular options, as well as black for eveningwear!

note how they’re laced in the back! that’s very very nice for fitting them nicely to the waist. and all those buttons, while a hassle, were again very nice for fitting them closer and keeping the position of the shirt perfectly in place so as not to create weird-looking wrinkles. spats were also a nice option to have to protect fancy shoes!

there were also pantaloons for the fashionable man’s eveningwear: these would hug the legs much more tightly, and would specifically have curves cut just to the shape of the leg. leather, while also used for regular pants sometimes, was an even nicer option for pantaloons due to the stretch allowing for more tightness. check out this extant example and one pattern for modern recreation:

and if you were in court for some reason the breeches followed a whole nother pattern! they’d cut and buttoned just below the knee, lower on the waist, and more colorful! sometimes be embroidered, too! look at these:

pretty, right? :)

I can definitely see this being a thing. Habituation is a term used to describe how the brain basically filters out and stops paying attention to sensory stimuli (like a metronome, or people talking, or flashing lights) after a while because nothing new is happening and our brains get used to it. Usually people are pretty good at doing this.

However, there’s a lot of research on ADHD and habituation, which shows that we have a really hard time doing it. That means a sensory stimulus continues to distract us no matter how long it’s been there. For example, I can’t have any blinking lights or repetitive movement in my field of vision while I’m trying to focus because seeing it out of the corner of my eye constantly draws my attention, which leads to me getting distracted every 2 seconds. The metronome probably causes the same thing for you.

I contain multitudes

Would you look at that, I'm distracted again

Not five mins into an epic and I pause to make a rant post and here I am scrolling