“It’s fashion: It goes in and out! To put a stop on that just wasn’t possible.”Įven communists, not known for their style, flopped in their idealistic striving for a uniform. “Saying fashion should not change is, by definition, not making sense,” Przybyszewski says. Thriftiness isn’t enough to stamp out the visceral craving among Westerners to showcase our individuality through clothes. Despite its lovely interchangeable collars, cuffs, and trimming that sustained interest with variety, the Standardized Dress never caught on. Women would finally be remembered for their faces and ideas, rather than their floral prints. Men benefited from the no-brainer business suit (and still do, damn them), while women were (and are) persecuted by the “pursuit of dress.” The Standardized Dress would end "the constant and ridiculous, troublesome and costly, change of fashion,” Johnson said. “Our purpose,” she said, “is nothing less than a freedom from a kind of slavery.” Johnson was melodramatic about her quest: “Our purpose,” she said, “is nothing less than a freedom from a kind of slavery.” In 1916, US home economist Helen Louise Johnson proposed a Standardized Dress - as chronicled by Linda Przybyszewski in The Lost Art of Dress, it had a V-line neck and modest skirt, similar to Coco Chanel's dresses at the time. Uniforms could alleviate many of these problems.Īnd yet, any attempt to standardize dress across an entire culture has failed. High fashion favors taut, unrealistic figures, leaving the rest of us with emotional complexes about our bodies. The rich wear intricate clothing to peacock their wealth, depleting the lower classes of their innate power and self-esteem. Fashion is one of the world’s nastiest polluters, second only to oil. ![]() In theory, we should all be wearing uniforms. After all, sartorial sameness conveys gravitas in the office. Lately, this utopian ideal of dress has become trendy among busy and thrifty women in the rise of the work uniform. What do Catholic school girls and Joseph Stalin have in common? They've worn a uniform to conserve their mental energy for a higher purpose than just fashion. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here. The archives will remain available here for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years.
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