Everyday Fashions of the Fifties As Pictured in Sears Catalogs

JoAnne Olian, JoAnne Olian

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486316918
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

This scrupulously researched, meticulously rendered collection spotlights multiple generations of a family for each decade of the twentieth century. Apparel includes everything from ankle-length tennis outfits and men's formal wear of the 1910s to military outfits from both World Wars, high-fashion suits and dresses in the post WWI years, and wedding finery spanning several decades.
These immediately useable illustrations have a host of applications for fashion and costume designers, fashion historians, and anyone looking for fashion images to use in art and craft projects. Informative notes on the costumes complete an outstanding collection documenting nearly 100 years of costume history.

Copyright

Copyright © 1949–59 by Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Introduction copyright © 2002 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2002, is a new selection of patterns from the following Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs: Spring and Summer 1950; Spring and Summer 1951; Fall and Winter 1951; Spring and Summer 1952; Spring and Summer 1954; Fall and Winter 1955; Fall and Winter 1957; Sears Summer Sale, 1957; Fall and Winter 1957; Fall and Winter 1958; Fall and Winter 1959.

The catalog images within this book are reprinted by arrangement with Sears, Roebuck & Co. and are protected under copyright. No duplication is permitted.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Everyday fashions of the fifties as pictured in Sears catalogs / edited and with an introduction by Joanne Olian.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-42219-0 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-486-42219-4 (pbk.)

1. Costume—United States —History—20th century. 2. Fashion—United States—History—20th century. 3. Sears, Roebuck and Company—Catalogs. 4. Nineteen fifties. I. Olian, Joanne.

GT615 .E895 2002
391’.0973’0904—dc21

2002073788

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
42219406
www.doverpublications.com

INTRODUCTION

Show me the dress of a country and I can tell you its history—Anatole France

To leaf through the pages of a 1950s Sears catalog is to be transported into a Norman Rockwell vision of middle-class America with “clean-cut” young men, “ladylike” women, and “girl next door” teens. College students stroll through ivy-covered halls in blazers and Bermudas, well-girdled wives of aspiring executives dress up in hats, gloves, and high-heeled pumps, while their hatted husbands dash off to offices in suits and ties. On summer evenings they gather around the backyard barbecue, wives in capri pants, the kids in peasant blouses or Roy Rogers jeans and Davy Crockett coonskin caps. Even grandma, alias Gracious Lady, is there, growing old ever more gracefully (in dresses up to size 52) with each succeeding Sears decade. Nor are the customers who crave high fashion and find it in the catalog at a price far below that of Fifth Avenue or Paris forgotten. In short, if future historians were to reconstruct history from the pages of Sears, what they would doubtless arrive at would be nothing short of the American Dream.

Even Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was deeply impressed with how well dressed Americans were. When he met with Nelson Rockefeller in 1959 he was astonished that “the biggest capitalist in the world” was dressed just like everybody else. As Claudia Kidwell pointed out, “The other side of the coin was that everybody else was dressed like Rockefeller.” This equality of dress is the fundamental characteristic of American clothing. In the fifties, two elements conspired to achieve its success. First, increasing prosperity propelled unprecedented numbers of Americans into the middle class, and second, manufacturing know-how and technology enabled mass-produced garments, made of newly developed easy-care synthetic fabrics, to be sold at affordable prices. Sears, with the foresight to capitalize on the demographics and the power to command the manufacturing resources was, by mid-century, the nation’s largest retailer of general merchandise (selling not only apparel for the entire family but providing it with its furnishings, appliances, and sporting and entertainment paraphernalia), whose annual sales would ultimately equal one percent of the gross national product.

The number of families moving up to the middle class was increasing by over a million every year, according to Fortune, whose editors projected that by 1959 half the families in America would have moved up to this category. For many of them, veterans of World War II, the American Dream meant a secure job with a large corporation, marriage and a family, and a brand-new house in the suburbs, often financed by a low-rate GI mortgage. In the fifties, 13,000,000 new houses were built, many of them on the assembly line system developed by William J. Levitt, who housed 82,000 people in 17,000 single-family Cape Cod style homes in the first Levittown alone. A New York Times ad proclaimed, “All yours for $58. You’re a lucky fellow, Mr. Veteran. Uncle Sam and the world’s largest builder have made it possible for you to live in a charming house in a delightful community without having to pay for them with your eye teeth…”

This new suburban lifestyle required a new kind of wardrobe, and Sears was equal to the challenge. Along with frilly aprons they sold capri pants, sweaters, storm coats, and jeans. Men were able to buy suburban coats, sport shirts, corduroy slacks, and stylish sweaters.

Everyday dress for each sex was very different; women stayed home in what were essentially single-sex communities during the day, while their husbands, generally the sole breadwinners in the family, donned suits, ties, and the inevitable hat, for the commute to the city.

Daytime garb for the housewife, unless she was dressing for a luncheon or taking in a matinee in town, consisted of a sweater (often of washable Orion) and skirt or pants or the ubiquitous shirtwaist dress, worn with a short “topper” or a car coat when carpooling behind the wheel of the family car. She sipped her morning coffee with neighbors in a nylon “duster,” one step above a short bathrobe. Sears’ fashion consultant, Mary Lewis, advised Women’s Wear Daily that a housewife and a career girl wear very different kinds of clothes. Suburbanites “live in pants … when they do put on a dress it has to be very dressy … so reserve promotion of the oversimplified styles for city and career girls.”

Evening wear presented a sharp contrast to the demure “happy housewife” image. One writer remembers, “In the daytime we wore tight, revealing sweaters, but they were topped by mincing little Peter Pan collars and perky scarves that seemed to say, ‘Who, me? Why, I’m just a little girl!’ At night our shoulders were naked, our breasts half-bare, the lower half of our bodies hidden in layers of tulle.” If day clothes can be thought of as Doris Day or Debbie Reynolds, the intent of after-five clothes was to transform the wearer into a femme fatale along the lines of Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, or Dorian Leigh, the sophisticated, alluring, raven-haired model in Revlon’s “Fire and Ice” ads. Fabrics were typically brocades, tulles, or velvets, and, depending on the formality of the occasion, a dress would be long or short, sleeved...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Back Cover