The pandemic has changed the way women dress; we’re purchasing fewer shoes, dress pants, and makeup, and trading underwire bras for loose bralettes or sport bras, or even choosing to forgo them completely. Yet, as businesses around the country get ready to call their workers back to the office, this life of loungewear might be coming to an end. And as women contemplate their return to formal wear, the return of the bra might be one of the most dreaded aspects of post-pandemic normalcy.

This struggle is not new. Women have long connected clothing with ideas of freedom, and there is a long and strong relation between women’s demand for sartorial comfort and feminist ideas. Indeed, for many women, both in the past and today, discarding bras is not just an act of personal choice but an act of feminist rebellion.

The association of bras, and similar undergarments like corsets, with discomfort, oppression, and distress, goes back to the 19th century. Then, members of the nascent feminist movement sought simultaneously to free themselves from oppressive legal and social systems—and from tight corsets and trailing skirts. “Something of the nature of the American costume … must take the place of our present style of dress, before the higher life—moral, intellectual, political, social or domestic—can ever begin for women,” feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps argued in 1873. Phelps called women to burn up their corsets, arguing that by freeing themselves from discomfort they could truly experience emancipation.

And in the second half of the 20th century, burning bras (or corsets)—whether as a real act or as a metaphor—would become one of the most popular images representing a new generation of feminists. Arguing that “the personal is political,” these feminists sought equality in all realms of life, from the home to the workplace, demanding control over their uteruses as well as their clothing choices. No bras were burned in the famous “No More Miss America Protest” of 1968—though some were thrown into a trash can along with lipstick and high heels. But the media was quick to associate bra burning with the radical feminists who protested oppressive beauty standards.

Yet before women’s fraught relationship with their undergarments became a symbol of radical feminists, women sought to liberate themselves through attire. There was, in fact, a similar push a century ago—in the shadow of another global pandemic and the realignment of world order after World War I. Emboldened by the right to vote and the social changes it brought, young women in the U.S. and elsewhere began to reevaluate their position in society as well as their appearance. Funny enough, in doing so they popularized the now-reviled bra.

Pre-World War I, in response to women’s growing involvement in sports and leisure, the fashion industry began marketing lighter, less restrictive corsets and more flexible girdles in an attempt to maintain their profits. Into this atmosphere, a relatively new undergarment emerged as a corset substitute: the brassiere. Although its origins are somewhat unknown, in the U.S., socialite Caresse Crosby patented her brassiere design in 1913.

A Maidenform bra advertisement. Courtesy of Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Women’s growing mobilization into the workforce and social reform during the 1910s only increased the demand for sartorial change. The U.S. entry to the war in 1917 and the influenza pandemic in 1918 also affected changes in fashion. By the 1920s, young women shortened their skirts and hair and discarded their corsets, often in favor of a bra, insisting on wearing comfortable clothing that suited their active lifestyles and to celebrate their sexuality without being reprimanded for it.

“’Let Go’ is the law of the new corset and the corsetless figure,” exclaimed Eleanor Chalmers, fashion editor of the women’s magazine Delineator, in 1922. These new fashions became identified with the image of the modern flapper. But they also became both a visual and symbolic statement of a new feminine presence in the public sphere. By forgoing their corsets, women were also forgoing the ideas that were attached to them: confinement, passivity, and oppression. The corsetless figure became the epitome of women’s social and political freedom and mobility, forging a new beauty ideal that was younger and slenderer.

Some of the first widely marketed bras of the 1920s had a flattening effect that fitted the straight, rectangular silhouette of the flapper ideal. But unlike boned corsets, these bras gave only minimal support, functioning more as an extra layer beneath clothes than a means to mold a woman’s torso.

Taken together, the new flapper dresses and the bras beneath them became a means for women to assert their power as consumers and their rights. “They demanded independence, and they got it … when they went shopping they asked for what they wanted, instead of what they saw,” explained fashion consultant Margery Wells in 1928 as she looked back at the shift in Women’s Wear Daily. Instead of being followers of fashion, women began to actively voice their preference.

The ideal silhouette evolved alongside undergarments—and social reform. Women’s Wear Daily.

By the end of the 1920s, with the coming of the Great Depression, the youthful, leisurely flapper ideal seemed out of touch. Instead, a more mature and curvier silhouette gained popularity. Bras became undergarments responsible for enhancing and uplifting the breasts and creating a more structured shape, similar to the function we chafe against today. Yet the emphasis on comfort, whether imagined or real, continued to be part of the selling message for women.

