Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Thomas Seay entheogens at yahoo.com, Wed Feb 9 13:39:44 PST 2005:
> >I see no advantage to dressing up like a 1920 industrial worker
1. Cost 2. Less time dressing 3. Less time shopping
(In the '20s I would guess industrial workers had their shirts ironed. The coming of perma press made a big difference. In the '50s, and I suppose the '60s, industrial workers wore sports shirts, not work shirts. Those of us who had khakis left over wore them.)
>
> What men of all classes, not just industrial workers, lost is hats.
>
Hats were victims of WW2 & the Korean War. Millions of men were forced to put on hats (many of them not too comfortable) every time they stepped outdoors for two to five years, and they came out of the service vowing never again. :-) I was one of them.
Yoshie's source puts the divide in the 1960s, but hats were rapidly disappearing from the late '40s on. Before the war college men tended to wear hats; I don't remember a single hat-wearer at Western Michigan in the years I was there (1947-50). What made the difference, I think, was the influx of veterans. Hats went the way of freshman hazing.
Carrol
P.S. I once did see a Platonic Archetype walking. In the summer of '69 driving to Des Moines we stopped at a restaurant along I80 in Iowa. And a couple (40s to 60s?) came in; he was wearing a pressed work shirt, pressed bib overalls; she was wearing a house dress right out of a Rockwell Kent painting.