Every garment in the closet has a history, and many are stranger than they look. The cardigan is named for a cavalry commander, the zipper began as a boot fastener, and the Panama hat comes from Ecuador. This collection follows clothing, designers, accessories and trends from Elizabethan England to the U.S. Senate, correcting a few famous myths along the way and giving credit to people fashion history often forgot.
Every tile in a Fashion History game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Clothing
nine stories
1The necktie's ancestor went to war
On the tile: Cravat1600s
The necktie's ancestor arrived in Paris on soldiers. During the Thirty Years' War, Croatian mercenaries wore red scarves knotted at the neck, said to have protected their faces against cold weather and battlefield smoke. The French said the scarf was tied à la Croate, in the Croatian manner, and the word cravate entered French from the name of the Croats. King Louis XIV took up the fashion, and his pages are said to have brought him cravats every morning. From Paris the style spread across Europe, and Croatia now marks Cravat Day on October 18.
Charles Macintosh, a Glasgow chemist, distilled naphtha from coal tar, a by-product of the city's gasworks, and put it to work dissolving rubber. In 1823 he patented a waterproof fabric made by spreading that rubber between two pieces of cloth. The early coats smelled of naphtha, turned stiff in cold weather and soft in the heat, and trapped perspiration. His partner Thomas Hancock designed looser coats that let air circulate, and shortly after Macintosh died in 1843 he patented vulcanization, which weatherproofed the rubber. The raincoat kept the founder's name, respelled mackintosh.
The cardigan carries the title of James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 and pushed for warm clothing for his troops. His name attached itself to the close-fitting knitted wool jacket he made fashionable. The Crimean War named more than one garment. The raglan sleeve honors Lord Raglan, a British commander there. The knitted balaclava took its name from the battle, though that use of the word isn't recorded until 1878, during a later war in Afghanistan.
In the 1840s, crinoline meant a petticoat lined with horsehair cloth, worn to hold out a fashionably full skirt. As skirts kept widening, the weight of those petticoats became very uncomfortable by 1856. Relief soon came with the cage crinoline, patented in Paris that year: a frame of spring steel hoops that grew wider toward the hem, joined by tapes. Demand was enormous. Sheffield produced enough crinoline wire each week for over half a million of them. Some hoops even had hinges, to help women through doorways and up stairs.
A popular legend says some Victorian women had ribs surgically removed to shrink their waists. Fashion historian Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, calls that entirely mythical, and there seems to be no historical evidence such surgery ever happened. The famous tiny waists are exaggerated too. Steele cites figures from the Symington Collection in Leicestershire: out of 197 corsets, only one measured 18 inches, and most fell between 20 and 26 inches. Women of all classes wore corsets, including working women, and some corsets were made for sports and physical labor.
Pajamas began as something to wear by day. The word comes from Hindi pajama, probably from a Persian word meaning leg clothing, and it named loose trousers tied at the waist that were worn in India. Europeans living there adopted them, especially for sleeping, and the word reached English around 1800. Colonials brought the garment home as exotic loungewear, and by 1902 a Sears catalog was pitching men's pajamas as freer than the usual nightshirt. In the 1920s, beach pajamas became fashionable for women.
Americans named the tuxedo after Tuxedo Park, the New York enclave developed by tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard IV in 1886, but how the jacket got there is disputed. Local lore says his son Griswold and friends startled the October 1886 Autumn Ball in tailless coats and scarlet vests. Another story credits James Brown Potter, supposedly outfitted by the Prince of Wales's tailor, Henry Poole. Poole's records back part of that tale: in 1865 it cut the prince a short blue evening coat for informal dinners. But no Potter appears in its ledgers.
At a polo match in England, John Brooks, grandson of the founder of Brooks Brothers, noticed that the players had fastened down their collar points so they wouldn't flap as the ponies raced about. The family firm turned that trick into a permanent feature with small buttons, and in 1900 it introduced the button-down collar shirt in New York. The company still sells it as the Original Polo Button-Down. After World War II, the button-down became America's most popular shirt style and a pillar of the Ivy League look.