Over the next four decades, the bra progressed slowly from an item associated with women’s liberation and self-dependency to another confining and restrictive garment associated with women’s oppression. Indeed, it was the meanings that women gave their bras in the postwar, post-pandemic 1920s, more than the design itself, that offered women a sense of liberation. And it was the meanings, not the design, that feminists in the 1970s found so abhorrent.

In the 1920s, fashion was where women turned to convey their new reality. And today, amidst a pandemic, bras once again become a symbol of the limitations on women’s experience in the labor force. As women reevaluate their social position, the sound of rebellion is getting louder. Even if COVID will not bring a wave of bra abandonment, women today are already making fashion choices that will impact our future. And if history is a lesson, we are in for an interesting ride.

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Summer wouldn’t be summer without textiles.

Blessed with an abundance of cloth, we tend to take textiles for granted, all the more so when we aren’t bundled up against the cold. But textiles are among the oldest, most essential, and most pervasive of human inventions. Their summertime incarnations demonstrate just how central they are to defining who we are. Freed by higher temperatures from most of their protective functions, in the summer textiles reveal their social side, becoming signs of who we are and what we value.

A combination of warm weather and cultural imperatives probably drove humans to invent cloth in the first place. During the last ice age, loose blankets and shawls fashioned from animal pelts no longer provided humans with enough protection from the wind and cold. People began crafting skins into layers of clothing fitted to the body. Complex clothing replaced simple wraps.

Then, as the ice age ended around 11,500 years ago, the climate changed. The weather got warm and humid. Garments made from animal skins became sweaty and uncomfortable, sometimes dangerously so. The obvious solution would have been to get rid of clothes altogether. But that’s not what happened, even in hot climates.

Like Adam and Eve with their fig leaves, people almost everywhere continued to cover at least their genitals with loincloths and girdles. Only in a few places where the climate had never grown cold enough to require complex clothing, such as mainland Australia, did everyday nakedness remain normal until contact with people from colder regions. “After wearing complex clothes for millennia—from at least 40,000 years ago in the middle latitudes of Eurasia—it would seem that casual exposure of the naked body was no longer socially acceptable,” writes Australian archaeologist Ian Gilligan in his 2018 book, Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory.

To meet cultural expectations and climate constraints, people started turning string into cloth.

The oldest archaeological evidence of fabric goes back about 11,000 years—to around the time the world turned warm. Cloth required farming and herding to dependably supply enough fiber to make large quantities of yarn. A typical beach towel contains roughly five miles of yarn. A Roman toga required 25 miles. We owe agricultural settlement at least as much to the social desire for clothes as to the biological need for food.

The earliest surviving archaeological textiles demonstrate that cloth was more than purely functional. Fragments found in the Nahal Hemar cave in Israel’s Judaean desert date back nearly 9,000 years. They show signs of red pigment, as well as decorative stitching and embellishment with tassels, shells, and beads. At the Huaca Prieta mound on the northern coast of Peru, archaeologists have uncovered 6,200-year-old cotton cloth with stripes alternating natural beige with indigo-dyed blue, plus white highlights from a local milkweed plant. Someone went to a lot of trouble to create blue dye and make patterned cloth. Summer’s checked picnic blankets and striped beach towels, designed to do more than merely protect you from the dirt and sand, reflect the same decorative impulse—and the same basic knowledge of how to weave simple patterns.

Of course, textile technologies have changed a lot over the millennia, most of all in the 250 years since the first spinning mills opened in northern England. By making thread abundant, spinning machines changed the world. They reduced the time it took to spin miles of yarn from weeks to minutes—and eventually to seconds. By the turn of the 19th century, the speedy power looms invented in the mid-1880s had joined spinning mills to make textiles abundant for the first time in history, affecting not only clothing but sails and tents, sacks and sheets. These technologies made it feasible for a beachgoer to spread out on a towel whose thick pile of loops consume extra thread—terrycloth dates only to the 1890s—or for a bride to walk down the aisle in a special dress she only wears once.

Even more important for textiles’ cultural role was the development of synthetic dyes in the mid-19th century. Beginning with the purple that teenage chemistry student William Perkin accidentally concocted in 1856, dyes made in labs added every conceivable color to the textile palette. Hues that had once been difficult to achieve, such as intense blacks, purples, and greens, became commonplace.

Color not only gives cloth beauty. It imbues it with meaning. Just look at some of the world’s simplest textiles: banners and flags. The red, white, and blue of Independence Day in the U.S. and Bastille Day in France have symbolic meanings—valor, purity, and justice. Equally important, and the likely reason they are the most common colors of older national banners, is that blue and red are also easy to achieve with plant-based dyes: indigo for blue, and madder for red.

