“What a nuisance clothes are”
“What a nuisance clothes are”
An eternally applicable ‘Common Sense’ essay on the burden of clothing, written by William Calhoun Walker in 1919
Editor’s note: This text first appeared in the journal Common Sense, edited by William Calhoun Walker, in the year 1919. It was reprinted in The Nudist magazine in January 1935. Walker is known to have established “Common Sense Clubs” which had camps across the United States and supported social and athletic nudity several years before Kurt Barthel established the American League for Physical Culture (ALPC)—widely miscredited as the first American “nudist” club—in 1929. Walker also produced Common Sense, a magazine that advocated for nudism and included a camp directory, as early as 1917.
We spend a large part of all that we earn on clothes. We devote a large proportion of our time to dressing or undressing, pressing, washing, mending, making over, planning, buying, packing, ironing, or fussing in some way over clothes.
Our freedom of movement is hampered so that when we wish to exercise we must take them off. And then we have to put on clothes especially made for that purpose.
We have to have different kinds of clothes for different occasions, bathing suits, working clothes, dress suits, business suits, riding suits, walking suits, even night clothes.
We are constantly conscious of our clothes, and very ill at ease if they are not the ones appropriate for the function in which we are engaged. We are constantly fearful lest we soil or tear them. We are humiliated if someone else of our acquaintance has more elaborate or expensive clothes or if the style changes more rapidly than our wardrobe can.
We are tempted and many of us yield to the temptation, to cover up our physical defects by a camouflage of clothing. We cannot go to a church or a lecture or a theater and get real intellectual enjoyment because we are so fearful lest there be something out of the way due to our clothes.
And with all of our care and expense and worry, we are often very uncomfortable because of our clothes and sometimes suffer seriously in bodily health. What a fetish we have made of these bits of cloth and leather, buttons and feather.
Oh, if heaven is a place where everyone is happy and comfortable, I am going to pick a secluded part of the Elysian Fields where folks never wear clothes and where the fashion never changes. And, I fancy I will find congenial company there, too! 🪐
I wear what is comfortable to me. Nothing! Shorts or jeans and a t shirt if in public. I’m not a clothes person.
I love how timeless this reads, so polite in its suggestion that we've developed an unhealthy codependency and fetish for clothing covering us, and so spot on too.