Here's our website: tedium.co - it answers my question about putting our clothes on front-ways is easy because of the labels on the back.
The answer is unusual: the roots of modern clothing labels start with unions. At the turn of the 20th century, union labels were used by a variety of labor groups, both inside and outside of garments. In fact, the first example of such labels came from cigar-makers in 1874, who used it as a way to highlight the higher product quality compared with products made elsewhere.
But the most famous use of this tactic came from clothing-makers, particularly the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which used the tags almost as a branding strategy for the union. In fact, the union became noted in the ’70s and early ’80s for its television commercials, in which members of the union sing a ditty called “Look for the Union Label.”
Now labels convey many things - place or origin, materials, warnings for hazardous materials. And there are labels on everything - remember when bananas didn't need to have a label on them? Labels are now regulated requirements.
The internet covers labels today in various ways: Ways to remove clothing labels, get custom clothing labels made, get name stickers for your kids, how to sew a label into a garment, and so on.
Tomorrow we'll explore more things we take for granted - things that make our everyday activities easy and efficient.
Our pictures today are the front garden - taken yesterday. I am always amused to see vertical perennials in the front garden tilting - they do whatever the wind tells them. There is definitely a southern wind here on Sunnylea Crescent.
Dignity is defined as the state or quality of being worthy of honour or respect. Other definitions speak to the having a composed or serious manner. A common association with dignity is mastery over our bodily functions and the presence/lack of clothing. We seem to consider naked to be undignified. This is so much the case that it is illegal in most places.
I went in search of some context for this and I found this article at the National Catholic Register HERE:
Clothe the Naked: Acknowledging the Need for Human Dignity.
"Nake is an archaic English word meaning “to strip clothes off.” To be “naked,” therefore, is to be in a state of “having had your clothes stripped off.”
Why does this bit of pedantry matter? Because it speaks volumes about what our ancestors regarded as the natural state of man.
While a couple of groups attempted it in warmer Mediterranean climates in early Christendom, it is not until after the Reformation, the rise of the Enlightenment and, especially, the rise of technologies that allowed Northern Europeans to maintain a bit of comfort in chill weather that Northerners really started to see the rise of so-called “Adamite” movements (later frankly renamed nudist movements), which propose that our natural state is to walk around buck naked on the theory that clothes are an unnatural encumbrance on our glorious childlike freedom.
For our ancestors of not many generations back, such a proposal was not just silly in a practical sense; it was also just about 180 degrees backwards from normality. Fallen man was, so to speak, born clothed. Something unnatural had to be done — he had to undergo some process of naking — for him to end up naked. It was seen, not as a return to simplicity and beauty, but as a shameful state. Pity — or scorn — was heaped on those found to be naked, not breezy “Flower Child” approval".
It is because clothes have so very much to do with our human dignity that Jesus urges us to clothe the naked. But this confronts us with a problem. As with every counsel of Jesus, the command to clothe the naked has both a practical and spiritual dimension, because grace builds on nature. And there’s the rub: Our encounters with the naked beggar are fairly rare. The people I meet in the soup kitchen line at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Seattle are not naked. Nor are the homeless folk you meet in your town.
This is the beautiful Veltheimia flower - this picture is at Butchart Gardens in the restaurant.
