Depression Era: High Style in Hard Times


By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. A polo shirt , also known as a golf shirt and tennis shirt , is a form of shirt with a collar, a placket with typically two or three buttons, and an optional pocket. Paramatta was a fabric of combined silk and wool or cotton; crape was a harsh black silk fabric with a crimped appearance produced by heat.

A polo shirt, also known as a golf shirt and tennis shirt, is a form of shirt with a collar, a placket with typically two or three buttons, and an optional pocket.. All three terms may be used interchangeably. Polo shirts are usually made of knitted cotton (rather than woven cloth), usually a piqué knit, or less commonly an interlock knit (the latter used frequently, though not exclusively.
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dull or ribbed silk facings became preferred as shiny satin lapels were increasingly associated with ready-to-wear apparel • the semi-butterfly was the favored bow tie shape although the rounded tie, pointed tie and narrow straight bat tie were also acceptable.


Although period etiquette experts made sure to limit the appropriateness of these innovations to the most informal of occasions — summer evenings, in particular — the new jacket model nonetheless rivaled the popularity of the single-breasted standard by It was often midnight blue and its lapels were usually peaked. As for the contemporary shirt style, the November issue of Esquire noted that the turndown collar had superseded the traditional wing collar by the mid thirties and was "now virtually standard for informal wear".

Back in England , London shirtmakers devised a novel variant that was dressier than informal soft-front shirts yet more comfortable than the formal stiff-front option. The resulting marcella shirt was an elegant compromise consisting of a semi-stiff bosom fashioned out of formal piqué with a matching turndown collar and cuffs. There was seemingly no end to the appetite for flourishes in thirties evening fashion extending down to the smallest details: The decade's final innovation of note is one of the few that were not inspired by the Prince.

Instead it was originated by well -heeled Americans and Britons seeking a cooler alternative to the heavy, heat-absorbing black dinner suit when wintering in tropical climes. In late fashion reporters at American tropical resorts noted a new vogue among socialites for the white mess jacket, a civilian counterpart to military formal wear that resembled a tailcoat cut off at the waistline. Apparel Arts explained that the jacket originated as evening wear for British naval officers " but by its adoption by well-dressed Americans for wear aboard their yachts and at smart Palm Beach evening functions, it is accepted as being correct.

At first the jacket was made either in gabardine, duck, or a washable material and had self-faced peaked lapels and front buttons. It was worn with a waistcoat of the same material, a wing collar formal shirt and high - rise dress trousers of black or midnight blue without back pockets. The bow tie and accessories were as per standard informal evening wear.

It was appropriately paired with a soft-front turndown collar shirt and the recently re introduced cummerbund. Then, almost as quickly as it had appeared, the mess jacket fell out of favor. Its primary disadvantage was that the cut was unbecoming to anyone with a less-than athletic build.

Its second drawback was that it was rapidly adopted as a universal uniform for bellhops and jazz bands and few gentlemen of any fitness level wished to be mistaken for hired help or entertainers.

White dinner jackets premiered alongside the mess jacket in resorts like Palm Beach and Cannes, albeit with much less fanfare. Constructed of cotton drill, linen or silk they were originally worn with either black or white trousers of tropical weight wool.

Their popularity at tropical locales grew slowly but surely and by the time the mess jacket had become passé in they were as common as traditional dark coats. In its August issue, Esquire defined the quintessential warm-weather formal evening wardrobe: This year, the big swing is to single- or double-breasted [light colored] dinner jackets, collar and self lapel facings.

These are worn with [black] tropical dress trousers, patent leather oxfords or pumps, a white, soft shirt with either soft or laundered collar and a black dress tie. A cummerbund was also required when wearing a single-breasted jacket and although there were no specific rules for lapel style, shawl collars were the norm. The acceptance of white jackets paved the way for other colors in summer evening coats and soon hues such as plum, dark green, wine and bright blue were being worn on the moonlit patios of Palm Beach.

The next logical development was coordinated accessories and dark red was the favorite choice for bow ties, cummerbunds, hosiery clocks and boutonnieres. Pocket squares were also frequently used to add a splash of flair but only when the boutonniere was white.