It wasn’t until the spread of synthetic dyes that the green and violet in the rainbow flag, and the intense blacks and greens of Juneteenth banners, became widely available.

Before then, greens were usually created by first dyeing with yellow and then with blue. The yellows tended to fade, which is why the medieval tapestries you see in museums often have blue grass. The best blacks, like the ones recorded in Dutch portraits, also required multiple layers of color, often starting with an indigo base. Ordinary people used brownish plant dyes, adding iron salts to deepen the color, to dye fabrics black. But none of these were as true as the blacks adopted as Pan-African symbols in the mid-20th century. Traditional African artisans were (and still are) among the world’s great masters of indigo, but the brilliant colors of African pride are products of modern chemistry.

Every new textile technology opens up new means of cultural expression, as people find ways to make fabrics their own and, through their textiles, to say something about who they are, where they belong, and what they love. In both substance and significance, cloth is remarkably fluid. Fabrics fold and bend and flap in the breeze, switch from two dimensions to three, conform to the contours of bodies and follow the terrain. In the sunny days of summer, especially, they become expressive declarations of identity and joy.

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It was not a city I thought I’d first move to in my 40s, after 13 years in New York City and a peripatetic decade in academia. Washington is a good town for nerds but tough on freaks, and I have thought of myself as a freak since high school, which wasn’t cured by coming out as a lesbian many years ago. Washington has no shortage of queers, with or without Republicans in charge. But its tidiness extends to its queer life. I never quite got past the floundering stage of when you move to a brand-new town.

One place where I did find myself in Washington, if only for less than an hour at a time, was at Meeps, a vintage store near the bottom of a sharp slope dropping off from the Adams Morgan neighborhood, across the street from a community center and a few doors up from a gay diner. I lived on the same street, a little over half a mile away, and if two things held true—i.e., if I was feeling a little down but was also recently blessed with a payday—I took myself down the hill to go shopping.

Meeps meant a lot to me because I could indulge my passion for clothes, and for clothing history, without catching any cross glances for also being a butch lesbian who is sometimes more or less indistinguishable from a man. This store and the people who work there made me love the way I look.

I wear men’s shirts, ties, vests, sweaters, and jackets. Meeps, which in March closed shop for the time being due to the pandemic, has a sublime collection of men’s vintage, which is hard to find, and carried enough in small sizes to keep me coming back. The finds were often incredible. About two years ago the owner, Cathy Chen, must have come into a serious cache of ’70s pastel-colored ruffle tuxedo shirts. Since every self-respecting butch dandy needs a ruffle tux, I instantly got one in mint green. But more and more colors kept appearing in the months afterward: sherbet orange, sky blue, yellow, pink.

At one point I even saw a tailcoat. I tried it on and miraculously I could have been Astaire, it fit so well. But one of the staff actually talked me out of pulling out my wallet: “It’s beautiful, it looks great on you, but where are you going to wear it?” He was right. I saved my $100 and later bought a sharp 1960s iridescent blue damask smoking jacket whose label said it was hand-tailored by one Charley Chang at the Hong Kong Hilton. I’ve worn it in public exactly once, but it makes me feel like five-part harmony.

The space is tiny and well kept, but the fitting rooms are spaces enclosed by curtains pinned together with binder clips and clothespins. Like a lot of butches, I find fitting rooms difficult. For many years I avoided them altogether, because of the weird combination of gender segregation, body ambivalence, and surveillance they represent. I’ve thankfully gotten past that unease, but still I think it’s all to the credit of the Meeps staff that I always felt like I had a right to see how clothes—elegant, fabulous clothes—looked on my body. If a beautiful garment turned out to fit perfectly, I would parade around the store, one glance over the shoulder into the mirror in the corner, another in the mirror hanging above the bored-boyfriend settee. The staff would enumerate the ways the garment flattered, if in fact it did. If it was borderline, they would never push me to buy it. It was certainly a transactional relationship, but I’m sure they were sincere.

I think most people with experience as a woman know that this is extremely rare. I do have the advantage of having a slender frame, which is easier to fit and which, of course, is more accepted in a culture that shames people with bodies less normative than mine. But preferring to dress against gender expectations is deeply unsettling to many people, including, possibly, one’s own self. I’ve been harassed and assaulted on the street for looking like a man. So finding a public space that is not explicitly queer but is still explicitly affirming gives a warm feeling.

