The way we dress now took recognizable shape during the 1930s:
Men got jackets with substantial shoulder pads and darts at the waist. Women acquired sportswear, in fabrics and designs that followed the lines of the figure: clothes made for movement and ease — and equipped with pockets. They spelled escape from dependence on the handbag (or a husband’s pockets). The brassiere, an invention only a few decades old, grew molded cups for uplift and became standard garb. And where would we be without slacks? For women, they still counted as daring 80 years ago, but there was no doubt that they would catch on.
Look closely at the emergence of our modern style, and you can see politics in the fabric seams. Economic collapse and the search for social unity — the conditions that made the New Deal possible — created an unlikely alignment of tastes. Streamlined clothes appealed to the still prosperous, anxious to hide their wealth, and to the downwardly mobile, who hoped to conceal their slide. The sleek look in dresswear issued from Paris, where a pioneering generation of career women colonized the couture scene. The clean lines spread to New York’s Seventh Avenue, where an equally visionary set of American women designers, foremost among them Claire McCardell, spearheaded the sportswear boom. They shared a bold vision: to exploit the idea of femininity and sex appeal in order to achieve a more natural fashion, liberated from shifting conventions — a timeless style.
A timeless obsession took root, too. The elegantly simple creations inspired by this convergence of social tensions and taste disguised wealth, or the lack of it, but revealed an awful lot else. There was no hiding the figure under these clothes. The toned and exercised body became a marker of privilege, a status signal that has become only more glaring since. We have the 1930s to thank for a by-now-familiar paradox: Americans’ clothes became more similar even as their bodies diverged along class lines.
For men as for women, the changes in fashion were startling. Suits were now designed to build a man up. The sack-suit jacket, a floppy construction, had revealed drooping shoulders; the pants readily slipped below bulging bellies. But the redefined suit, born in London and Naples, bid farewell to all that. On Savile Row, the Dutch-born tailor Frederick Scholte took as his model the scarlet coats worn by members of the Brigade of Guards, famous emblems of masculinity (and, infamously, the lust objects of gay men, as a series of sex scandals demonstrated). Scholte’s “drape” method of cutting cloth broadened the shoulders and narrowed the waist, making a man look taller, slimmer, and more muscular. Suddenly anyone could take on the dashing figure of a guardsman. In 1933, Esquire, a lavish 116 pages and 50 cents on the newsstands (this at a time when the average household income was about $29 a week), sold out its first print run. The magazine, conceived as a quarterly, turned monthly with its second issue.
For the ladies, accentuating femininity was the goal. The flapper’s straight, dropped-waist dress of the 1920s — a garment so loose that it could be pulled on over the head — was gone. Dresses were fashioned from clingy materials and cut on the bias, diagonally across the grain of the cloth; the technique exploited the stretch of the fabric to emphasize the curves of the body. New methods of weaving produced fabrics ideal for sinuous designs: mousselines and supple velvets, silk gauzes and chiffons. Every year, more body was exposed. At the beach and by the pool, women could dare to show off in midriff-revealing two-piece swimsuits. Evening gowns dipped down backs, displaying naked flesh. Nightgowns were slinky and slippery. It could be hard to distinguish between what 1930s women wore to galas and what they wore to bed at night.
Hollywood hyped the new look, broadcasting it to the tens of millions of people who flocked to American cinemas every week during the movie-mad Depression.