The Progressive Era was a time of social, political, and cultural upheaval. Years of unprecedented immigration and industrialization, the end of Reconstruction and the formation of Jim Crow, growing disparities between rich and poor and “native” and new comer, as well as questions as to the country’s role as a global imperial force in the wake of American wars in Cuba and the Philippines and World War I all raised questions of who and what was American. During this time a group of American designers, educators, industrialists, and journalists came together to promote a new and “distinctly American” style of women’s fashions. This “war of fashion independence” sought to overthrow France as the arbiter of style for American women. Behind the calls for patriotic support of American made and designed clothing were overlapping and contradicting beliefs in nationalism, nativism, suffrage, white supremacy, and eugenic theory which guided the actions of a campaign and its supporters and the styles of clothing they made. Through the campaigns for an “American Fashion for American Women” we see how our clothing both revealed and shaped political and cultural thought in America’s Progressive Era.
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