SUMMARY As Britain's imperial and colonial ambitions intensified toward the end of the nineteenth century, the preservation of white European health in tropical climates became an increasingly important concern. Since at least the seventeenth century, the "tropics" had been seen as spaces holding vast potential wealth but also death and disease. To combat these deadly but desirable landscapes, ...

The quality of life for disabled and elderly people can in many cases be substantially improved by a better choice of good looking and functional clothing and other textile products. Disabilities often lead to special functional requirements of clothing and other textile products in living environment. Persons with highly sensitive skin have to consider the skin contact or tactile properties an...

According to the European prestandard ENV 342:1998, the thermal insulation of cold-protective clothing is measured with a thermal manikin. Systematic studies on the reproducibility of the values, measured with different types of clothing on the commonly used standing and walking manikins, have not been reported in the literature. Over 300 measurements were done in 8 different European laborator...

In this paper, we address the problem of large scale crossscenario clothing retrieval with semantic-preserving visual phrases (SPVP). Since the human parts are important cues for clothing detection and segmentation, we firstly detect human parts as the semantic context, and refine the regions of human parts with sparse background reconstruction. Then, the semantic parts are encoded into the voc...

Modern technology makes garments smart, which can help a wearer to manage in specific situations by improving the functionality of the garments. The personal heating garment (PHG) widens the operating temperature range of the garment and improves its protection against the cold. This paper describes several kinds of PHGs worldwide; their advantages and disadvantages are also addressed. Some cha...

In the year 2000, a paper entitled ‘‘A Heat Transfer Model for Firefighters’ Protective Clothing’’ was published in Volume 36, No. 1, of Fire Technology, and it received the 2001 Harry C. Bigglestone Award for Excellence in Written Communication of Fire Protection Concepts from The Fire Protection Research Foundation. Since the publication of this paper, there has been additional development of...

The clothing fashion reflects the common aesthetics that people share with each other in dressing. To recognize the fashion time of a clothing is meaningful for both an individual and the industry. In this paper, under the assumption that the clothing fashion changes year by year, the fashiontime recognition problem is mapped into a clothing-fashion classification problem. Specifically, a novel...

According to an old empiric rule related to suicidal gunshot wound still in use, suicides will rarely shoot through their clothing, but will put it aside to expose the nude skin. A bullet defect in victim's clothing was often interpreted as a suspicious finding. In our article, which is based on retrospective consecutive study of gunshot fatalities from 1980 to 2004, where all autopsies were pe...

The clothing we wear and our identities are closely tied, revealing to the world clues about our wealth, occupation, and socioidentity. In this paper we examine questions related to what our clothing reveals about our personal style. We first design an online competitive Style Rating Game called Hipster Wars to crowd source reliable human judgments of style. We use this game to collect a new da...