Poodle Skirts, Saddle Shoes & Sunday Best: What We Wore Back Then

There was a time when no matter where you were going – downtown on errands or to church on Sunday – everyone dressed up for it. Dressing up wasn’t for special occasions; it was for leaving the house at all. People dressed up just to fly on an airplane. We didn’t always have money, but we always had nice clothes.

For the girls: felt, crinoline, and a chiffon scarf

You probably had, or yearned for, a poodle skirt if you were a young woman in the late 1950s. The full, wide circle of fabric that made up the skirt was basically an outfit standard at sock hops; It hung over a crinoline petticoat starched stiff enough to stand up by itself, worn with a crisp blouse, a cardigan buttoned just so, and a chiffon scarf at the neck or ponytail.

• Bobby socks, folded exactly once — over saddle shoes kept white with weekly polish, or penny loafers with a shiny penny in each slot
• The circle pin on the Peter Pan collar, and a charm bracelet that jingled your whole biography
• His letterman jacket or his class ring — worn on a chain or wrapped with angora yarn to fit, the official announcement that you were going steady
• White gloves downtown — because a lady did not shop bare-handed, and neither did her mother

For the fellas: denim, Brylcreem, and the perfect ducktail

The boys had their own uniform to follow: blue jeans cuffed just once at the bottom, a white T-shirt, and a letterman jacket (if you’d made the cut) — or, if your mom would allow it (and I doubt she did), a black leather jacket similar to Brando’s. If you were into Pat Boone then white bucks; otherwise engineer boots.

Hair was architecture. A little dab of Brylcreem (“a little dab’ll do ya”, no one ever used less than that) plus the comb in your back pocket, pulled out every hour or so to fix a few stray hairs. The ducktail got shaped with more patience than any homework ever received. And it all happened at the barber shop (striped pole out front, comics stacked on a shelf, a gumball machine by the door). A haircut ran fifty cents.

Everyone wore a hat. Everyone.

Look at some of those classic street photos from the 1940s and ’50s — that picture is an example — and see if you can spot a single bare head. Men wore hats (fedora and trilby) when they were out, always tipping them to women, and removing them as soon as they went inside. Women wore their hats to church (sometimes very impressive ones, with netting and silk flowers) and stored them in round hatboxes on the closet shelf. Even the kids wore caps.

A man was no more likely to forget his hat than his trousers. And then, in barely a decade, the whole institution vanished — one of the fastest extinctions in the history of getting dressed. The hatboxes lingered in attics for decades, like monuments.

Made at home, and made to last

The fashion magazines never captured this part: Half of all American clothing was stitched together at a kitchen table. Patterns from Simplicity, Butterick and McCall’s were fifty cents each; going to the fabric store was an errand you did once a week — and if a mother could sew, she could duplicate something in the Sears catalog for pennies on the dollar.

During the lean years, flour and feed companies printed their cotton sacks in florals and ginghams specifically so they could be sewn into dresses — and plenty of us wore “feed sack” school clothes without a hint of shame, because so did everybody else. Clothes were mended, let out, handed down, and turned — and “school clothes,” “play clothes” and “Sunday best” were three separate wardrobes that did not mix. Woe to the child who climbed a fence in Sunday best.

You had your school clothes, your play clothes, and your Sunday best — and woe to the child who wore one as the other.

Your fitting room is open: Did you have a poodle skirt or a letterman jacket? Did your mother sew from patterns — or feed sacks? And gentlemen: Brylcreem or Vitalis? Settle it in the comments.

Fashion photo, 1957. Photo: Erik Holmén, Nordiska museet — CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.