Dress and Identity in America

The Baby Boom Years 1946-1964

Daniel Delis Hill

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350373914
• eBook ISBN: 9781350373938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Dress and Identity in America is an examination of the conservatism and materialism that swept across the country in the late 1940s through the 1950s-a backlash to the wartime tumult, privations, and social upheavals of the Second World War.

The study looks at how American men sought to recapture a masculine identity from a generation earlier, that of the stoic patriarch, breadwinner, and dutiful father, and in the process, became the men in the gray flannel suits who were complacently conventional and conformist. Parallel to that is a look at how American women, who had donned pants and went to work in wartime munitions factories or joined services like the WACS and WAVES, were now expected to stay at home as housewives and mothers, dressed in cinched, ultrafeminine New Look fashions.

As the Space Age dawned, their baby boom children rejected the conventions of their elders and experimented with their own ideas of identity and dress in an emerging era of counterculture revolutions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: Growing Up
• 2 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: The Postwar Years
• 3 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: Crisis in Masculinity
• 4 Men’s Dress from Ivy League to Continental to Mod
• 5 Ethnic Men’s Identity and Dress
• 6 Women of the Baby Boom Era: Lessons of Youth
• 7 Women’s Identities in the Baby Boom Years
• 8 Women’s Fashions of the Baby Boom Era
• 9 Baby Boom Children
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright