Victorian gentlemen were impeccably dressed.
Every day their valet would press and arrange their shirts, trousers and ties. They would heat the heavy iron on the stove and using a cloth carefully eliminate every crease from each item in turn.
In modern times we have a steam iron that presses clothes perfectly in a fraction of the time.
Yet despite the advance in ironing technology, the lack of a valet has forced today’s gentlemen to have to improvise. And invent.
At some point we invented a trouser press. A large device that enables a pair of trousers to be loaded between two plates which are then heated to press the garment. There is an art to loading a trouser press and it takes time. Any slight failure to properly position the said trousers results in creases that are in the wrong place and are very difficult to get rid of. So care is needed. However after wrestling with the trousers and getting them perfectly positioned the effort involved in pressing them is negligible.
For the gentleman that likes his ties to look the same as his trousers we invented a miniature version of the trouser press in order to smooth-out a piece of cloth hanging from our neck! The tie press again requires the correct positioning of the tie if the resulting pressed article is to look presentable.
Of course no modern gentleman would be without a steam iron for those items of clothing (other than trousers and ties, perhaps) which necessitate a press from time to time.
Yet a steam iron is remarkably good for pressing trousers. With minimal effort and with a huge amount of flexibility in control and adjustment the steam iron can turn crisp-packet trousers into the stuff of Sandhurst passing-out parades! Same for ties. In seconds. Lie flat. Press. Move on.
So tell me, why the fuck do we have trouser and tie presses? Who the fuck thought that they were an improvement on a steam iron? And perhaps more tellingly, why the fuck have we all bought these things? Like we need them? Do we fuck!
They use up resources in their manufacture. They take up space in our homes (often we need an extra room for this shit (a laundry room!!?) – valuable real estate wasted on useless crap!) And they serve pretty much no useful purpose! Ultimately they will end up in landfill because we can’t find anyone left who hasn’t realised just what a pointless waste of space they are, so we can’t even give them away!
Although when our kids ask us why we fucked up our planet at least we can say that we were smartly dressed while doing it!
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