by Ardeana Hamlin
of The Weekly Staff
Once upon a time, from the early 1900s to the early 1960s, a group of female home economics professors who taught at well-known universities in the United States, were largely responsible for how women and girls looked in terms of dress. Their work had nothing to do with fashion as we know it today, but it had everything to do with dressing stylishly in clothing designed to take a woman through the day whether she was a teenager, a college student, a “home woman” married and raising children, or a woman who worked outside the home for living.
In those days, teenagers and women wore clothing designed for specific activities — house dresses for keeping house, fitted suits for going to work in offices, bare-shouldered gowns for an evening out, or pants and blouses for engaging in sports. Many of these women — our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers — sewed their own ensembles, knew how to take care of and mend their clothing, and owned far fewer items of clothing made of good quality fabrics than is the norm today.
The fact that all women do not look alike, do not have the same body type and that some are mature and elderly was factored into the science behind how the “dress doctors,” as the home economists came to be known, determined what a woman wore, including me and women of my generation.
This is just some of the fascinating information contained in Linda Przybyzewski’s book “The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish,” published in 2014. It sheds much-deserved light on the home economists, the institutions and the government agencies responsible for taking on the task of teaching women, for more than 50 years, how to dress appropriately, stylishly and economically. Her narrative is engaging, interesting and offers a vast trove of wisdom dress that has been pretty much forgotten, until now.
There were, of course, rules in the era of the dress doctors. Girdles, hats and gloves were items of necessity. No one except the grief stricken ought wear black, and especially not mature women beyond the age 50. The dress doctors deemed black unbecoming to the aging face. Clothing in those years, was designed to bring attention primarily to the face.
Pants were worn only for sports and related activities. Dress to suit the life you live, not the one you wish you were living, the dress doctors advised. Plan a wardrobe, determine what it will cost and stay within that budget. If you cannot afford to buy readymade the clothing you need or desire, sew the dresses yourself. The dress doctors, through their vast network, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Extension services, would teach you how.
As I read “The Lost Art of Dress,” I began to think about my family photographs and how my mother and aunts dressed — hats, gloves and heels for special occasions, good-quality coats that took them through more than one winter, skirts and dresses that allowed for ease of movement. They look stylish and put together even though they grew up in a tiny Maine town and were the daughters of farmers and woodsmen whose incomes did not allow for lavishness of dress. Then it dawned on me — my female relatives, who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s — had absorbed the lessons of the dress doctors even though none of them had ever been on a college campus. They did, however, read ladies’ magazines, pore over home shopping catalogs such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, and had mothers or grandmothers who sewed dresses for them. Catalogs, magazine articles and pattern books were some of the ways the lessons of the dress doctors seeped into and shaped my relatives’ ideas of how to dress.
What the dress doctors taught was powerful, common sense wedded to science — direct observation, surveys and diligent study.
The dress doctors assumed that “dress can lead any girl or woman to success in life,” and that “beautiful and becoming clothing that contributes to one’s attractiveness gives poise and assurance and thus contributes to success.”
And if you only had one or two dresses? The dress doctors could come up with at least a half-dozen ways you could change the look of your dress with removable collars and cuffs, belts, scarves or even sewing on a new set of buttons.
“The Lost of Art of Dress” is a historical chronicle of a movement and the women behind it who believed in the democratization of dress so that any woman, regardless of her looks, size or socio-economic status could have clothing that fit her figure, was becoming in terms of color and cut, and was affordable.
The statement I liked best in the book — though I found every chapter of interest — was this: “Dressmaking is a form of engineering.” Dressmaking, Przybyzewsk writes, requires a woman to imagine what she wants a dress to look like, to draw the pattern (which is akin to a blueprint), and figure out the steps and the process of putting the garment together and to make it fit correctly to a three-dimensional form. She will use math skills in the process. She also will need to know how to operate and maintain the machine on which she makes the dress.
Although “The Lost Art of Dress” does not call specifically for a return of home economics to public schools and colleges in the 21st century, her book makes a good case for it.
Reading Przybyzewski’s book made me glad I had the opportunity to spend a year taking high school home economics classes from teacher Mrs. Elizabeth Calkins.
The “dress doctors” were godmothers I never knew I had, until now.
For information, go to basicbooks.com.