Clothing and Fashion

Clothing and Fashion. Clothing and fashion are cultural expressions of individuals' understanding of, and participation in, the social and economic life of their communities and nation. In America, frequently changing fashions and aesthetic play have characterized the history of clothing, enabling people of different races, classes, and sexual persuasions to express their individual and collective identities and escape the constraints of tradition.

To Europeans at first contact, the draped furs, tattoos, and ornaments of shell, stone, feather, and hemp worn by Native Americans indicated their uncivilized state, contrasting with the processed cloth and leather from which European garments were machine‐ and hand‐sewn. While a few Europeans may have adopted native garb—skins, furs, and moccasins—settlers more typically conformed to Old World rather than New World styles of dress. Native Americans wore European garb only selectively and purposefully, usually to communicate friendliness to traders and missionaries or to help them pass unnoticed through hostile territory during wars.

Puritan settlers abided by English sumptuary laws that prohibited extravagance and regulated clothing styles according to trade, rank, and wealth. Thus, a miller in apron and shirtsleeves would not be confused with a magistrate in frock coat, knee breeches, and silk stockings. During the Revolutionary War Era, colonists boycotted British goods and produced their own cloth and clothing—called homespun—demonstrating republican self‐sufficiency, frugality, and industry. The patriotic rejection of British imports, coupled with the invention of the cotton gin and the rise of the textile industry in the Northeast, stimulated cloth manufacture in the new nation and hastened the shift from home production to commercially produced goods. By the mid–nineteenth century, mail‐order catalogs and the establishment of dry‐goods and department stores helped nationalize the distribution of cloth, trim, and ready‐made clothing. The rise of standardized sizing, stimulated by the Civil War demand for uniforms, allowed manufacturers to employ women, immigrants, and children to assemble garments by the piece in their homes. Sweatshop labor accounted for nearly half of all clothing manufactured in the United States from 1870 to 1900.

As early as the 1820s, the suit—a dark and simple coat, waistcoat, and trousers (the latter said to derive from English sportsmen and French Revolutionary workmen's costumes)—had become the standard garb of urban upper‐class and middle‐class men as well as some skilled craftsmen. Women had no such utilitarian and comfortable attire. Dress reformers and women's rights advocates in the 1850s advocated simpler dress, but outfits such as Amelia Bloomer's loose‐fitting Turkish‐style trousers and short dress failed to gain currency. Though Quakers, Shakers, and other religious sectarians abandoned corsets and layers of petticoats in favor of plain dress or a form of trousers, urban women did not customarily wear pants until the 1930s and 1940s.

Magazines featuring colored lithographic fashion plates, notably Godey's Lady's Book (1830–1898), along with sewing machines (developed in 1846) and paper clothing patterns (devised by Ebenezer Butterick in 1863) communicated women's fashion trends widely. One pale and sylphlike ideal of female beauty was dubbed the “steel‐engraving lady” after the print technology that popularized it. Her bell‐shaped skirt, sloped shoulders, crimped waist, and muted colors obscured the genteel lady's sexuality and stressed her delicacy and virtuous morality.

By midcentury, a more voluptuous figure came into fashion, perhaps owing to the influence of immigrant women, for whom weight offered a cultural gauge of wealth. Both men and woman nipped their waists with corsets and enhanced their rears with padding and bustles to create a nature‐defying shape called the “Grecian Bend.” This fashion was satirized on stage by the “British Blondes,” a touring company that entertained burlesque and vaudeville houses with their comically overadorned, buxom, and bustle‐enhanced characters.

The British Blondes' stage antics spoofed what economist Thorstein Veblen described in TheTheory of the Leisure Class (1899) as “conspicuous consumption”—the elaborate fashions by which leisure‐class women exhibited their husbands' wealth and status. Wealthy Americans' demand for fashions that would distinguish them from the masses was fulfilled in part by Parisian haute couture, the art of hand‐sewn, high‐style fashions initiated by Charles Frederick Worth, the first to use live fashion models. Reflecting the elegance of Second Empire France (1852–1870), Worth's lavish gowns were widely emulated by fashion‐conscious Americans.

Changing roles for women and the craze for outdoor activities led to new fashion trends captured by Charles Dana Gibson (1867–1944) in his 1890s magazine illustrations of the statuesque “Gibson Girl,” an emancipated figure costumed for golf course or office. Her shirtwaist and flowing skirt, easy to manufacture and appropriate to different classes, resembled a man's suit. Women's hemlines rose steadily, first during the dance craze of the 1910s and then going knee‐length in the “flapper” fashion of the 1920s. The silent‐screen actresses Mary Pickford and Clara Bow typified this youthful ideal: small and boyish, with understressed breasts (sometimes achieved through tight wrapping) and hips.

More sober fashions for both sexes prevailed during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II. In 1943, servicemen in Los Angeles attacked Mexican‐American youths for wearing “zoot suits”: exaggerated drape‐shaped jackets with outrageously padded shoulders and fiercely tapered trousers, illustrating how fashion may constitute a form of cultural resistance.

Postwar youth similarly used clothing to defy convention—the blue jeans and leather jacket style popularized by the movie rebels James Dean and Marlon Brando in the 1950s, the hippies in bell‐bottoms and miniskirts in the 1960s, the ripped T‐shirt and safety‐pin adorned punks of the late 1970s. Post‐1960s clothing styles became more androgynous, reflecting a pastiche of global influences. Thrift‐store and secondhand clothing was recycled as high style. Cross‐dressing and fashion fetishism (as with sadomasochistic gear of leatherwear, whips, and chains) influenced mainstream fashion design, exhibiting the ways clothing can express diverse ideas about gender and sexuality.

Fashion became a fast‐moving international enterprise in the 1980s and 1990s. Styles that originated with inner‐city youth and hip‐hop and rap‐music cultures demonstrated global appeal. So did the clothing or footwear endorsed by high‐visibility sports stars. High turnover and pressures for product variety in the retail industry, combined with economic globalization, contributed to the reemergence of sweatshops in the United States, Asia, and Central and Latin America. As consumption, technological sophistication, and marketing savvy became concentrated in developed countries, and labor and production in poorer countries, a garment might be designed in America, sewn in China, assembled in Mexico, and then marketed to a consumer public avid for the latest offering of the ever‐changing, kaleidoscopic world of fashion.
See also Child Labor; Consumer Culture; Cotton Industry; Domestic Labor; Fifties, The; Film; Foreign Relations: The Cultural Dimension; Gender; Global Economy, America and the; Mass Marketing; Puritanism; Sixties, The; Twenties, The; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Lois Banner , American Beauty, 1983.
Valerie Steele , Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age, 1985.
Stuart Cosgrove The Zoot Suit and Style Warfare, in Zoot Suits and Second‐Hand Dresses, ed. Angela McRobbie, 1989.
Diana de Marly , Dress In North America: The New World, 1492–1800, 1990.
Marjorie Garber , Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, 1992.
Anne Hollander , Sex and Suits, 1994.

Catherine Gudis