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The history of our wardrobe

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The wardrobe. The warder-of-robes, or the protector-of-clothes. Crafted and built from the best of woods, decorated with carvings across the top and on the edges, to care for the expensive clothes that you will need for the next special occasion, protected by camphorated moth balls. A heavy and dark piece of furniture in the bedroom, or maybe in the dressing room where the king was dressed by his courtiers.

Over time, as ordinary people’s houses got smaller, the dressing room shrank down to nothing, and the bedroom too got smaller, and it shrank even more as the bed grew to Super King sized.

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The wardrobe also changed over time, as it became somewhere to hide the piles of clothes so you could sidle round the bed. The wardrobe changed and developed to be lighter in colour and weight. It lost its wooden structure and was built into the room, even under sloping ceilings. Made of hardboard or at best fibre board and with brass hinges at the side of each door.

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It still contained the clothes, but they were now had to be folded and piled up on shelves or hung in a small, short space, usually with more than one shirt on a hanger, and a small full-length hanging space for dresses. And in some wardrobes, where it wasn’t deep enough for a hanger, the hangers had to be parallel to the door.

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Now there is even a light inside the wardrobe. There are specially designed drawers with partitions. Sadly, the partitions only work for new things and never for washed things and so they limit the amount of say socks that can be stored, and which now have to be folded and rolled in pairs to be forced to go in slots. Ties aren’t stored anymore so the older wardrobe that has a tie rack now uses it for snoods.

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The outside is no longer fronted with a heavy dark brown polished wood, with or without old dusty woodworm holes, but is now a bright large mirror. Doors, if that are what they are called now, are a mirror that reflects the whole bedroom. That makes you feel as you lie down in bed that you are being watched from the side of the room or from the foot of the bed. The heavy mirror doors are hung on railway tracks and open by being moved from side to side, usually exposing the shelves with the clothes you didn’t want, you then have to move them back to the other side. And then you have to move them back and forth as you get dressed from your underclothes to your jacket.

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So what next? I think that your house will have a square hole in the wall of the sleep-pod room out of which will be issued the clothes that the house AI thinks, based on your request, that you will need to be well or perhaps appropriately dressed for today’s life experience.