Toward the beginning of the novel Stone Butch Blues, the gender warrior Leslie Feinberg’s main character, 11 years old, finds her father’s starched-stiff shirts and ties and his two suits, one blue and one gray, which he’s told her is all a man needs. She begins to dress her butch body: “I put on the suit coat and looked in the mirror. A sound came from my throat, sort of a gasp. I liked the little girl looking back at me.” She catches a glimpse of how good it feels to express who she is freely, without judgment—but only briefly, as she’s made to feel the weight of her transgression in the coming scenes. Clothes sometimes hide who we are in our bodies. Other times, they expose it, sometimes painfully. Sometimes they protect it. And rarely, all too rarely it seems, they liberate it.

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The Navajo Nation sued the company for copyright infringement of its name and, after a five-year court battle, the two sides settled. At a 2012 Victoria’s Secret fashion show in New York, model Karlie Kloss wore an extravagant feathered headdress and turquoise jewelry, inciting a backlash that led the company to issue an apology. Two years later, Ralph Lauren used historic photographs of Native Americans confined on reservations to tout his line of rugged, Western-style clothing. He removed those images and expressed his regret after Indian groups and others complained about his insensitivity.

The public debate led by Native American advocates, scholars, and other commentators focused less on the issues of copyright and profits and more on a lack of historical awareness. Feathers, turquoise, and patterned prints might represent superficial and fleeting aesthetic choices, but they also reflect indigenous traditions that have endured centuries under assault. Clothing style may seem innocuous, but it often expresses profound cultural meaning. In the battlegrounds of conquest, dress can become an important weapon when one group usurps the symbols of another. The past that Urban Outfitters, Victoria’s Secret, and Ralph Lauren failed to appreciate was America’s long and troubled history of cultural appropriation in the service of empire.

That history might have begun with buckskin. Perhaps Americans do not equate putting the sueded and fringed jackets on rugged men with draping feathered headdresses on lingerie models or printing Navajo patterns on panties. But the familiarity of buckskin as an emblem of the West—of ’60s counter-culture, and of American manhood—has obscured its native origins.

Indigenous groups across the continent wore garments of treated hide from a variety of species. The abundance of deer, however, led to widespread use of their skins. Native designers adapted it for their specific needs. The characteristic fringe, for example, served as an efficient means to shed water. Narrow strips drew moisture away from the body and allowed it to drip from the ends. By the 17th century, European traders and backcountry settlers recognized its value, and began bartering for buckskin jackets, trousers, and moccasins. During the American Revolution, colonial rebels adopted the style for its utilitarian and symbolic value. According to historian Philip Deloria, “playing Indian” permitted colonial fighters to assert their Americanness by differentiating themselves from Great Britain.

The appropriation continued after the United States established its independence. As the country moved toward a concerted policy of Indian removal, buckskin clothing—with its projection of rugged individualism and ostentatious fringe—became a highly visible tool in the cultural project of territorial expansion. By adorning themselves in the indigenous wear, Anglo-American men symbolically wrested the Native American masculinity that they admired, practicing what ethnographer Renato Rosaldo terms “imperial nostalgia”—the act by which agents of empire replaced guilt and shame with mourning and celebration of the very peoples they had destroyed.

Alfred Jacob Miller, Trappers (1858-1860). Image courtesy of Walters Art Museum/Wikimedia Commons.

As such, during the 1820s through the 1840s, as the United States extended its economic influence into the interior of the continent, removed Eastern Indian groups to lands beyond the Mississippi River, and invaded Mexico, buckskin chic achieved iconic status, ostensibly demonstrating the Western male’s attainment of an imagined Indian-ness. In literature and art, white Americans invented aspects of indigenous cultures—emotional liberation, privileged violence—that they desired to emulate.

In an 1837 account of buckskin-clad Rocky Mountain trappers, Washington Irving noted that it became a “matter of vanity and ambition with them to discard every thing that may bear the stamp of civilized life, and to adopt the manners . . . of the Indian.” When Irving referred to the mountain man’s aversion to “civilized life,” he identified a counter-culture symbolism encoded in buckskin. Many Anglo-American men of this period fled to the West to escape the avarice and heartlessness that market competition and pursuit of profit had created in the East. By dispossessing the Native male of his self-dominion, these interlopers claimed to have embodied an original, essential manliness that contrasted with the materialist dandy of the city.

