Everyday Fashions of the Thirties As Pictured in Sears Catalogs

Stella Blum

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486132563
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design della moda

For thousands of women across America, hard hit when the frivolity of the twenties ended so resoundingly with the Crash of '29, the pages of the Sears catalog became an essential resource in maintaining a wardrobe. An ambitious marketing operation, it could not afford to take chances on haute couture; its fashions were geared as closely as possible to the prevailing tastes of the American people.
For this historically accurate sampling of authentic 1930s fashion, Stella Blum, former Curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, selected for reproduction 133 representative pages from rare Sears catalogs of the period (fall and spring catalog for each year from 1930 to 1939). Hundreds of illustrations record what men, women, and children were actually wearing in the 1930s when, as a copyline from the Fall 1930 catalog proclaimed: `Thrift is the spirit of the day. Reckless spending is a thing of the past.`
You'll see here how simpler women's fashion designs — of more traditional, affordable material — recaptured the feminine form with a more natural waistline and lower hemlines than seen in the twenties. For evening wear, longer dresses replaced flamboyant beaded short gowns while cloche hats, another twenties trademark, were replaced by berets, pillboxes, and turbans. The seriousness of the accessories and dresses endorsed by such Hollywood legends as Loretta Young, Claudette Colbert, and Fay Wray.
For historians of costume, nostalgia buffs and casual browsers, these pages afford a rare picture of how the average American really dressed during the thirties. It is an essential resource for study of the clothing of an important era which designers cannot afford to be without.

Publisher’s Note

Slicing off history in easily digestible units of decades is a useful device, but one that has its pitfalls, for it can easily obscure the broader sweep of time, with its long-developing trends. The thirties, however, are neatly framed by two events: the crash of 1929, with the attendant Great Depression, and the outbreak of world hostilities in 1939.

One might be tempted to think that the financial deprivations suffered by most people during the Depression would have brought fashion to a halt, but it continued, although the catalogs of Sears, Roebuck and Co., from which this anthology has been assembled, reflected the economic tumble.

In fall 1929, advertising copy had been light and breezy: “The newest styles, the most rece...