The trench coat is older than the trenches it was named for. Thomas Burberry developed gabardine, a weatherproof cotton, in 1879, and in 1901 his firm was asked to design a lightweight raincoat for soldiers. His rival Aquascutum had supplied military coats to the British Army in the Crimean War of the 1850s. In World War I, the War Office commissioned coats with epaulettes, a storm flap and D-rings on the belt, and because officers wore them in the trenches, the name stuck. Explorer Ernest Shackleton praised Burberry cloth for keeping out drifting Antarctic snow.
Rose Bertin came to Paris from Picardy as a young woman with no connections, and by the early 1770s she had her own shop, Le Grand Mogol, on the fashionable rue Saint-Honoré. In the summer of 1774, the Duchess of Chartres, one of her patrons, introduced her to the new queen, Marie Antoinette. By 1778 Bertin was so powerful at court that the press dubbed her France's minister of fashion. Even after the royal family was placed under house arrest, she kept delivering outfits, and the clothes the queen wore on the day she was moved to the Conciergerie prison came from Le Grand Mogol.
The man often called the father of haute couture was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire, in 1825. Charles Frederick Worth moved to Paris in the mid-1840s and worked at Gagelin, a silk and shawl firm, where he married a fellow employee, Marie Vernet, who modeled his early designs. In 1858 he opened his own house on the rue de la Paix with a partner. A ball gown he made for Princess de Metternich caught Empress Eugénie's eye, and she summoned him to see her the next morning. He was one of the first designers to sew his own labels into his clothes.
Elizabeth Keckley, also spelled Keckly, was born into slavery in Virginia in 1818. In 1855 she paid $1,200 for her own freedom and her son's, with money patrons advanced to her as a loan. She built a successful dressmaking business in Washington, and in March 1861 Mary Lincoln hired her. Keckley became the first lady's confidante, and in 1862 she founded the Contraband Relief Association to help freed people. Her 1868 memoir was meant to be sympathetic, but it was attacked as an invasion of privacy, and the two never spoke again.
Dress history credits Paul Poiret with freeing women from the corset, which he replaced with a girdle and a brassiere. Then, in the spring of 1910 in Paris, came his hobble skirt. Its hem measured less than 36 inches around, so narrow that wearers were forced to hobble rather than walk. Poiret saw the irony himself and later remarked, in effect, that he had freed the bust but shackled the legs. His other bold ideas included harem pantaloons and lampshade tunics.
Gabrielle Chanel made her name with a fabric fashion didn't respect. Jersey was an inexpensive, utilitarian knit used largely for men's underwear, sportswear and stockings, until she used it for supple clothes that let women move. In 1926, American Vogue showed a black Chanel crêpe de chine day dress and predicted it would be "the frock that all the world will wear." The magazine dubbed it the Ford of fashion, after the popular American car, and the little black dress became a wardrobe staple.
In the spring of 1927, Elsa Schiaparelli noticed a woman in Paris wearing a sweater that held its shape, a rarity when most sweaters sagged. It had been knitted by an Armenian woman using a special double-layered stitch, so Schiaparelli recruited her. She drew a white bow, like a scarf tied at the neck, and had it knitted into black sweaters. She wore one to a luncheon attended by fashion leaders, and a buyer from Lord and Taylor ordered 40 on the spot. That bowknot sweater, more than her first collection, made her famous.
In 1942, Harper's Bazaar challenged Claire McCardell, a designer from Frederick, Maryland, to create an outfit a woman could wear to clean the house and later to a cocktail party. She answered with the Popover, a simple wrap dress of durable cotton that came with its own oven mitt. It sold for $6.95, and more than 50,000 were sold in 1942 alone. Rather than copy Paris, McCardell designed comfortable, mass-produced clothes with American women in mind, and she is credited with pioneering separates, ballet flats and leggings.
Christian Dior showed his first collection on February 12, 1947, and became an overnight sensation. It offered rounded shoulders, a hand-span waist and enormous skirts, the opposite of lean, boxy wartime clothes. Carmel Snow, editor of American Harper's Bazaar, christened it the New Look on the spot. It took a lot of cloth, typically 15 meters for a wool day dress and 25 for a short taffeta evening gown. In Britain, where rationing was still in place, that caused outrage, and the Board of Trade tried to suppress it.