Authors like Irving, James Hall, and Timothy Flint, and artists like George Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Charles Deas communicated these ideas to an eager audience. When James Fenimore Cooper first introduced his frontier hero in The Pioneers (1823), he adorned him in “[a] kind of coat, of dressed deer-skin” as well as breeches, from which the character acquired the moniker Leatherstocking. In the popular A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Irving wrote of the rangers Jesse Bean and John Ryan “equipped in character; in leathern hunting shirt and leggins [sic].” Such was the fashion that in an 1833 biography of George Washington, author Mason Weems described the young Virginian as “Buckskin” to set him apart from the British general Edward Braddock.

Buckskin became a fixture of the wardrobes of fur trappers, overland merchants, and volunteer soldiers of the 19th century who sought connection to an ideal of the exceptional American male. For many, careers in the contested regions of the West had promised transformation from inconsequential greenhorns into conspicuous veterans—and grimy, worn, fringed garments attested to the perils and hardships that had forged their vital manliness.

Sometimes newcomers presumed too much, and put on the outfit before they had earned it. In 1839, Francis Lubbock, future governor of the Lone Star State, volunteered for the campaign to remove Cherokees and allied groups beyond the borders of the Republic of Texas. In his enthusiasm, he commissioned a tailor to provide him with “a pair of fine buckskin pants such as worn by frontiersmen.” Unfortunately, while he slept in camp, rain soaked his prized skins, and when he awoke and sought the warmth of the fire, his pants quickly and uncomfortably shrank. “They got tighter and tighter all the time until . . . ,” he recalled, “I had in a manner to cut them off my limbs.”

With the nation’s attention drawn away from the West and toward the controversies between the North and South, the vogue of tanned hides and fringe seemed to have waned by the Civil War. During the decades after, however, it enjoyed a resurgence. During Reconstruction, emasculated Southerners and battered Northerners sought common ground by resurrecting Western manhood, and buckskin served as a ready symbol. During his campaigns against indigenous groups, Lt. Col. George A. Custer wore jackets of that type, one of which is currently on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Buckskin coat, worn by George Armstrong Custer, around 1870. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

The showman William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody wore the style. So did “Kit” Carson and “Davy” Crockett in the dime novels of the time. Theodore Roosevelt was so enamored with the image and its message of masculine superiority that he famously posed in buckskin for a series of photographs to accompany a book about his experiences out West. By donning the fashion of the Native American, these white men outwardly exhibited their extravagant manliness and celebrated their roles as agents of empire.

Images of buckskin-clad Westerners continued to reassure American audiences during the 20th century. Between 1930 and 1960, for example, John Wayne wore the style in at least eight film performances, including his Custer-esque portrayal of Capt. Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and his turn as Davy Crockett in The Alamo (1960). Along with Fess Parker’s popular Crockett (and whose movie prop coonskin cap made of raccoon is also in the collections of the museum), these iterations of the honest, just, vital, and abjectly American frontiersmen reinforced the perception of the United States as the defender of freedom and democracy during the Cold War—in contrast to its missions of self-serving economic expansion and sponsorship of right-wing dictatorships.

By the late 1960s, counter-culture groups like the hippies emerged to oppose the American mantra of progress, consumption, and power—and they adorned themselves with buckskin anew, this time as a rejection of U.S. materialism and empire. They imagined that the garment endowed them with Indian simplicity and respect for nature. As historian Sherry L. Smith has shown, some hippies actively participated in the Red Power Movement. Others supported ecological causes, but many, if not most, were faddists who followed the superficial chic of the moment without understanding the cultural significance of their adoption of Native American imagery.

The history of the misappropriation of buckskin as an emblem of Anglo-American exceptionalism helps explain the criticism of 21st-century fashion designers’ marketing of indigenous symbols. Fashion houses may believe that the incorporation of feathered headdresses or Navajo geometrics celebrates Indian-ness, but they are mining an unfortunate past in their attempts to achieve a fresh aesthetic for profit. Much like generations of men in the United States who donned buckskin, they disregard the centuries-old project of usurping Native American emblems as a tool for conquest and subjugation.

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It seems surprising now, but once the use of cloth feed bags for clothing and household items was a part of mainstream rural American culture—related to a long practice of utilizing all resources that is deeply imbued in the American psyche. Resourceful housewives recycled feed bags from flour, corn, sugar, salt, and even chicken feed into children’s’ clothes, aprons, and dresses.

At the outset, feed bag clothing was strictly utilitarian; in the Great Depression, it became a symbol of thrift and economical household management, and during the war years in the 1940s its use was promoted as part of the campaign for Allied victory. The rise and fall of the feed sack dress tells a story about a culture that once deeply valued both thrift and ingenuity. It is also a story of how commercial interests—cloth makers, feed sellers, bakers, pattern makers, and even newspapers—were keenly aware of the large, if indirect, market for such thrifty clothes.

