Wardrobe

Method and order.

I'm afraid that I'm not very good at it, but sometimes I manage to form some sort of organisational habit and that's what's happened here.

Top left, ties and shirts for the office.

Bottom left, uniform shirts - daily wear when not at the office, and occasionally when I am if there's manual labour to be done.

Bottom right:  dress shirts, dinner shirts and tunic shirts.

The rest I suppose are "other", pretty shirts for occasions, odd ones, dressing up ones, and simply ordinary ones that occasionally get selected for work.

The method is: clean laundry gets put away on the left-hand end of a rail.  Shirts are selected, and this applies most to office wear, from the right.  I may just take the next available or I may pass over one or several for a variety of reasons.  That results in unfavoured shirts accumulating to the right-hand end of the rail and from time to time it dawns on me that I should put them back amongst the "others".

It is perhaps a little perverse to have a lot of shirts and only regularly use a small sub-set.  But it works for me because one of the aims is that in going out I'm never quite in the same outfit twice.

Oh, it hardly needs to be said but with a few oddities marked terylene or polyester by far the majority are nylon and all are synthetic.

Uniform

I didn't intend to do this, but the picture's taken and it's likely that I'd not get around to it tomorrow.

The essence of a uniform is that it be... well uniform.  So a single uniform shirt could be a contradiction in terms.  I've just washed and hung to dry twelve blue ex-police nylon-terylene uniform shirts.  In addition to the police these were issued to prison officers and ambulance crew but not (for reasons that should be obvious) to the fire services.

A peculiarity is that different constabularies and other agencies each contracted with a manufacturer for their uniforms so there are differences in detail such as the shape of breast pocket flaps or the means of epaulette fixing depending on which force it was made for and there were several competing manufacturers including Van Heusen, Reliant and Banner..  Another is that it was stipulated that the fabric could not be used for retail products while the contract ran, presumably in an attempt to make impersonation of a police officer slightly more difficult.  So the two that I have without pockets are most likely post-contract made to finish off a run of fabric made surplus by the contract ending.

A memory from about the age of 11 is of the local police headquarters open day one summer where the majority of officers, allowed to shuck their tunics, were in these synthetic uniform shirts.

Washed a dozen implies worn a dozen which is indeed the case.  If it's not a work day or a special occasion that would justify dressing up these are what I wear.

The white version is rarer and was unmixed nylon.  Rarer because white was only issued to senior officers at the time, when the Met was the first force to put all officers in white shirts nylon had been replaced with polycotton.  Why unmixed I'm not certain but my guess is that the fabric mix of the blue shirts originated from mixing fibres of available colours to produce the particular steel-blue colour required.  If anyone knows otherwise please do tell!