Icon: Tracing the Path of the 1950s Shirtwaist Dress

Today's period films typically show the 1950s housewife in the uniform of her profession: a shirtwaist dress. The shirtwaist itself encompasses the 1950s ideal of conformity and domesticity with a variety of media reinforcing these notions over time. In effect, it helped to define a women's place as "in the home." In the 1950s, magazines, television, books, and films had varying degrees of influence on women's fashion choices. Magazines, however, had the strongest influence at the inception of the 1950s shirtwaist style, just after World War II. Historian and documentary filmmaker David Halberstam explains that "women turned to magazines to learn how to adapt to their new roles in the land of plenty" (David HaIberstam's The Fifties: Let's Play House). Good Housekeeping was a practical lifestyle magazine that women utilized to inform and influence their fashion decisions. This study examines how Good Housekeeping's position and reputation sold women the 1950s shirtwaist and the idealized figure it came to represent. Tracing the path of the shirtwaist- from its established prewar form, to its 1947 New Look revision by Haute Couture designer Christian Dior, to its gradual appearance in this new form in Good Housekeeping- shows how it began its development as an icon. Exploring how the shirtwaist was presented in other media some years later will show how this item of clothing came to permanently represent idealized motherhood and domesticity. Shirtwaist dresses were not new in the 1950s. They had been worn as early as in the 1900s and were based on the design of a man's shirt. Patterns for Blouses and Dresses, published in 1917, describes the basic "mannish-shirtwaist" as a "garment so designed as to follow practically the same lines as those of a man's negligee shirt" (Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences 9). In its pattern book of dresses from 1916, The Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences notes that a shirtwaist dress was "a simple, practical dress" and that "even for the classroom or for business, because of its trim simplicity and graceful dignity, it has its advantages" (Picken 55). Just before Dior's New Look, the 1940s "wartime shirtwaister" was prevalent. Author Angela Partington explains that this version was based on the Utility look.1 It focused the silhouette on "square shoulders and short, straight skirts," which is just the reverse of the soft, rounded shape of the New Look (154). This Utility style shirtwaist was popular and appeared in advertisements in Good Housekeeping, Seventeen, and Mademoiselle in early 1947. Many of these dresses appeared as golf- or other sporting-related clothing due to their comfort and practicality. They were also often sold specifically to younger women in an effort to help them feel more adult like. An advertisement on the inside cover of Girls and Teens Merchandiser from January 1947 showed a "Teen-Set." It noted, "It's one young customer and then the next . . . every teen-ager is going crazy over Teen-Set. For Spring selling we recommend this gay version of the shirtwaist: partly push-up sleeves, shoe-string ties at the neck and cuffs, a sophisticated black stripe cotton." Partington explains that the Utility look remained popular via the shirtwaist, but acknowledges the change in form: "The wartime shirtwaister . . . flourished in the form of 1950s dresses which became almost symbolic of the housewife, and were invariably used to dress her in advertisements for household goods" (154). Christain Dior's influence on the iconic 1950s shirtwaist began with his New Look collection in the spring of 1947 that almost single-handedly defined the postwar silhouette. Although other designers such as Claire McCardell were working with similar skirt shapes at the time, the fashion media credited Dior with the inception of the "New Look." Whereas Dior did influence the ready-to-wear styles, it is incorrect to say that his version merely "trickled down. …