Starting in the mid-1800s, cloth bags became a recognized resource for clothing. Foodstuffs were packaged in a range of five- to 100-pound sacks; the latter measured 36 by 42 inches. Originally made of burlap or osnaburg—a coarse off-white plain fabric that softens with subsequent washings—they were ideal for men’s, women’s, and children’s undergarments and nightwear as well as utilitarian household accessories.

Feedsack Dress made by Mrs. Dorothy Overall of Caldwell, Kansas, in 1959. Photo courtesy of The National Museum of American History.

In the early 1930s, with the onset of the Great Depression, bag manufacturers added colors and prints, along with the traditional white bag that could be dyed—to attract more farm wives. Their husbands were instructed to buy feed bags in specific colors and prints in order to get sufficient yardage for garments.

Patterns for garments specifically made from feed bags were promoted in advertising pages of newspapers. Companies such as Famous Features in New York City produced numerous patterns with different brand names such as Barbara Bell, Sue Barnett, and others from circa 1923 to 1997. The collaboration was designed to attract the farm housewife to specific products.

In partnership with National Cotton Council, bag manufacturers produced national publications such as “Bag of Tricks for Home Sewing” and even promotional flyers to insert in loaves of bread. Patterns shown in the publications specified the number and size of bags needed to make each garment. These designs were not subject to the latest fashion trends but featured timeless fashions that gave them a surprisingly long lifespan. For example, the pattern for the pajamas that the church ladies presented to President Coolidge was still in circulation in 1945.

I learned details about the feed bag clothing innovation from publications and patterns in the Commercial Pattern Archive at the University of Rhode Island. Daniel Flint, owner of Famous Features, explained in an interview that their styles were basic and intended to last for several years. Not all patterns are tagged specifically for the use of feed bags but many can be used that way.

Enterprising women formed clubs to collect and exchange bags; purchasers sought specific matching colors and a textile design to meet the yardage needs. Bakers realized they could sell their flour bags, so they bought specific dress goods bags and shipped them to millers to be filled with flour. After emptying the bags, they made up home sewing kits with four matching cotton bags, eight buttons, thread, and a pattern book.

One of the most popular garments that could be made from bags was an apron; some designs were simple, while others were fancier. Other popular garments included mother/daughter fashions, infant’s and children’s wear, toys, draperies, slip covers, closet organizers, maternity, and undergarments.

The child’s dress prominently and unusually displays the product logo. Photo courtesy of the Commercial Pattern Archive.

Producers identified their product with company logos on each bag. Ideally these needed to be removed, which usually required soaking the bag overnight in cold water then washing in warm soapy water and possibly boiling for 10 minutes to restore color. Removal of the logos was considered essential to avoid announcing the source of the fabric and any related stigma of poverty and “home-sewn.” On rare occasions, the logo was a feature of the design such as that worn by the little girl (pictured right).

A major contributor to the endurance of clothing from bags during World War II was textile restrictions imposed in support of military needs. The restrictions did not impact feed bag manufacturers because the bags were designated in the “industrial” category. Therefore, the high quality textiles used for feed bags were in abundance for the home sewer. Consequently, feed bag clothing became even more popular during World War II.

According to “Bag of Tricks for Home Sewing,” by the end of the war more than 800,000,000 yards of cotton fabric each year were made into bags. In “Bag Magic for Home Sewing” (1946) the National Cotton Council declared feed bag clothing to be the “warp & woof of daily life, the simple virtues of thrift, ingenuity and skill—the virtues upon which in the last analysis, the future of the country rests.” In addition to recycling the bags, users were encouraged to save the string used to close the bags for crocheting; patterns were included in the booklets.

In the postwar years, the National Cotton Council and the Textile Bag Manufacturers Association concentrated on additional associations with two mainstream pattern companies and expanded the line of textiles to include percale, chambray, cambric denim, toweling, and rayon with a silky sheen. At the peak of the bags’ popularity, textile designers were hired to create exciting prints to attract consumers—both millers and the public. Bag manufacturers issued a wide range of textile colors and designs. In conjunction with Simplicity and McCall’s, they promoted national sewing competitions for adults and teens as well as traveling fashion shows featuring bag clothing through at least 1961.

