Dress and Identity in America - The Baby Boom Years 1946-1964

Dress and Identity in America is an examination of the conservatism and materialism that swept across the country in the late 1940s through the 1950s-a backlash to the wartime tumult, privations, and social upheavals of the Second World War. The study looks at how American men sought to recapture a masculine identity from a generation earlier, that of the stoic patriarch, breadwinner, and dutiful father, and in the process, became the men in the gray flannel suits who were complacently conventional and conformist. Parallel to that is a look at how American women, who had donned pants and went to work in wartime munitions factories or joined services like the WACS and WAVES, were now expected to stay at home as housewives and mothers, dressed in cinched, ultrafeminine New Look fashions. As the Space Age dawned, their baby boom children rejected the conventions of their elders and experimented with their own ideas of identity and dress in an emerging era of counterculture revolutions.>

About the author

Daniel Delis Hill has worked as a retail fashion illustrator, catalog art director, and creative director of fashion photography. He also taught in the fashion departments of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and the University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio. He has written ten books on fashion and American popular culture, including Peacock Revolution: American Masculine Identity and Dress in the Sixties and Seventies, and Dress and Identity in America: The Baby Boom Years 1946-1964. In addition, he has written a number of essays for the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and American National Biography (Oxford University).

Product details

• Authors: Daniel Delis Hill
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.01.2024
• EAN: 9781350373914
• ISBN: 978-1-350-37391-4
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 156 mm x 236 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Dress and Fashion Research
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Interior design, design; Social & cultural history, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, DESIGN / Fashion & Accessories, DESIGN / History & Criticism, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Fashion & society, Social and cultural history, history of design, United States of America, USA, History of fashion