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The fashions of Nebraska communities sure have changed over the years.
Things looked a lot different when the towns of Hartington, Coleridge, Laurel and Randolph were first settled in the 1880s and 1890s.
While calico dresses, aprons and sunbonnets may have been popular among farm wives, a fashionable young womanabout- town wouldn’t have been caught dead in such a rural-looking outfit.
Ladies wore floor-length dresses that were narrow at the waist and wide at the shoulders.
The wide-shouldered look was achieved with “leg-o-mutton sleeves.” The effect was similar to, but much more exaggerated than, the shoulder-pads of today.
Another fashionable garment was the shirtwaist. Similar to a blouse, a shirtwaist was worn with a dark skirt. Modesty in dress was the rule. Except for unveiled faces, women of the 1890s were clothed Islamic-style from head to foot. Underwear was not worn on the outside and buttons were buttoned to the neck.
The look women yearned to achieve was created by an American newspaper illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson.
Gibson’s typical American girl wore a starched white shirtwaist with a high collar, an ascot tie at the neck, and a dark floor-length skirt. With her trademark hourglass figure, the Gibson Girl became America’s first cover-girl.
The hourglass figure was not an easy shape to obtain.
Tight corsets were needed to achieve the proper look. Reinforced with stays of whalebone, steel or coralene, these instruments of torture were laced up tighter than a pigskin football. “The woman who dresses smartly must get rid of her stomach,” decreed the National Dressmakers’ Association from its New York City headquarters.
New York may have set the fashion pace for city slickers but the Advocate advised men “to beware of a girl, horse or cow that hasn’t got a stomach — and a good one. No engine is worth anything that hasn’t got a good boiler. Tie to a girl, young man, that can sit down to the breakfast table and make a harvest hand look like a dyspeptic — and she can’t do it with her stomach crowded through to the small of her back.”
Gibson Girl skirts could be quite bothersome when crossing muddy streets. “It is as difficult to understand why a dog runs on three feet instead of four as it is to comprehend why a lady will wear a skirt cut so long she must hold it up all the time when she might avoid all the annoyance by making it a little shorter,” said the Laurel Advocate in April 1900. So was it the mud holes of the 1890s that led to the miniskirts of the 1990s?
Fashions had become much more daring by 1913. Walt Mason wrote: Backward, turn backward, oh time in your flight/ and give us a girl whose skirts are not tight/ Give us a girl whose charms, though a few/ are not exposed by too much peek-aboo/ Give us a girl, no matter what age/ who won’t use the street as a vaudeville stage/ Give us a girl not too sharply in view/ Dress her in skirts the sun can’t shine through.
In 1895 two young ladies scandalized the citizens of Sioux City by appearing on the streets wearing divided skirts.
They said they couldn’t find two horses broken to ride sidesaddle. Women were agitating for more comfortable dress.
And what did the fashionable men wear?
The working man usually wore a shirt and bib overalls. In February 1908 a woman went into a store to buy a pair of overalls for her husband. “What size does he wear?” the clerk asked. “I don’t know,” the woman replied, “but his bust measure is 42.”
The business man often wore a dark-colored sack suit. Sack suits had four buttons which were buttoned nearly to the neck.
A suit with a cutaway coat might be worn on special occasions. A cutaway coat had long tails.
And no matter what the occasion, a hat would be worn. The cutaway coat required a top hat while a fedora or derby would be appropriate with a sack suit.
Even horses could wear straw hats in the summer: “The latest fad in the cities is to provide horses with large straw hats with a wet sponge inside them. This is a very humane act although it looks a trifle odd to those accustomed to this style of head gear for horses.”
