North American Clothing Styles after 1800
(Click here to go back to the 1700's)
By the 1800's, most of the people living in North America
were of European or African origin. Kids still often wore clothes that had
been cut down for them from worn-out grown-up clothing. Most kids,
and many grown people, went barefoot whenever it was warm enough, even
to school. Women usually wore
shirts and long skirts down to their ankles, or even brushing the ground.
Sometimes they wore steel hoops
under the skirts to make them rounder. Under their dresses, they wore petticoats,
and shifts, and corsets to support their breasts. They could afford to use
more cloth because people were making clothes of cotton,
which was cheaper. Many people now had both an everyday dress and a special
dress for holidays or to wear to church.
An enslaved woman and her owner, 1804.
Both are black.
African women who
had been enslaved tried to keep dressing the way they had at home - wrapping
their heads with cloth, for instance. Some African styles, like the kerchief,
became popular with North American women, white and black and Native American.
But enslaved women usually only had one dress, and even that was usually
an old dress that a free woman didn't want anymore. Sometimes these women
had make their dresses out of old flour sacks. Farming
women who had to work hard on their farms, or women who were hunters
or gold miners, sometimes
wore pants (especially if nobody would see them).
Boys in overalls doing chores
on the Oregon Trail
In the 1850's, men began to wear jeans, made first from hemp cloth
by a Jewish man named Jacob Davis, and then out of cotton with his partner Levi Strauss (now we call them Levi's). They also wore denim or cotton corduroy
overalls. Men started to wear their pants down to their ankles instead of
their knees.