Ann Lowe, born in Alabama in 1898 and the granddaughter of an enslaved woman, came from a family of accomplished dressmakers. In 1953 she made Jacqueline Bouvier's gown for her wedding to John F. Kennedy, using fifty yards of ivory silk taffeta. Ten days before the wedding, a burst pipe in Lowe's studio soaked ten of the fifteen dresses, the bride's included. Her team remade in ten days what had taken eight weeks, and the job became a heavy financial loss. Almost none of the wedding coverage mentioned her name.
High heels are often assumed to have been invented for women. They weren't. Heeled footwear was worn for hundreds of years in Western Asia, where a heel let a horseback rider hook his foot in the stirrup and steady himself to use weapons such as the bow. Heels reached Western Europe only around the turn of the 17th century, and European men took them up. At the court of Louis XIV, high red heels signaled political privilege. In the 18th century, fashion was recast as frivolous and feminine, and most men gave up their heels.
For more than two centuries, many a woman's pocket wasn't sewn into her dress at all. Tie-on pockets, pear-shaped pouches worn singly, in pairs or even in threes, were tied around the waist and reached through openings in the dress and petticoats. They were in common use from about 1650 to the end of the 19th century. A 1725 London newspaper notice for a lost pair lists what they held: a silver purse with five or six shillings, a ring, a toothpick case, two handkerchiefs, a small knife, a key, gloves and a thimble.
Jonas Hanway is said to have been the first man to make a practice of carrying an umbrella while walking the streets of London. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he persevered for some thirty years through the jeers of passersby and the clamor of sedan-chair carriers and hackney coachmen, until his habit was generally adopted. A Victorian history of London adds that he punished some who struck him with their whips. Hanway, a traveler and philanthropist who died in 1786, also cofounded the Marine Society.
Some of the earliest wristwatches were made as jewelry for women. In 1810, Caroline Murat, Napoleon's sister and queen of Naples, ordered from Breguet an oblong repeating watch for a bracelet. Finished in 1812, it was mounted on a wristlet of hair woven with gold thread. In 1868, Patek Philippe made a dainty gold bracelet watch set with enamel and diamonds, later sold to a Hungarian countess named Koscowicz. A famous early wristwatch for a man came in 1904, when Louis Cartier made one for his friend, the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who wanted to be able to tell time while flying.
The bowler began as protective headgear. According to Lock & Co., the London hatters who took the order, it was made in 1849 for Edward Coke, younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Leicester, who wanted a hard, close-fitting hat with a low, rounded crown. It was meant to shield his gamekeepers' heads from low-hanging branches as they rode around the Holkham Hall estate in Norfolk. Thomas and William Bowler made the design. Coke is said to have tested the finished hat by setting it on the floor and stamping on it, then paid 12 shillings. Lock's still calls it the Coke.
Despite its name, the Panama hat is not Panamanian. It is woven in Ecuador from the fibers of the toquilla palm, which grows on the country's coast, and UNESCO recognized the weaving tradition as intangible cultural heritage in 2012. The misleading name comes from the trade: Ecuadorian merchants found a bigger market for the hats in Panama, the narrow crossing between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Photos of Panama Canal workers in the hats helped make them popular, and in 1906 Theodore Roosevelt was photographed wearing one on his visit to the canal.
Whitcomb Judson patented his clasp-locker in 1893 as a replacement for the long laces then used on both men's and women's boots. The prototype was clumsy and jammed often, though it did work: Judson and his business associate, Lewis Walker, had sewn it into their own boots. In 1913, Gideon Sundback remodeled it into a more streamlined and reliable fastener. The catchy name came a decade later. In 1923 the B.F. Goodrich company began selling rubber galoshes with the fastener and coined the name zipper, for the zip sound it made.
In March 1910, Chicago banned wearing any hatpin in public whose exposed point stuck out more than half an inch beyond the crown of the hat. Supporters said long pins endangered eyes and faces in crowded places, and violators faced arrest and a $50 fine. Women in the galleries protested that long hatpins were often their only means of defense at night, and they shouted their disapproval when the vote was announced. Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and New Orleans were among the other cities that limited hatpins.