The addition of subtle colored touches to the black and white summer palette was so successful that many of these accessories began to migrate to traditional dark dinner suits as the decade progressed. The reappearance in the late s of the newly modified cummerbund fared much better thanks largely to its pairing with the popular mess jacket. On the right people at the right time it is decorative and correctly in the spirit of colorful gaiety.

As the author alluded, the cummerbund could be used to infuse warm-weather formal wear with color and even patterns. Most often though, black silk continued to be de rigueur for waist coverings worn with the white dinner jacket. Regardless of the terminology employed, it was universally accepted that recent innovations in evening fashions had created a new sub-hierarchy.

At the top of the tuxedo scale were the very formal single-breasted jacket of black or midnight blue — the only correct colors for dressing in town — and the wing collar shirt.

At the bottom of the ladder were warm-weather jackets, suitable only for country summers and the tropics. Situated somewhere in between were the double-breasted jacket and turndown collar shirt originally classified as casual but increasingly acceptable at all semi-formal occasions thanks to their soaring popularity.

By the conclusion of the s the tuxedo had reached its apex in both popularity and style. As Alan Flusser summarizes in Style and the Man: No other era could have produced such a sartorial success. The new dinner jacket projected a level of stature and class equal to that of its starched progenitor, albeit while providing considerably more comfort. A boys' night in as depicted in a whiskey ad.

Colored cummerbunds and boutonnieres at the elite summer resort town of Newport. The vanguard of the return to pre-war standards was students at prestigious universities. The former are suggested for occasions such as "a round of nightclubbing".

Midnight blue material, peaked lapels, soft turndown collar and narrow pleated shirt. A classic pre-war evening outfit. Formality's Future Formal Facts: Tuxedo Rental Clothing rental clothing hire in the UK made formal wear vastly more accessible to the average person and became a became a multi-million dollar industry in the process.

Prom Yale University junior prom The American high-school prom descended from college cotillions and society debutante balls in the s and became widely popular in the s.

Dress Suit Not even the century-old dress suit was immune from the sartorial exuberance of the times. Full-Dress Linens Not content to simply improve the comfort of the full-dress waistcoat, the Prince of Wales also upped the ante on its style. Other Style Trends There was seemingly no end to the appetite for flourishes in thirties evening fashion extending down to the smallest details: Warm-Weather Black Tie The decade's final innovation of note is one of the few that were not inspired by the Prince.


White Dinner Jacket White dinner jackets premiered alongside the mess jacket in resorts like Palm Beach and Cannes, albeit with much less fanfare. They also held sacred the raven. They believed that Odin , the king of the Nordic pantheon, had two black ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who served as his agents, traveling the world for him, watching and listening. Neolithic paintings of bulls in the Lascaux Cave , more than 17, years old.

Statue of Anubis , guardian of the underworld, from the tomb of Tutankhamun. Ajax and Achilles playing a game, about — BC. Red-figure pottery with black background.

Portrait of Thetis , about — BC. In the early Middle Ages, black was commonly associated with darkness and evil. In Medieval paintings, the devil was usually depicted as having human form, but with wings and black skin or hair. In fashion, black did not have the prestige of red, the color of the nobility.


Black symbolized both power and secrecy in the medieval world. The emblem of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany was a black eagle. The black knight in the poetry of the Middle Ages was an enigmatic figure, hiding his identity, usually wrapped in secrecy. Black ink , invented in Ancient China and India, was traditionally used in the Middle Ages for writing, for the simple reason that black was the darkest color and therefore provided the greatest contrast with white paper or parchment, making it the easiest color to read.

It became even more important in the 15th century, with the invention of printing. A new kind of ink, printer's ink, was created out of soot , turpentine and walnut oil. The new ink made it possible to spread ideas to a mass audience through printed books, and to popularize art through black and white engravings and prints. Because of its contrast and clarity, black ink on white paper continued to be the standard for printing books, newspapers and documents; and for the same reason black text on a white background is the most common format used on computer screens.

The Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna showed Christ expelling the Devil , shown covered with bristly black hair — The 15th-century painting of the Last Judgement by Fra Angelico — depicted hell with a vivid black devil devouring sinners. Portrait of a monk of the Benedictine Order Black ink was used for printing books, because it provided the greatest contrast with the white paper and was the clearest and easiest color to read.


First, high-quality black dyes began to arrive on the market, allowing garments of a deep, rich black. Magistrates and government officials began to wear black robes, as a sign of the importance and seriousness of their positions. A third reason was the passage of sumptuary laws in some parts of Europe which prohibited the wearing of costly clothes and certain colors by anyone except members of the nobility.


The wealthy bankers and merchants of northern Italy responded by changing to black robes and gowns, made with the most expensive fabrics. The change to the more austere but elegant black was quickly picked up by the kings and nobility. It moved to England at the end of the reign of King Richard II — , where all the court began to wear black.

In —20, black became the color of the powerful Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good. European rulers saw it as the color of power, dignity, humility and temperance. By the end of the 16th century, it was the color worn by almost all the monarchs of Europe and their courts. Philip the Good in about , by Rogier van der Weyden. Portrait of a Young Woman by Petrus Christus about Portrait of Philip II of Spain — While black was the color worn by the Catholic rulers of Europe, it was also the emblematic color of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the Puritans in England and America.

John Calvin , Philip Melanchthon and other Protestant theologians denounced the richly colored and decorated interiors of Roman Catholic churches. They saw the color red, worn by the Pope and his Cardinals, as the color of luxury, sin, and human folly. In Protestant doctrine, clothing was required to be sober, simple and discreet. Bright colors were banished and replaced by blacks, browns and grays; women and children were recommended to wear white. In the Protestant Netherlands, Rembrandt used this sober new palette of blacks and browns to create portraits whose faces emerged from the shadows expressing the deepest human emotions.



Swiss theologian John Calvin denounced the bright colors worn by Roman Catholic priests, and colorful decoration of churches. Increase Mather , an American Puritan clergyman In the second part of the 17th century, Europe and America experienced an epidemic of fear of witchcraft. People widely believed that the devil appeared at midnight in a ceremony called a Black Mass or black sabbath, usually in the form of a black animal, often a goat, a dog, a wolf, a bear, a deer or a rooster, accompanied by their familiar spirits , black cats, serpents and other black creatures.

This was the origin of the widespread superstition about black cats and other black animals. In medieval Flanders , in a ceremony called Kattenstoet, black cats were thrown from the belfry of the Cloth Hall of Ypres to ward off witchcraft.

Witch trials were common in both Europe and America during this period. During the notorious Salem witch trials in New England in —93, one of those on trial was accused of being able turn into a "black thing with a blue cap," and others of having familiars in the form of a black dog, a black cat and a black bird.

An English manual on witch-hunting , showing a witch with her familiar spirits. Black cats have been accused for centuries of being the familiar spirits of witches or of bringing bad luck. In the 18th century, during the European Age of Enlightenment , black receded as a fashion color. Paris became the fashion capital, and pastels, blues, greens, yellow and white became the colors of the nobility and upper classes.

But after the French Revolution , black again became the dominant color. Black was the color of the industrial revolution , largely fueled by coal , and later by oil. Thanks to coal smoke , the buildings of the large cities of Europe and America gradually turned black. A different kind of black was an important part of the romantic movement in literature. Black was the color of melancholy , the dominant theme of romanticism.



Black dominated literature and fashion in the 19th century, and played a large role in painting. James McNeil Whistler made the color the subject of his most famous painting, Arrangement in grey and black number one , better known as Whistler's Mother. Some 19th-century French painters had a low opinion of black: Nothing is black, nothing is gray. Manet's portrait of painter Berthe Morisot was a study in black which perfectly captured her spirit of independence.

The black gave the painting power and immediacy; he even changed her eyes, which were green, to black to strengthen the effect. Pierre-Auguste Renoir used luminous blacks, especially in his portraits. When someone told him that black was not a color, Renoir replied: Black is the queen of colors. I always detested Prussian blue. I tried to replace black with a mixture of red and blue, I tried using cobalt blue or ultramarine, but I always came back to ivory black.