The demise of feed bag clothing was brought about by the increasing popularity of less expensive paper bags, and in 1948 twenty states forbade re-use of cloth bags for food products. Combined with the increasing popularity of less expensive paper and plastic bags, the decline of farming populations, and increased availability of inexpensive ready-made clothing, this resulted in a low demand for cloth feed bags by the early 1960s. The cultural shift from primarily family-operated farms to large cooperatives resulted in many families moving to urban centers.

Fewer women were providing the family wardrobe, since ready-made clothing was readily available and more affordable. Home-made garments and gifts celebrating economy and thrift were no longer part of the American psyche.

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I happen to own 17 pairs of sweatpants, but I am a convert to casual. As a teen, I scoffed at the wrinkled khakis of my high-school colleagues and scoured the thrift stores of central Pennsylvania in search of the most non-casual clothes I could find—wasp-waist wool dresses, opera gloves, and evening bags. By my mid-20s, I realized I no longer wanted to pry my 6-foot-tall body into uncomfortable clothes and stay in them for hours. While my Clergerie-clad best friend chased down taxis and potential husbands in 3-inch heels, I chose cowboy boots and a pair of overalls that same friend said made me look like an oversized baby. For me, casual is not the opposite of formal. It is the opposite of confined.

As Americans, our casual style uniformly stresses comfort and practicality—two words that have gotten little attention in the history of fashion, but have transformed how we live. A hundred years ago, the closest thing to casual was sportswear—knitted golf dresses, tweed blazers, and oxford shoes. But as the century progressed, casual came to encompass everything from worker’s garb (jeans and lumberman jackets) to army uniforms (again with the khakis). Americans’ quest for a low-key style has stomped on entire industries: millinery, hosiery, eveningwear, fur, and the list goes on. It has infiltrated every hour of the day and every space from the boardroom to the classroom to the courtroom.

Americans dress casual. Why? Because clothes are freedom—freedom to choose how we present ourselves to the world; freedom to blur the lines between man and woman, old and young, rich and poor. The rise of casual style directly undermined millennia-old rules that dictated noticeable luxury for the rich and functioning work clothes for the poor. Until a little more than a century ago, there were very few ways to disguise your social class. You wore it—literally—on your sleeve. Today, CEOs wear sandals to work and white suburban kids tweak their L.A. Raiders hat a little too far to the side. Compliments of global capitalism, the clothing market is flooded with options to mix-and-match to create a personal style.

Despite the diversity of choice, so many of us tend towards the middle—that vast, beige zone between Jamie Foxx and the girl who wears pajama bottoms on the plane. Casual clothes are the uniform of the American middle class. Just go to Old Navy. There—and at The Gap, Eddie Bauer, Lands’ End, T.J. Maxx, and countless others—t-shirts, sweaters, jeans, sports shoes, and wrinkle-free shirts make “middle classness” available to anyone who choses to put it on. And in America, nearly everyone wants to put it on because nearly everyone considers himself or herself to be middle class.

The Dartmouth Shorts Protest of 1930

The “why” behind casual dress is a hand-clappingly perfect demonstration of fashion theorist Malcolm Barnard’s idea that clothing does not reflect personal identity but actually constitutes it. As one of my students put it, “So, it’s not like ‘Hey, I’m a hipster and then I buy skinny jeans and get a haphazard haircut,’ but more like in becoming a hipster, I get the jeans and the haircut.” Yes.

In wearing cargo shorts, polo shirts, New Balance sneakers, and baseball hats, we are “living out” our personal identifications as a middle-class Americans. Our country’s casual style is America’s calling card around the world—where people then make it their own. It is witnessed by the young boy on the Ivory Coast wearing a Steelers jersey and in the price of Levi’s on the black market in Russia. Street styles in Tokyo harken the campuses of Harvard and Yale in the 1950s—tweed sports coats paired with t-shirts and saddle shoes. Casual is diverse and casual is ever- changing, but casual was made in America.

As far as the “when” of our turn to casual, three major milestones mark the path. First, the introduction of sportswear into the American wardrobe in the late 1910s and early 1920s redefined when and where certain clothes could be worn. The tweed, belted Norfolk suits (complete with knickers and two-tone brogues) of the Jazz Age seem so formal by our “flip-flops-can-be-worn-everyday” mentality, but these garments were truly revolutionary in their time. As were the sweater sets and gored skirts worn by women. The trend towards casual flowed in one direction, as one period observer noted in a 1922 article in the San Francisco Call and Post: “Once a woman has known the joys and comfort of unrestricted movement, she will be very loath to go back to trailing cumbersome skirts.” The mass acceptance of sportswear coincided with the consolidation of the American fashion industry, which had previously been disjunctive and highly inefficient. By the end of the 1920s, centralized firms produced designs, worked with manufacturers across the country, and marketed specific kinds of garments to specific demographics.

