Tossing the Hand-Me-Downs
It was described as a nightly ritual in which young club-hoppers slathered on glamor with an unbridled gusto. Heavy gold jewelry would frame a face painted with as much artifice as a contour brush could – or couldn’t – manage.
This article opens our three-part series on fashion in the Second City. Covering the history of Chicago fashion, this piece is followed by two more articles examining the city’s sartorial present and future.
As we launch our series on Chicago fashion, it is vital to start at the beginning. It is also sensible to ask, “What beginning?”—as the Chicago of history was hardly an Eden of original trends. Like most other American cities that blossomed after the turn of the twentieth century, its taste was imported. For the longest time, its trends were always from “out there.”
In the mid-seventies, however, Town & Country published a ten-page spread on what they deemed the emerging, unique “Chicago look.” This “look” was, to be polite, deeply overwrought: Chicago betties dolled up, jester-like, fancifully attending to the evening’s gaieties. Yet an excursion through the lounges of Chicago’s Gold Coast indicates a supreme lack of melodramatic pomp in les fringues of the modern Chicago woman. But this story, just one of our present stories, is for our next installment (and our future stories are for our last). Let us first retreat into the past and look at the looks we had before we had our own.
The Industrial Revolution altered the socioeconomic and cultural landscape of cities across the world. The American nouveau riche eagerly sought status, enlightenment, and beauty by means of traveling and bringing foreign delicacies back home. For Chicago women of wealth, that delicacy happened to be French couture, especially the dresses that British designer Charles Fredrick Worth was producing in Paris. Upon returning from their grand tour of Europe, the woman sauntered in and out of opera boxes, balls, and sitting rooms while decked out in fully loaded silk skirts, the breadth of which signaled social position.
The American nouveau riche eagerly sought status, enlightenment, and beauty by means of traveling and bringing foreign delicacies back home.
Not to be outdone, as the twentieth century approached and the growing middle class began to buy fashion for fashion’s sake, old-monied women started to adapt even more opulent and decorous fashions, which featured larger skirts of a velvet brocade with appliqués of cord, chenille, and needle lace. These rich fabrics, coupled with the accentuated S-shape created by the increased fullness of the skirt and swan-bill corset, allowed wealthy women to distinguish themselves from the middle-class and les demimondaines.
Yet by the outbreak of World War I, women had stopped wearing lavish clothing and jewelry. It was considered patriotic and in good taste to don more subtle and sober dress. In theaters and other venues, sartorial standards for both men and women began to break down, and classes started dressing in the same, more relaxed style. The wartime look entailed shorter, more liberating skirts (for lack of fabric) and militant influences that included belts with buckles. This gave way to the iconic “flapper” style, which abandoned the S-shape altogether and promoted the shapeless, draping, almost sexless shift-dress.
