Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
À la Mode
"No woman, however hard pressed for time, has a right to look dowdy nowadays," the Ladies' Home Journal categorically declared in 1925, underscoring the premium America of the twenties placed on looking "smart" and fashionable. No matter where she lived, in the city or on a farm, the magazine continued, she could buy stylish, affordable clothes at her local dress shop or department store, order them from a catalog, or make them herself from pattern books. The modern American woman could also attend a fashion show, hear a lecture, and consult all manner of fashion magazines and guidebooks on the art — and science — of dressing well. With so many opportunities, she had no excuse for not looking her best at all times. Like their womenfolk, American men could also avail themselves of a growing number of sartorial options. No longer could they blame their wives for their lackluster or even shabby appearance. ("Men Neglect Clothes to Keep Wives Well-Dressed," proclaimed a headline in the New York Times, implying that cost-conscious husbands preferred to adorn their wives rather than themselves.) Now they, too, could purchase a great many things, including colored shirts. "Times have changed," observed the Saturday Evening Post in 1931, applauding the way color had emancipated modern man. A glimpse into the wardrobe of the well-dressed man would make the "explorers of Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb green with envy," asserted another student of contemporary mores, referring to the spectacular discovery of the ancient boy king's tomb a decade earlier. "His Royal Highness in Fashion" had nothing on the contemporary American gentleman.
Once the exclusive prerogative of the high and mighty, fashion by the 1920s had become a "social fact" that touched the lives of average people. Calling it one of the "greatest forces in present-day life," Paul Nystrom, a Columbia University professor of marketing, observed in 1928 that fashion had pervaded every field and reached every class. It was fashion that made men shave every day, crease their trousers, and wear shirts with attached collars and that encouraged women to change the "tint of the face powder, the odor of the perfume, the wave of the hair, the position of the waistline, the length of the skirt, the color of the hose, the height of the heels." In short, Nystrom concluded, "to be out of fashion, indeed, is to be out of the world." To be in fashion, though, was to be right on top. Offering a new form of identity to millions of Americans across the country, fashion placed within reach an expanded sense of life's possibilities. Women should never underestimate the "psychological effect of clothes," cheered businesswoman Bertha Rich. While a great deal went into making someone a success, the "one asset that every woman [could] count on as chief assistant" was her clothes. "First please the eye, and the rest will come easily." Journalist O. O. McIntyre couldn't have agreed more. Clothes not only make the man, he wrote, they "buoy [his] courage."
Rich, McIntyre, and increasing numbers of Americans like them associated clothing with pleasure and opportunity. Their parents and grandparents, citizens of the nineteenth century, probably did not. For them, assembling and maintaining a wardrobe was by no means easy. A drain on their finances and their energies, it took some doing. For one thing, those hankering for a stylish new dress or suit had first to purchase the fabric and then find a dressmaker like the chic-sounding Madame DeLyle or a distinguished firm of custom tailors like Howard, Keeler & Scoffield to transform cloth into clothing through the complicated rigamarole of draping, pinning, cutting, and fitting, a process likened to a "cabalistic art." The practice of having one's clothes made also demanded patience and ready cash, both of which were in short supply among everyone but the well-to-do. "I could afford to have only my best dresses made by a regular dressmaker," admitted Anne Aldworth in 1885, adding that her modiste's extravagance in cutting (and wasting) cloth had "long filled me with indignation." Little wonder, then, that most Americans considered a new dress or suit a rarity and stylishness a perquisite of affluence.
Instead, they made do by making their own. Armed with needles, pins, scissors, and thread, thousands of women across America took up sewing. As Aldworth noted, "I cannot help thinking that there must be many others like myself, anxious and ready and willing to do their own simple dress making if only they knew just where and how to make it easy." Aldworth was fortunate: she had her aunt Mary to help her over the rough spots. Sitting at her aunt's side, she watched and took notes as the older woman ran through a series of complicated exercises: "Secure the seam at the waistline first and be very careful not to stretch the cloth ... then pin about an inch above that, and from there towards the bottom of the waist with the front towards you. Now turn it so that the back will be towards you and pin from above the waistline towards the top. Baste in the same way." A sensible womanly skill transmitted from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter and from Aunt Mary to her niece Anne, sewing was held in high regard as much for its pedagogic value as for its utility. "Learning to cut, fit and make clothes, pretty clothes," it was widely believed, was critical to the making of a proper young woman. The "practice and art of making clothes which are so far as possible graceful, simple, economical, beautiful should be taught to girls and employed by them in a nation-wide movement if we are to have the best development of our race that our young women are capable of," insisted one fan of this household art, dreaming of an ambitious moral crusade with sewing at its core.
