Once again it's time for another installment of Cataloging Catalogs! Today we have more pages from the Spring Summer 1943 Montgomery Ward catalog again of course, as it seems the pages are endless! Today we move on from just dresses to some different items like slack suits, juniors (!) maternity, aprons, nurses uniforms, swimsuits, and jodhpurs!
I can't wait to keep scanning and sharing the rest of this catalog with you all, next up will be blouses and sweaters :) As always, feel free to pin these images and share them if you see something you like, I'm putting these up as a reference for everyone.
It seems so strange to see uniforms being sold through a reular catalogue - I don't know whether I'm more baffled at people having to buy their own, or that there wouldn't be a specialist supplier.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem odd, perhaps these were nicer or more comfortable than the ones issued and it was acceptable to buy your own upgrades? I have no idea how that all worked!
DeletePerhaps Montgomery Ward and Sears WERE the "specialist supplier" for women's work clothes for the time? Who else would be more adept at supplying women's clothing, no matter the style than those two? After all, work clothing for this time was simply slightly altered women's clothing in different colors, patterns and fabrics, made to fit women's bodies. They had already been making clothing to fit women all along, and I bet most industrial employers were already more than willing to make use of these catalog producers to fit their "temporary employees" in wartime specific styles and colors for their industrial "workshops" and offices, rather than get involved in trying to do it themselves. Most of these employers - men - were already imagining more issues with dealing with female employees than would ever come about anyway. They likely would have had some of their secretarial and safety staff take a catalog of each, and pick their women's uniform styles and the color that best represented the corporate color scheme (if there was one) than get involved in it themselves!
DeleteThe catalogs would have been eminently simpler to order from, have the women order the sizes they knew they would need, have it sent straight to their homes, and be done with it. As for cost, they would have had to have some kind of clothing to wear that did not conform to their wardrobes already anyway, since most women didn't already work outside the home, so they were all going to have to buy something.
Although there were some precedent for having company uniforms provided by the company in the movies. They must have gotten the idea from someplace. The movie, "Swing Swift" with Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti and Ed Harris. At the end of the movie, when the war ends and so does the women's employment, she gets in a veritable tug-of-war over not wanting to turn over the winning piece of her victory on the job - her "Leadman" shirt!
It might have been policy to give them a few dollars a piece to purchase one or two uniforms of a known cost up front, then do like they do the men, who had to supply and maintain their own work clothes anyway (their wives did it!)
There wasn't much of a tax code at that time anyway - the idea of payroll/income tax was a fairly new idea anyway, so deducting all the things we struggle with now hadn't even dreamed of yet, especially things like work clothes and tools and such.
Interesting to see the uniforms and victory workers outfits. Lots of good stuff here. Wish I could shop from this catalogue.
ReplyDeleteMe too! I really want to fill out the order form, especially since everything seems comically inexpensive if one doesn't take inflation into account ;)
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