Vincent van Gogh used black lines to outline many of the objects in his paintings, such as the bed in the famous painting of his bedroom. His painting of black crows over a cornfield, painted shortly before he died, was particularly agitated and haunting. In the late 19th century, black also became the color of anarchism.

See the section political movements. Percy Bysshe Shelley in the black and white costume of the romantic poet A view of London by Gustave Doré from showed how coal and the industrial revolution had blackened the buildings and air of the great cities of Europe.

The Theater Box by Pierre-Auguste Renoir , captured the luminosity of black fabric in the light. Wheat Field with Crows , one of the last paintings of Vincent van Gogh , captures his agitated state of mind. In the 20th century, black was the color of Italian and German fascism. In art, black regained some of the territory that it had lost during the 19th century. The Russian painter Kasimir Malevich , a member of the Suprematist movement, created the Black Square in , is widely considered the first purely abstract painting.

He wrote, "The painted work is no longer simply the imitation of reality, but is this very reality It is not a demonstration of ability, but the materialization of an idea. Black was also appreciated by Henri Matisse. I used black as ballast to simplify the construction Since the impressionists it seems to have made continuous progress, taking a more and more important part in color orchestration, comparable to that of the double bass as a solo instrument.

In the s, black came to be a symbol of individuality and intellectual and social rebellion, the color of those who didn't accept established norms and values. By the end of the 20th century, black was the emblematic color of the punk subculture punk fashion , and the goth subculture. Goth fashion, which emerged in England in the s, was inspired by Victorian era mourning dress.

In men's fashion, black gradually ceded its dominance to navy blue, particularly in business suits. Black evening dress and formal dress in general were worn less and less. In , John F. Kennedy was the last American President to be inaugurated wearing formal dress; President Lyndon Johnson and all his successors were inaugurated wearing business suits.

Women's fashion was revolutionized and simplified in by the French designer Coco Chanel , who published a drawing of a simple black dress in Vogue magazine. She famously said, "A woman needs just three things; a black dress, a black sweater, and, on her arm, a man she loves. The Italian designer Gianni Versace said, "Black is the quintessence of simplicity and elegance," and French designer Yves Saint Laurent said, "black is the liaison which connects art and fashion.

The American civil rights movement in the s was a struggle for the political equality of African Americans. It developed into the Black Power movement in the late s and s, and popularized the slogan " Black is Beautiful ". In the s, the Black Standard became the banner of several Islamic extremist , jihadist groups. The goth fashion model Lady Amaranth. Goth fashion was inspired by British Victorian mourning costumes.

Variants of the Black Standard flag are used by many militant Islamist groups that have adopted militant interpretations of jihad. In the visible spectrum , black is the absorption of all colors. Black can be defined as the visual impression experienced when no visible light reaches the eye. Pigments or dyes that absorb light rather than reflect it back to the eye "look black".

A black pigment can, however, result from a combination of several pigments that collectively absorb all colors. If appropriate proportions of three primary pigments are mixed, the result reflects so little light as to be called "black". This provides two superficially opposite but actually complementary descriptions of black.

Black is the absorption of all colors of light, or an exhaustive combination of multiple colors of pigment. See also primary colors. In physics , a black body is a perfect absorber of light, but, by a thermodynamic rule, it is also the best emitter. Thus, the best radiative cooling, out of sunlight, is by using black paint, though it is important that it be black a nearly perfect absorber in the infrared as well.

In elementary science, far ultraviolet light is called " black light " because, while itself unseen, it causes many minerals and other substances to fluoresce. On January 16, , researchers from Troy, New York 's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute announced the creation of the then darkest material on the planet. The material, which reflected only 0. A material is said to be black if most incoming light is absorbed equally in the material.

Light electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum interacts with the atoms and molecules , which causes the energy of the light to be converted into other forms of energy, usually heat. This means that black surfaces can act as thermal collectors, absorbing light and generating heat see Solar thermal collector.