Chuck Taylor played for the Firestone Non-Skids, a semi-pro basketball team owned by the tire maker, before taking a job as a salesman for Converse in the early 1920s. He put on basketball clinics all over the country and seemed to know every college coach. People began ordering Chuck Taylor's shoe instead of the Converse All Star, so in 1932 the company added his signature to the ankle patch, 15 years after the shoe's 1917 debut. Taylor was later inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
In Shakespeare's England, clothing was a legal matter. Statutes of apparel reserved silk of the color purple, cloth of gold tissued and sable fur for the royal family, with narrow exceptions for top nobles. In 1574, Elizabeth I issued a proclamation warning that excess of apparel threatened the wealth of the whole realm and was ruining many young gentlemen. Offenders risked heavy fines and prison, but enforcement was spotty at best. In 1565, one Richard Walweyn was detained over an outrageously large pair of hose. In 1604, James I voided all the acts of apparel.
When Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni, he wasn't talking about pasta. In 18th-century Britain, a macaroni was a flamboyantly dressed young man, the kind who had made the Grand Tour of Europe and come home with continental tastes. Some formed a Macaroni Club in the 1760s, and they wore tight, colorful coats and towering powdered wigs. The song mocked American colonists as such simpletons that they thought one feather made them fashionable. By the 1770s, macaroni had become a term of derision in England itself.
In 1795, with Britain at war with France, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger's government taxed hair powder. Anyone who wanted to powder their hair had to buy an annual certificate costing one guinea. Reformist Whigs mocked those who paid as guinea pigs and chose to cut their own hair short in the French style instead. Powdered hair and wigs were already falling out of fashion, and the tax hurried them along. By 1855, only 997 people were still paying it, and the tax was finally repealed in the 1860s.
The curling teardrop called paisley began far from Scotland. It is the buta, which National Museums Scotland calls the most celebrated motif known to Indian weavers, and it reached Europe on Kashmir shawls in the 18th century. The shawls were the height of fashion but hard to afford, so British weavers copied them, beginning in Edinburgh in 1767. The town of Paisley came to outproduce the rest of Britain, and by the 1830s the shawls were simply called Paisleys. In the 1870s, bustles replaced crinolines, and shawls quickly went out of fashion.
5Queen Victoria did not invent the white wedding dress
On the tile: White Wedding1840Myth busted
Queen Victoria is often said to have invented the white wedding dress. She didn't. White had been a popular color for wedding gowns for centuries before her 1840 wedding, and for ordinary brides it was a show of wealth, since white clothes were costly and hard to keep clean. What Victoria broke with was royal custom, since royal brides typically wore silver or gold. Her white gown of Spitalfields silk, trimmed with Honiton lace worked in the Devon village of Beer, did help make white the favorite color for brides.
6Amelia Bloomer promoted them but did not design them
On the tile: Bloomers1851Myth busted
Bloomers are named for Amelia Bloomer, but she didn't design them. In 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller visited her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, New York, wearing a roughly knee-length skirt over Turkish-style pantaloons. Stanton adopted it, and Bloomer promoted it in The Lily, the temperance and women's rights paper she edited, so the outfit took her name. Cartoonists sneered, and critics fixed on the clothes instead of the arguments. Stanton gave the costume up by the end of 1853.
In an 1884 photograph, two-and-a-half-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool in a white skirt, with shoulder-length hair, patent leather party shoes and a hat trimmed with a marabou feather. It looks surprising today, but social convention then dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, around the time of their first haircut, and his outfit was considered gender-neutral. University of Maryland historian Jo B. Paoletti has traced how children's clothing later split into two teams, blue for boys and pink for girls.
Nylon stockings went on sale nationwide on May 15, 1940, at $1.15 a pair, and they were sold out at most stores by noon. Within two years nylon had taken 30 percent of the full-fashioned hosiery market. Then, in November 1941, DuPont shifted its nylon from consumer goods to military production, for parachutes, tire cords and more. When stockings came back after the war, supply couldn't keep up. In Pittsburgh in June 1946, some 40,000 people lined up for over a mile to compete for 13,000 pairs.
A popular story says John F. Kennedy killed the men's hat by going bareheaded to his inauguration. In fact, he wore, or at least carried, a silk top hat that day. The real decline started decades earlier. As journalist Neil Steinberg showed in his book Hatless Jack, American men's hat manufacturing peaked in 1903, hatlessness was already a major problem for the industry by the mid-1920s, and the business was in free fall by the late 1940s. Kennedy disliked hats, but the trend was long underway.