Clothing through history, showing (from top) Egyptians, Ancient Greeks, Romans; Byzantines, Franks; and 13th-century through 15th-century Europeans. (Public Domain)
Clothes make the man. Or if you prefer, “vestis feminam facit”: Clothes make the woman.
Throughout recorded history, attire and its accoutrements have signaled to others one’s wealth, power, and station in life; added allure and glamour to the wearer; and reflected the culture of a particular time and place.
In ancient Rome, for example, the toga was the mark of a Roman citizen, a garment forbidden to slaves and foreigners. More than a thousand years later, the Jacobins of the French Revolution called themselves “sans-culottes,” thereby identifying themselves with the lower classes who didn’t wear the aristocrats’ culottes, or silk knee-breeches. One of the principal charges against Joan of Arc during her trial for heresy and sorcery was dressing in men’s clothing when she led the French soldiers. In countless works of literature, writers have featured descriptions of the attire worn by their characters to enhance their personalities.
A toga praetexta, a white toga with a broad purple stripe on its border, was the formal wear of Roman kings and magistrates. (Public Domain)
Clearly, attire is a vivid manifestation of a people and a society. As dress and textile historian Hilary Davidson concludes in her article “The Fashion of Jane Austen’s Novels,” clothing is a “fundamental part of all human culture.”
Fashion and Culture: The 1950s in America
Several years ago, I was showing the “La Marseillaise” scene from the 1942 film “Casablanca” to two preteen granddaughters, when one of them suddenly asked, “Why was everyone so dressed up back then?”
“People used to dress that way. It was normal for them. We just don’t do it anymore.”
When I laughed, she gave me a puzzled look, then returned to the movie.
My usual attire consists of a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and Skechers shoes; yet, in my granddaughter’s eyes, I was a model of high fashion, which says a great deal about the current state of fashion in the United States. Recently, her remark came to mind and set me to thinking of my 1950s’ and 1960s’ childhood.
President Kennedy sails aboard the U.S. Coast Guard yacht "Manitou" off the coast of Maine, in a casual Ivy League outfit. (Public Domain)
People definitely dressed differently then, closer in style to those characters in “Casablanca” than to us today. Even in our small town, the banker wore a suit, the male storekeepers wore white shirts and ties, the women dresses or skirts. Throughout my elementary school years, the teachers, all female, did the same, as did the girls in my classes. Everyone who attended our Methodist church, no matter their work in the secular world, dressed for services in their “Sunday best.”
The terms “blue-collar” and “white-collar” were more appropriate and distinct in those days. If as a male you dressed in a suit or a sports jacket with a tie, then you were deemed a professional, an office worker, or a salesman. Mechanics wore either uniforms or T-shirts and jeans, while farmers typically dressed in overalls. Your clothing marked your class.
Miss America contestant Yolande Betbeze wears the young woman's uniform of a short-sleeve sweater and pencil skirt, with high heels, 1950. (Public Domain)
Appearing in public in those days meant looking your best. Many of us are surprised when we look at photographs from the 1950s of passengers on a commercial airliner or spectators at a baseball game. Nearly all the men are wearing coats, ties, and hats, while the women are fashionably decked out and coiffed. They took pride in their appearance, but it’s useful as well to keep in mind that for many of these people, men and women alike, such attire was normal. The fans in the baseball stadium probably didn’t regard themselves as “dressing up” to watch the Yankees play the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Breaking Away
Fashion, like the weather, is always changing. It comes and goes and can both reflect and drive changes in a culture. During the Roaring ‘20s, for instance, young women began bobbing their hair, some from having seen actresses wearing bobs in the silent films of the day, some for comfort’s sake, some as a rejection of traditional femininity. The ankle-length dresses worn by their mothers grew shorter as well, rising an average of 15 inches up the leg by the end of the decade.
Mary Quant wears a minidress at a 1969 fashion show. (Jack de Nijs for Anefo/CC0)
The years following the 1950s brought similar radical alterations in style. The miniskirt first appeared in the mid-1960s. At about the same time, teenage model Lesley Hornby, known around the globe as “Twiggy,” became one of the first supermodels while launching a fashion revolution. No fan of hats, President John F. Kennedy may have helped bring about the demise of that ubiquitous piece of men’s wear. Bell-bottom jeans for men and women, pant suits, ponchos, T-shirts, sneakers: All these and more became popular.
Bell-bottoms became fashionable for both men and women. (Mike Powell/CC BY-SA 2.0)
In addition, businesses began the practice of Casual Friday, when workers could change out their suits and dresses in favor of less formal, though still businesslike, attire. Originating in the mid-1960s with aloha shirts in Hawaii and spreading from there to California, by the 1990s Casual Friday had become a part of American culture and the workplace.
And just as the silent films of the 1920s inspired the bob, the entertainment business steered Americans away from the more formal look of the 1950s. June Cleaver of television’s “Leave It to Beaver,” with her dresses and string of pearls, gave way to Mary Tyler Moore of “The Dick Van Dyke” show, with her pants and pullovers. Men’s clothing changed as well, though less dramatically. “Mad Men,” for instance, treated viewers to the sharp style of men’s clothing worn by admen in Manhattan in the early 1960s. Set some 40 years later around the turn of the century, “The Office” depicted paper salesmen wearing ties and sports coats, though much more casually.
Louise Brooks styling a "shingle" bob cut in 1929. (Public Domain)
Movies also impacted the world of fashion and cultural change. Worn in the 1961 film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Audrey Hepburn’s little black dress wowed audiences and led countless women to imitate the Hepburn look. Yet by 1977, Diane Keaton’s menswear outfits in “Annie Hall” were all the rage. The iconic red windbreaker, white T-shirt, and jeans worn by James Dean in the 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause” induced thousands of male teenagers to copy his style.
Interestingly, rock music affords another excellent example of this shift in attire. In the early 1960s, popular bands like The Animals, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones performed much more formally dressed, often in coats and ties or matching outfits, than they would just a few years later. That the fashion industry understood the influence of these bands may be seen when in 1965, a British men’s apparel magazine asked without success for the Stones to wear ties and so help rescue the ailing British necktie industry.
The Rolling Stones in more formal attire in 1964. (Hugo van Gelderen/CC0)
Freestyle
Today, everyday fashion is decidedly casual—some would say too much so. When Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman wears sweats and gym clothes to the Senate floor, he raises eyebrows on both sides of the aisle. The online site People of Walmart exists to poke fun at some of the outlandish clothing worn by that chain’s shoppers. A walk around any city in the United States brings an array of fashion ranging from the the attractive to the bizarre.
In the Chicago Tribune article “Why Americans Dress So Casually,” Roberto Ferdman interviewed Dierdre Clemente, a historian of 20th-century American culture. She sums up today’s fashion scene this way: “There’s a clear trend toward individualization, as opposed to homogenization. There are so many different kinds of social and cultural personas that we can put on, and our clothes have become extremely emblematic of that. And the thing is, even if you don’t have a lot of money, you can now dress freely, individually.”
Young woman in 2009 wearing all-black clothes. (Beercha-Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
So, while some of us may wish that certain of our fellow citizens would stop shopping in their pajamas at the grocery store, we can charitably chalk it up as the price of liberty. Besides, if khakis and a button-down shirt can in contrast make Grandpa look like Humphrey Bogart to his grandkids, he should resist complaining too much.
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Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