Then again, being clever with the needle was also a vehicle of rectitude, a way of demonstrating the American attributes of thrift and resourcefulness. The "vast army of mothers all over the land" who made their sons' clothing, cheered Good Housekeeping, were to be commended for their "practice of economy." The Ladies' Home Journal, in turn, approved of those who, dressing themselves as well as their children, knew how to stretch their wardrobes. "To appear well-dressed on a limited income one must be able to sew neatly, must understand how to renovate old materials and have the knack of being able to use and make the most of pieces of old trimming and leftover scraps," advised Emma Hooper, author of the popular monthly column "To Dress Well on a Small Income." A new collar could "brighten up an old bodice as nothing else can," she recommended, while a "circular flounce of broadcloth" did wonders for an otherwise skimpy skirt. Farm women were even more receptive to the art and craft of "clothing renovation," the high-minded name social reformers gave to the process, born of necessity, by which the life of things was extended. Well into the 1910s and 1920s, economically straitened farmers' wives watched and listened carefully as "clothing specialists," home-demonstration agents hired by statewide agricultural extension programs, fanned out across the country teaching them resourcefulness. "Next to poultry, clothing ... has perhaps the greatest economic and social value of any project in the state," declared agent Agnes Ellen Harris. The program gave the "country woman self respect and self confidence by making her feel ... as well dressed as city women." Every year, specialists like Harris and Mary Shaw Gilliam spent thousands of miles on the road, teaching rural woman, especially in the South, how to make, and care for, their clothes. "Good taste in renovation just does not happen," explained Gilliam. "It is ingenuity, plus skill."
Ingenuity, skill, and pedagogy, along with a penchant for language drawn more from the doctor's office than from the sewing room, came together in classes on the making of "children's clothes from leftovers" and at so-called clothes clinics where "worn, cut, 'dejected' garments would be rejuvenated." A South Carolina woman who attended one such clinic recalled that "club members and friends gathered and brought every imaginable kind of clothing and hats. The doctor (agent) and nurses (local leaders) examined these garments and prescribed the necessary treatment." At the end of the day, 337 dresses and 19 hats had been remodeled, 101 boys' suits made from men's old clothing, and 141 slips fashioned from old nightgowns and "thin dresses." Elsewhere in the South, clothing specialists experimented with the "humble flour and food sack," using the sturdy material to create inexpensive and durable clothing for the entire family. The experiment turned out to be a great success, inspiring several Alabama women like Mrs. M. E. Bishop of Talladega County and Mrs. Wilbur Hull of Limestone County to turn chicken-feed bags into an ensemble of dresses and matching hats. These items "would have done credit to a professional modiste," crowed one eyewitness. "Everyone seemed to think they were so pretty."
Despite such encomia, sewing was arduous work. Almost as laborious and time-consuming as fittings at the dressmaker's, the domestic production of clothing required nimble fingers, a good eye, and a sense of proportion, qualities that were often as hard to find as patience. As a result, homemade clothing frequently looked homemade, with a distinctive, sad-sack appearance. Two technological improvements, though — the advent of the domestic sewing machine and the mass production and dissemination of inexpensive paper dress patterns — not only made sewing easier, "as if done by fairy fingers," but also professionalized the final product, rendering it more attractive. By the 1870s, women everywhere could be found carefully spreading tissue-thin dress patterns on their kitchen tables or parlor floors and tracing the outlines of a bodice or a sleeve onto a bolt of fabric, following the helpful directions that companies like E. Butterick & Company made a point of providing. (Sometimes, however, instructions were so complicated that "none but students of higher mathematics could possibly master" them.) Placing the fabric in the sewing machine, the home sewer would effortlessly baste and seam until, with a real show of "yankee ingenuity," a reasonably well-fitting, somewhat stylish garment emerged from her labors — all for under a few dollars.
Even with these latter-day improvements, not all women acquitted themselves well. At first, everything went according to plan, recalled one woman of her initial efforts at using a paper pattern to make a "waist," or blouse. "The directions were easy to follow and I succeeded in saving a great deal of cloth." But when it came time to try on the garment, it "wrinkled here and there in a strange way that puzzled me. I took it off and looked at it, but could discover nothing wrong; again I put it on and took it off in despair, and finally after taking in a seam here and letting out one there, and pulling and smoothing all to no effect, I became disgusted and threw the waist across the room and shed bitter, bitter tears." Some women clearly lacked the requisite skills, or else they found sewing much too tedious. Women wrote to say they didn't know how to sew, an exasperated Emma Hooper noted. They would have to learn, she told them. Other women wrote to say they loved to sew but sewing made them nervous. To them, Hooper suggested "they try to sew when tired and to rest every fifteen or twenty minutes."