Absorption of light is contrasted by transmission , reflection and diffusion , where the light is only redirected, causing objects to appear transparent, reflective or white respectively. Vantablack is made of carbon nanotubes [33] and is the blackest substance known, absorbing a maximum of The earliest pigments used by Neolithic man were charcoal , red ocher and yellow ocher. The black lines of cave art were drawn with the tips of burnt torches made of a wood with resin. Different charcoal pigments were made by burning different woods and animal products, each of which produced a different tone.

The charcoal would be ground and then mixed with animal fat to make the pigment. The 15th-century painter Cennino Cennini described how this pigment was made during the Renaissance in his famous handbook for artists: And these tendrils need to be burned.

And when they have been burned, throw some water onto them and put them out and then mull them in the same way as the other black. And this is a lean and black pigment and is one of the perfect pigments that we use. Cennini also noted that "There is another black which is made from burnt almond shells or peaches and this is a perfect, fine black.

The powdered charcoal was then mixed with gum arabic or the yellow of an egg to make a paint. Different civilizations burned different plants to produce their charcoal pigments. The Inuit of Alaska used wood charcoal mixed with the blood of seals to paint masks and wooden objects. The Polynesians burned coconuts to produce their pigment.

Good-quality black dyes were not known until the middle of the 14th century. The most common early dyes were made from bark, roots or fruits of different trees; usually the walnut , chestnut , or certain oak trees. The blacks produced were often more gray, brown or bluish.

The cloth had to be dyed several times to darken the color. One solution used by dyers was add to the dye some iron filings, rich in iron oxide, which gave a deeper black.

Another was to first dye the fabric dark blue, and then to dye it black. A much richer and deeper black dye was eventually found made from the Oak apple or gall-nut. The gall-nut is a small round tumor which grows on oak and other varieties of trees. The gall-nuts which made the best dye came from Poland , eastern Europe, the near east and North Africa. Beginning in about the 14th century, dye from gall-nuts was used for clothes of the kings and princes of Europe.

Another important source of natural black dyes from the 17th century onwards was the logwood tree , or Haematoxylum campechianum , which also produced reddish and bluish dyes. It is a species of flowering tree in the legume family, Fabaceae , that is native to southern Mexico and northern Central America. Since the midth century, synthetic black dyes have largely replaced natural dyes. One of the important synthetic blacks is Nigrosin , a mixture of synthetic black dyes CI , Solvent black 5 made by heating a mixture of nitrobenzene , aniline and aniline hydrochloride in the presence of a copper or iron catalyst.

Its main industrial uses are as a colorant for lacquers and varnishes and in marker-pen inks. The first known inks were made by the Chinese, and date back to the 23rd century B.

They used natural plant dyes and minerals such as graphite ground with water and applied with an ink brush. Early Chinese inks similar to the modern inkstick have been found dating to about BC at the end of the Warring States period. They were produced from soot , usually produced by burning pine wood, mixed with animal glue. To make ink from an inkstick, the stick is continuously ground against an inkstone with a small quantity of water to produce a dark liquid which is then applied with an ink brush.

Artists and calligraphists could vary the thickness of the resulting ink by reducing or increasing the intensity and time of ink grinding. These inks produced the delicate shading and subtle or dramatic effects of Chinese brush painting. India ink or Indian ink in British English is a black ink once widely used for writing and printing and now more commonly used for drawing , especially when inking comic books and comic strips. The technique of making it probably came from China.

India ink has been in use in India since at least the 4th century BC, where it was called masi. In India, the black color of the ink came from bone char , tar , pitch and other substances. The Ancient Romans had a black writing ink they called atramentum librarium.

This was the same root as the English word atrocious. It was usually made, like India ink, from soot , although one variety, called atramentum elephantinum , was made by burning the ivory of elephants. Gall-nuts were also used for making fine black writing ink. Iron gall ink also known as iron gall nut ink or oak gall ink was a purple-black or brown-black ink made from iron salts and tannic acids from gall nut. It was the standard writing and drawing ink in Europe , from about the 12th century to the 19th century, and remained in use well into the 20th century.

Sticks of vine charcoal and compressed charcoal. Charcoal, along with red and yellow ochre, was one of the first pigments used by Paleolithic man.

