Desperate times call for desperate measures and few times in our nation’s long history have been as trying as the days of the 1930’s during America’s Great Depression.
As early as 1904, Chinese peasants had been wearing trousers made from flour sacks, garnering the outfits the humble title of “hunger clothes.”
During the Depression era, with cotton at a premium and money scarce, the citizens all over America’s heartland found themselves with few options with regards to clothing their growing children in the days leading up to the Second World War.
Soon, mothers from rural areas were cutting empty flour, potato, and livestock feed sacks into patterns. They then sewed them into dresses and pants for their needy sons and daughters. They weren’t pretty, but the sacks served a much-needed purpose.
By 1925, at least one company, Gingham Girl flour, packaged its goods in dress-quality fabric and used its sacks as a selling point. By the Depression years, printed sacks were widely reused, and the practice continued through fabric-starved years of World War II and into the early 1960s.
By the 1930s, businesses saw fabric sacks as crucially important for the promotion of their products.
Kendra Brandes of Bradley University writes,
“The recycling of cotton feed sacks into apparel and household items was a common practice across rural America during the first half of the twentieth century. This creative recycling of a utilitarian fabric has, until recently, been omitted from histories of American fashion because the practice centered on fabric use rather than new garment styles, and because the farm wife of rural America was not considered to be a source of fashion inspiration… However, it is the activities of these farm wives, clothing their families in feed sacks, that offer a view of life that was unique to rural communities during this time period.”
Trade organizations sponsored feed-sack fashion shows, and manufacturers hired designers to make sure the prints they chose would be appealing to women. The Textile Bag Manufacturers Association published a booklet, Sewing with Cotton Bags, in 1933, advising consumers how to get company logos out of sacks. (At that time, you had to soak the logo’s ink in lard or kerosene overnight.
By the late 1930s, companies began to use soluble inks that made the process much easier.
In writing her history of feed sack fashion, Brandes talked to older people who remembered feed store managers saving particular sacks for farm wives who were looking to match patterns.
But at least one feed salesman, quoted in 1948, found the shift in purchasing power from the farmer to his wife to be discomforting. “Years ago they used to ask for all sorts of feeds,” this salesman grumbled. “Now they come over and ask me if I have an egg mash in a flowered percale. It ain’t natural.”
Though we now look back at the feed-sack era as a charming time of frugality and thrift (and we have the Etsy listings of vintage fabric to prove it), during the Depression, there was some shame involved with dressing your family in feed sacks.
Widely repeated jokes about feed-sack underwear (a Pillsbury Flour Company manager, quoted in Time magazine in 1946: “They used to say that when the wind blew across the South you could see our trade name on all the girls’ underpants”) tapped into a degree of discomfort with the admission that you were dressed in recycled fabric.
Brandes reported: “For many women in rural America, use of these sacks for clothing was a mark of poverty. Soaking off logos, dying fabrics, and using embellishments of ribbon, rickrack, embroidery, and decorative buttons helped make the feed sack dress or shirt less distinguishable from ‘store bought’ garments.”
Though born of necessity, the wearing of feed sacks proved to be one of the defining character builders of a generation that would ultimately defeat Hitler, land a man on the moon and overcome one of the worst economic depressions the world has ever known. Now, there is no shame that should be placed on these home front heroes ,Well done!
thank you!
I never knew about this. Interesting!