HISTORICAL COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER

Styles

Throughout the years many styles have been dictated by the fashion mavens who changed fashions just to sell clothes. Colors have also figured in the changing of the look for different years.

         

The bowler hat of the 1890’s gave way to the straw hat followed by the fedora. Hats fell out of favor when the hair styles didn’t allow a hat to be worn comfortably. Recently the baseball cap has been prevalent for day-to-day wear for most men not in business attire.

         

A neat suit has always been in style, but they changed from single-breasted to double-breasted occasionally just for the sake of selling a new fashion. Single- breasted might have two or three buttons. For the man who wanted to stay in style, he practically had to get a new wardrobe every year.

         

There were far-out styles, such as zoot suits in the 1940’s, which the young people embraced to the dismay of the older generation. It was meant to irritate the older folks and advertise that you were different. It worked.

         

In my generation there were styles that evoked the same response that zoot suits did a generation before. These were usually done with conventional clothing. The long, slicked back hair with the duck tail in the back and a pompadour in the front was introduced by Elvis Presley and was the bain of every parent. This was usually accompanied by tight-legged pants and engineer boots. It really brought about a division in the teen-agers of the day. Most boys had crew cuts and frowned on the antics of the “drapes”, which was the name bestowed on the boys that didn’t follow the mainstream way of thinking and dressing. Another thing was the turned-up collar. This was a sure sign of an anti-establishment attitude. The only thing that spilled over from the fringe to the mainstream was the pink shirt worn with black pants. My mother always thought that pink clashed with my red hair and would never get me one. She also refused to buy me a pair of Levi’s, or dungarees as she called them.

         

In the 1950’s, it was almost a uniform to wear button-down shirts, khaki pants, white athletic socks and penny loafers. We were lucky in Salisbury to have a Gant shirt factory with an outlet store. We all had Gant shirts and loved the fact that they were about half of what they cost in regular stores. The Gant store was where Season’s Best antique mall is now.

         

The styles have been fairly standard for the last thirty years, and, if it fits, you can wear it and feel in style. The problem is that most of my clothes seem to get smaller with age.