A second milestone toward casual was the introduction of shorts into the American wardrobe. A flare-up in the popularity of bicycling in the late 1920s brought about a need for culottes (looks like a skirt but is actually shorts) and actual shorts—usually to the top of the knee and made of cotton or rayon. Shorts remained time-and-place specific for women (gardening, exercising, and hiking), until the Bermuda shorts craze of the late 1940s, when women turned plaid wool shorts into legit fashion and began experimenting with length.

Pennsylvania State University, 1950s

At all-male Dartmouth College in May 1930, the editors of the student paper challenged their readers to “bring forth your treasured possession—be it tailored to fit or old flannels delegged” so that the men could “lounge forth to the supreme pleasure of complete leg freedom.” The students listened. The Shorts Protest of 1930 brought out more than 600 students in old basketball uniforms, tweed walking shorts, and newly minted cutoffs, and introduced shorts into the American man’s wardrobe.

With a higher tolerance for different genres of dress and a newfound appreciation for non-constraining garments, Americans moved into the 1950s with more options to self-create than ever before. Fundamental to this freedom—apart from the suburban department store boom and the onslaught of media (magazines, television, film)—is a “unisexing” of our wardrobe, a third milestone on our quest to go casual. While bohemian types wore pants in the 1910s and 1920s, women really didn’t wear them until the 1930s, and it was not until the early 1950s that pants made it mainstream. There were still discussions and regulations about women in pants well into the 1960s.

That decade saw seismic shifts in “unisexing.” Women adopted t-shirts, jeans, cardigans, button-down collared shirts, and for the first time in nearly 200 years, it was fashionable for men to have long hair. James Laver, a renowned historian of dress, told a group of fashion industry executives in 1966, “Clothes of the sexes are beginning to overlap and coincide.” He recounted a recent experience walking through his town “behind a young couple” who “were the same height, both with long hair, both with jeans, both with pull overs, and I couldn’t tell them apart, until I looked at them from the side.”

To dress casual is quintessentially to dress as an American and to live, or to dream of living, fast and loose and carefree. I’ve devoted the past decade of my life trying to understand “why” and “when” we started dressing this way—and I’ve come to many conclusions. But for all the hours and articles, I’ve long known why I dress casual. It feels good.

The post Why and When Did Americans Begin to Dress so Casually? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This month marks my eighth year living in Los Angeles. I’ve always been a nomad–a collector not just of things but cities. I moved from Pennsylvania to Missouri to Michigan, back to Pennsylvania and then to Florida before coming to a city full of angels. You’d think I would have had enough of packing up junk and moving it from place to place. Quite the contrary. It’s the law of gravitas. What comes down must eventually be replaced.

In the Goodwill on Barrington and Santa Monica, just west of the 405 freeway that devours everything in its path, I find peace. Every aisle offers the solace of something I need replaced, or something my parents never allowed me to have but is now 95 percent off–and therefore screams, “Finders, Keepers!”

Sometimes I stray, and I flirt with other stores. But I’m pretty committed to this particular donation crowd. There’s just something about them.

I’ve trained my eye to catch subtly posh fabrics hanging amidst the racks of discarded GAP fashions and once-trendy H&M pieces. And I relish the chance to mock the donors of my designer finds. I wonder if they ever have regrets. Then I toss the clothing in my bag with a Mona Lisa grin. Their loss. As Marla Singer said of her bridesmaid thrift store find in Fight Club, “Someone loved it intensely for one day, then tossed it … like a Christmas tree. So special, than bam–it’s on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it.”

Sometimes it takes nothing more than the flash of a rogue rhinestone for me to dart from one color-coordinated aisle to the next. For my inner child (who lives on the outside most of the time, who am I kidding?), the experience is just shy of a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. A world of pure imagination.

The other day, I sat and stared at a slick pair of sparkly shades for a solid seven minutes trying to figure out where and how in my life they would be useful. Will everyone stare? Do they make too big of a statement? Do I like them ironically?

“You don’t have to worry about that here,” I told myself. “This is such stuff as dreams are made of.” It costs only $1.99 for me to walk out of the Goodwill feeling like a million bucks. I wonder what they’ll have in store for me next week.

Catherine Mangan currently heads up the internship program and social media efforts at Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. in Malibu.

*Photo courtesy of Catherine Mangan.

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