Such sage advice, for all its good intentions, frequently fell on deaf ears. Many American women, lacking either the manual or the mental dexterity required to sew, relied instead on their elders or on the kindness of strangers to obtain their clothes. In households across America, clothing led many lives: a pair of pants worn by Johnny one year was invariably handed down to younger brother Jimmy the next, and a dress worn by Margaret was passed on to her baby sister Molly. The practice of hand-me-downs was as regular as the seasons and just as essential. Critical to the household economy, hand-me-downs could either be worn as they had been or taken apart and reassembled to make something new. Writing in Good Housekeeping in 1885, Helen N. Packard urged modern mothers to take the time and trouble to make "little knee pants" for their young sons from the jackets and trousers discarded by the older men of the house: "It certainly requires no more patience or brains than crazy patchwork and is far more useful."
Meanwhile, those favored mortals blessed with affluence and able to outfit themselves as well as their sons and daughters in new rather than renovated clothing were encouraged to donate their discards to charity. The lady of the house should see to it that outworn clothing did not "become food for ... moths," advised the bible of sanitary science. "But rather she will cast her mind around to see on whom she can bestow" these items, "where they will be sure to be utilized." There would be people somewhere who would have their "hearts gladdened and their bodies made warm and neat at slight expense and trouble." Taking such suggestions to heart, church and synagogue sisterhoods as well as women's associations like the New-York Clothing Society for the Relief of the Industrious Poor and the Hebrew Ladies Sewing Society of Alabama made sure to help those in need. Members, "busy in the interest of others," got together several afternoons a week to make clothes for those less fortunate, a task as enjoyable as it was necessary. One devotee was so proud of her group's output that she likened her temple's sewing room to a commercial establishment. When not sewing, women's groups collected items they or their kinfolk had either outgrown or tired of wearing and, through "gift chests," rummage sales, and bazaars, saw to their distribution. In each instance, clothing was the currency of women's philanthropy.
Women's organizations also tried their hand at running thrift shops where, it was hoped, consumers would not feel like second-class citizens for having purchased something secondhand. In an atmosphere redolent of a "little" ladies dress shop, the thrift shop married the principles of merchandising with charity, treating those in need as customers rather than as supplicants. Every item received was carefully inspected, sensibly priced, and attractively displayed. Along the way, the thrift shop succeeded in generating a good deal of income for its charitable sponsors. What better incentive than charity, after all, to get women to rummage through the family attic in search of something to give away? The thrift shop also succeeded in professionalizing women's skills. "After an apprenticeship in thrift-shop merchandising, even a novice becomes as confident as any careerist," declared a representative of the Council of Jewish Women, noting how the Council Shop encouraged women to draw on their "latent flair for advertising." Ultimately, the thrift shop was more than just a morally uplifting form of housekeeping or a big moneymaker, one of its fans explained. "It means dignity and self-respect for many families. ... They pay for what they get and they select what they please." Besides, she added, "it's a lot of fun."
The secondhand clothing store went even further than the thrift shop in its commercializing of hand-me-downs and castoffs. An outright business venture, traffic in used clothing flourished in metropolitan America. With the cry "I buy! I cash clothes!" ringing through the streets, the presence of the "ole-clo's man" was familiar to generations of urban American housewives. Carrying brown wrapping paper for his purchases and a tightly folded newspaper ("This is the sign I buy, he says"), the old-clothes peddler canvassed the city for hours on end in search of discarded clothing, purchasing a pair of shoes for a quarter and a suit for a dollar. "I like to walk," said one peddler, explaining why he took up the trade in the first place. "I like the fresh air." By the end of the day, piles of used clothing would find a temporary resting place atop the dusty, cramped shelves of a secondhand retail clothing store. For years, the stock-in-trade of the secondhand store consisted almost entirely of men's furnishings and its clientele of men in straitened circumstances. "Fully 50% of men's clothing finds it way into the secondhand stores or is offered for sale on the streets," observed Harper's Weekly in 1911, devoting a full page to a colorful description of New York's secondhand clothing trade, where "one buys and sells without fear and without reproach." Downtown, at the site of the "greatest secondhand clothing business in the New or in the Old World" — or, for that matter, in the other urban immigrant enclaves that clothing dealers called home — male customers could purchase a pair of trousers ("always known as 'pants' in that locality") for fifteen cents, an overcoat for twenty. Women's apparel, in contrast, comprised a small fraction of the secondhand clothing store's stock, at least before the advent of ready-to-wear. The gentler sex, it seemed, had a "knack for remaking and remodeling their garments so many times that, when at last ... their days of usefulness have passed, they are then fit only for the bag of the rag-picker."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Perfect Fit"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Jenna Weissman Joselit.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
