Shaw was fanatic about his health. He was a vegetarian, a wool faddist, and a teetotaler. He drank no tea and very little coffee, preferring plain water, barley water, Postum, ginger beer, milk, and cocoa.

In this undated photograph, Shaw is wearing a “Jaeger suit,” a garment of knitted wool that was said to promote proper breathing. He became famous for almost always wearing this health garment, with knee-breeches and stockings. G.K. Chesterton, Shaw’s friend and literary compatriot, wrote of him in 1910, “[Shaw’s] costume has become part of his personality: one can come to think of the reddish-brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur . . . His brown woolen clothes, at once artistic and hygienic, completed the appeal for which he stood; which might be defined as an eccentric healthy-mindedness.”