Excerpted from
The People’s Almanac Presents the 20th Century: History With the Boring Parts Left Out, by David Wallechinsky.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA PARK
1900—Button-Down Collars
John Brooks, of the celebrated men’s outfitters Brooks Brothers, found a day out at the polo grounds in New Bedford a profitable experience. He noticed that some of the visiting British players had the collars of their shirts buttoned down and learned that it was to prevent the collars’ riding up into the players’ faces on the field of play. Brooks had a special line of shirts made up with button-down collars, which he launched as the Polo. Originally the buttoned-down look was only for sportswear, but it was picked up on Ivy League campuses for general wear in the early 1950s.
1906—Permanent Waving
German-born Karl Ludwig Nessler was working as a hairstylist in a London salon when he first tried out his new technique of permanent waving on a customer. The boss spotted him and he was instantly dismissed. This was fortuitous, as it was exactly the spur he needed to go into business on his own account. On October 8, 1906, he introduced his Nessler Permanent Waving at his salon on London’s Oxford Street. At first, customers were few. They had to wear a dozen heavy brass curlers weighing 1 3/4 pounds each, the process took six hours to complete, and the cost was beyond all but the very rich at $55. Success came only when Nessler emigrated to the United States on the outbreak of World War I to avoid being interned as an enemy alien. Soon after his arrival, the fashionable exhibition dancer Irene Castle introduced “bobbed” hair, and permanent waving became a craze that swept America.
1909—One-Piece Bathing Suit
Australian-born swimmer Annette Kellerman caused public outrage by appearing in public on a California beach wearing the first one-piece bathing dress. No stranger to controversy, in 1915 she gave the moral guardians of America something more to chew on when she dispensed with a bathing suit altogether to frolic in and out of the water naked in the Fox movie
Daughter of the Gods.
1909—Sportswoman to Wear Trousers
Scion of a Boston Brahmin family, Eleanor Sears was a superb all-around athlete who believed that women would never be able to play team games effectively until they abandoned their skirts. In 1909 she strode onto the polo ground at the Burlingame Country Club wearing jacket and trousers and asked to be allowed to join in a match against a team from England. Miss Sears’s blow for dress reform was premature. The captain of the English team was rendered speechless with indignation and the coach of the American team ordered her off the field. Attitudes toward rational dress for women relaxed during World War I, when there was little time for sport but many women donned pants for workwear. Just ten years after Eleanor Sears’s frustrated effort, a Leeds, England, schoolgirl named Elaine (later Baroness) Burton appeared in shorts for the first time at a track-and-field event in the Northern Counties (England) Ladies’ Athletics Championships—and nobody ordered her off.
1913—Zipper
The zip fastener as we know it today was patented on April 29, 1913, by Gideon Sundback, a young Swedish engineer from Hoboken, New Jersey. There had been earlier attempts to produce a slide fastener, but they all suffered from the fatal flaw of coming apart under pressure. Sundback’s improved version worked on the principle of identical units mounted on parallel tapes and was completely reliable. Initially, though, it met with no greater commercial success than its inferior predecessors. The navy put them on pilot’s overalls, the army on the pockets of uniforms, and the air corps found a use for them never contemplated by the inventor—zipping the fabric onto the wings of airplanes. After the war the fasteners began to be incorporated into footwear, the B. F. Goodrich Company coining the name “Zipper” when they used them on their rubber galoshes. But although zippers were sometimes used on sportswear, high priests and priestesses of haute couture disdained anything so practical until Elsa Schiaparelli started to put them on the back of women’s dresses at her Paris fashion house in 1931. Menswear finally succumbed in 1935, when fly buttons on men’s pants were replaced with the far more efficient, though occasionally painful, zip fastener.
1914—Backless Brassiere
The first patent for a brassiere was taken out by New York debutante Mary Phelps Jacobs on November 13, 1914. But was it the very first brassiere? What the French called soutien-gorge was already known in Paris, but as a large, cumbersome garment full of frills and furbelows. Jacob’s was the first elasticized, backless brassiere, designed to release women from the tyranny of the corset and enable them to participate in sports and other outdoor activities without physical restraint. Her prototype, though, had consisted of no more than two pocket handkerchiefs and a piece of pink ribbon. She conceived the idea while changing for a ball, the thought of dancing the night away in a tight whalebone corset inspiring her to find a looser and less constricting substitute. Within half an hour her French maid had stitched together this ultralightweight bust supporter and Jacob was able to enjoy the ball with a new sense of freedom. Friends to whom she confided her secret asked her to produce bras for them, and then one day a letter arrived from a total stranger asking for one and enclosing a dollar bill. Realizing that there was a market for her invention, Jacob hired a designer to produce a detailed specification for her patent application, then sold the patent to the Warner Corset Company for $1,500 outright. Had she opted for royalties instead, she would have earned at least a hundredfold.
1914—Fashion Show
The first fashion parade with live models in the United States was organized by Edna Woolman Chase, editor of American Vogue, and held in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York on November 4, 1914. (The first in the world had been held in London in 1899.) The object was to showcase American fashion, imports of Parisian couture having been suspended because of the war, though Mrs. Chase admitted in her memoirs to an ulterior motive—with no new designs from Paris, she had nothing with which to fill the pages of Vogue. Among the fashion houses represented were Bendel, Mollie, O’Hara, Bergdorf-Goodman, Gunther, Tappi, Maison Jacqueline, and Kurzman. The models appeared on a stage, turned left, turned right, descended a short flight of steps, and paraded down the center aisle. The only essential difference between the first fashion show and those of today was that the catwalk had yet to be invented.
TO BE CONTINUED
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