A Chinese inkstick , in the form of lotus flowers and blossoms. Inksticks are used in Chinese calligraphy and brush painting. Ivory black or bone char , a natural black pigment made by burning animal bones. The logwood tree from Central America produced dyes beginning in the 17th century.

The nation of Belize began as a British colony producing logwood. The oak apple or gall-nut, a tumor growing on oak trees, was the main source of black dye and black writing ink from the 14th century until the 19th century. The industrial production of lamp black , made by producing, collecting and refining soot , in An illustration of Olbers' paradox see below. The fact that outer space is black is sometimes called Olbers' paradox.

In theory, because the universe is full of stars, and is believed to be infinitely large, it would be expected that the light of an infinite number of stars would be enough to brilliantly light the whole universe all the time.

However, the background color of outer space is black. This contradiction was first noted in by German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers , who posed the question of why the night sky was black. The current accepted answer is that, although the universe is infinitely large, it is not infinitely old.

It is thought to be about Light from stars farther away has not reached Earth, and cannot contribute to making the sky bright. Furthermore, as the universe is expanding, many stars are moving away from Earth. As they move, the wavelength of their light becomes longer, through the Doppler effect , and shifts toward red, or even becomes invisible. As a result of these two phenomena, there is not enough starlight to make space anything but black.

The daytime sky on Earth is blue because light from the Sun strikes molecules in Earth's atmosphere scattering light in all directions. Blue light is scattered more than other colors, and reaches the eye in greater quantities, making the daytime sky appear blue. This is known as Rayleigh scattering. The nighttime sky on Earth is black because the part of Earth experiencing night is facing away from the Sun, the light of the Sun is blocked by Earth itself, and there is no other bright nighttime source of light in the vicinity.

Thus, there is not enough light to undergo Rayleigh scattering and make the sky blue. On the Moon, on the other hand, because there is no atmosphere to scatter the light, the sky is black both day and night. This phenomenon also holds true for other locations without an atmosphere. The black mamba of Africa is one of the most venomous snakes, as well as the fastest-moving snake in the world.

The only black part of the snake is the inside of the mouth, which it exposes in a threat display when alarmed. The black widow spider, or lactrodectus , The females frequently eat their male partners after mating. The female's venom is at least three times more potent than that of the males, making a male's self-defense bite ineffective.

A black panther is actually a melanistic leopard or jaguar , the result of an excess of melanin in their skin caused by a recessive gene. The American crow is one of the most intelligent of all animals. In China, the color black is associated with water, one of the five fundamental elements believed to compose all things; and with winter, cold, and the direction north, usually symbolized by a black tortoise.

It is also associated with disorder, including the positive disorder which leads to change and new life. When the first Emperor of China Qin Shi Huang seized power from the Zhou Dynasty , he changed the Imperial color from red to black, saying that black extinguished red. Only when the Han Dynasty appeared in BC was red restored as the imperial color. The Chinese and Japanese character for black kuro in Japanese , can, depending upon the context, also mean dark or evil.

In Japan, black is associated with mystery, the night, the unknown, the supernatural, the invisible and death. Combined with white, it can symbolize intuition. In Japan in the 10th and 11th century, it was believed that wearing black could bring misfortune. It was worn at court by those who wanted to set themselves apart from the established powers or who had renounced material possessions. In Japan black can also symbolize experience, as opposed to white, which symbolizes naiveté.

The black belt in martial arts symbolizes experience, while a white belt is worn by novices. In Indonesia black is associated with depth, the subterranean world, demons, disaster, and the left hand. When black is combined with white, however, it symbolizes harmony and equilibrium.

The first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huang , made black his imperial color, saying that black extinguished red, the old dynastic color. is the ultimate sports apparel store and Fan Gear Shop. Our sports store features Football, Baseball, and Basketball Jerseys, T-shirts, Hats and more . Welcome to H&M. Select your region to enter our site. Buy Champion Men's Classic Jersey T-Shirt: Shop top fashion brands Shirts at FREE DELIVERY and Returns possible on eligible purchases.

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