Dress in American Culture

by Cunningham, Patricia A.; Lab, Susan Voso; Cunningham, Patricia A.

• ISBN13: 9780879725792
• ISBN10: 0879725796
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-12-31
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Early Americans accommodated, adapted, and manipulated their clothing to adjust to their physical and social environment. This book focuses on the relationship of dress to the struggle of indigenous and immigrant Americans to fill expected and unexpected needs and express political ideologies and ethnic identity. In doing so the contributors hope to prompt readers to reconsider the place of dress in the interpretation of American culture. The casual reader of this book of essays may be surprised to learn that it has little to do with different styles of clothing or the vagaries of fashion. The contributors reveal the politics, or power, of dress, especially in its function as a symbol of American ideals, and examine changes in clothing behavior that occurred as Americans faced new experiences.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
From Moccasins to Frock Coats and Back Again: Ethnic Identity and Native American Dress in Southern New England	p. 6
Dress for the Ohio Pioneers	p. 42
Nineteenth-Century African-American Dress	p. 66
The American Cowboy: Development of the Mythic Image	p. 80
From Folk to Fashion: Dress Adaptations of Norwegian Immigrant Women in the Midwest	p. 95
Dressing the Colonial Past: Nineteenth Century New Englanders Look Back	p. 109
The Gym Suit: Freedom at Last	p. 140
Simplicity of Dress: A Symbol of American Ideals	p. 180
"War" Drobe and World War I	p. 200
Contributors	p. 220
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