Skin temperature and predicted discomfort of women wearing sheer Empire style dress

Abstract

There are various thermal experiments for current clothing by human wear test but it is rare for historic clothing. A sheer dress fashion in winter time was told as one of the reasons which many women and the young died in the western history. Thus we studied the physiological responses to cold and thermal insulation of the empire style sheer dress by performing human wear test with three subjects. Empire style dresses are made of thin wool, sleek silk and transparent cotton and then human wear test begin in a cool climate chamber 18 °C(±1 °C) and 55 %(±5 %). We measured mean skin temperature, metabolic rate, thermal insulation of clothing, subjective thermal sensation and Predicted Mean Vote with the process which subjects sit down (30 min) and then exercise (30 min) and have a recovery (30 min). As the results we found mean skin temperature kept decreasing in rest period, increased in the middle of exercise period, and decreased again in recovery period due to sweating after exercise, thus the numerical values of skin temperature proved that women could not keep body temperature comfortable in winter. Also, PMV of women wearing empire style dress reached -2.0 within 30 min, and even -3.0 for the wetted skin and after chilling, and the predicted discomfort was calculated using the known equation: minimum 48.3 % at early recovery period through maximum 98.3 % at late recovery period, thus we confirmed thermal discomfort of women with both objective and subjective data together.