The 1950s: The gateway era.

Often when I meet new vintage ladies around and about I ask them how they got started in all this crazy madness. For me it was thinking I wanted a circle skirt, a tight sweater and a scarf around my neck. I wanted that iconic 50s look.

When I first started this I was all, "I cant stand those other clothes. Im all about the 50s. Yup. Thats it. Nothing else for me!"

What I found interesting is a lot of ladies I chat with started in the 50s as well. But as Im talking to them, I see they are styled in the 40s, 30s or even 20s. "The more I got into it, the more I appreciated the earlier eras," was the consensus from a lot of the ladies who wore the earlier styles.

Its strange, that was the same for me too! The more history I learned, and the more events I went to, the more I appreciated the 40s. Then as I became better at distinguishing the eras, I started to adore the 30s!

My home now Id say is 35-45. Its a time that just speaks to be, but I think I will always have a special love for the 1950s.

Any of you gals who've dressed/lived the vintage styles have the same transition? Any newbies in the 1950s seeing merit in the earlier decades? Any 50s dressing veterans? Any stories to share?

LD

I think in part my interest in vintage clothing came from my Mother's 50s dresses that she made and kept, but also from my Grandmother and her fashions of the 30s/40s. Both caught my interest but vintage clothing was scarce in New Zealand where I'm from so I couldn't really get into collecting it there.

I started really collecting vintage stuff by getting into WW2 Living History when I came to England. I still have some 40s things, especially suits but I've 'returned' to my love of the 30s and that's the basis of my collection now.

I still like some 50s things - I wore a summer cotton dress on Saturday to the shops - and I do appreciate other earlier eras too but I think I've found my niche in the early - mid 1930s. A few items from other eras is fine but I really want a core collection of one era.

Lady Day said:

Any of you gals who've dressed/lived the vintage styles have the same transition? Any newbies in the 1950s seeing merit in the earlier decades? Any 50s dressing veterans? Any stories to share?

LD

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This has happened to me with 19th century clothing, though not really in a linear progression by decade. I was really into the early bustle look. Then somehow I ended up finding the Romantic era pretty awesome, when before it had looked kinda drab compared to late Victorian, yet oddly overdecorated compared to Regency. Most recently I've found the beauty in the lines of the Edwardian Era... quite some jumping around the eras, there, hah!

Hmmm. Good question.

I know I loved the 20s first. I loved that decade ever since I was a little girl and had no concept of why I was so drawn to it. When I got heavily into vintage in 1998, it was silent movies I was first after!

I've always been attracted to "rockabilly" men (ever since I was a little girl, again!) and I've dabbled my feet into the 1950s pool every now and again -- mostly because 1950s was the only vintage I could find that was in decent, wearable shape.

But I was never really fully a 50s kinda gal. From the 20s I progressed to the 30s where I've stayed for quite a while. I'm only now just discovering the wonders of pre-New Look 1940s fashion due to my new sewing skills.

Thanks to sewing and youtube hairstyling tutorials, I'm happy to be stuck in the mid 1930s to the early 1940s.

I started with 40s, back when the swing revival first, back in 98. I moved into 50s after losing a bunch of weight and visions of modeling swam through my head. I wanted to look like all the other pin-up girls. I've moved backward as I gained weight, both to find something that was better suited to my new figure and to get away from the overly feminized look. Whenever I dress 50s, I get lots of attention (whether I'm fat and thin) from men, most of it unwanted. I've also started watching a lot of old movies and discovering lots of new-to-me styles.

I think you're right LadyDay that most of us come into vintage through the '50s. That decade is so accessible because of the popularity of Elvis, poodle skirts, hot rods, the movie "Grease," etc. It's glamorous and can be a little over the top - big hair, big skirts and big fins on the cars - easy to stereotype and emulate. Nobody thinks of the WWII girls as glamorous in they're rationed day dresses and brown oxfords.

I got started in this from the car culture scene - attracted to rockabilly but not necessarily wanting to wear red, black and skulls every day. I see myself as more MaryAnn than Ginger (for you Gilligan's Island buffs). So I started with the full skirts and Peter Pan collars. I've come to appreciate the '40s as well, but have to profess that I still love the crinolines! Maybe it's because nobody can mistake a circle skirt for being trendy whereas a pencil skirt is in style today. I guess deep down I enjoy throwing people off balance and making them wonder why I'm "so dressed up!"

I think I got into this in a backwards sort of way. I was really into historical costumes first, then got into the Edwardian era which drew me to vintage, then slowly have been progressing upwards since then. Recently, within the last two or so years I've been drawn to the fifties because of the wearability of the clothes. Even though it's not my favorite era aesthetically I find it easier to do an everyday vintage look. My true love is still the thirties, but I couldn't do it every day.

definitely!

i think i was interested in 50s because I couldn't really differentiate between eras so well before i became interested in vintage. All i could think was that i wanted hair like Marilyn, now i've progressed (does that work?) towards the 40s!

I think BoPeep nails it -- the 50s are the ideal gateway because they're so accessible today, the earliest decade of the 20th century that's still in any way part of the mainstream, due mostly to television and rock music. People today don't have to reach too far to connect with it, because there are just enough vestiges of it still visible in the culture.

I never did the fifties myself, because I just can't pull it off -- the clothes are too delicate for me, and I'm definitely more the brown-oxford type than the stiletto type. But I'm old enough that "the fifties" were still a very visible part of daily life in a lot of ways when I was growing up -- fifties cars, clothes, and points of view were all lingering around thru my childhood, so that was certainly an influence.

The 50s are in a very important sense the "gateway" to today because it was the first time the material desires of the common masses really were in the driver's seat - consumer tastes dictating design, style, patterns of travel and spending and living.

There is a lot of talk about the Moderne esthetic of the 30s reaching towards simpler materials and more accessible designs. And yes, they got some beautiful results in that era. But it was still an elite in control. Not the old elite, true. But the ideas of a few creative and relatively privileged people - not the aspirations of a new class with its own consciousness.

Yeah i was initially attracted to the 50's - I think because in NZ it is very hard to get clothes from earlier than that so that was what i was accessing and wanting to find out more about.
Then.. It was the hair that changed it all for me!
I LOVE the victory rolls and complicated hair of the 40's - then of course i realised i needed to dress in 40's clothes to maximise the impact of the hair so there you go, before i knew it I was hankering after gored skirts and tilted hats.
This in turn has led to my new found sewing obbsession - because i cant buy 40's clothes i had to learn how to make them!
i have a strong feeling that it isnt going to end there. My family predict that i am just goign to keep going back in time.
I am loving how much i am learning. Who knows where this adventure will take me!

I was initially attracted to the 40's wartime and just after the war waaaay back in high school (74-78) with a love of WWII history in general, then an eye to fashion. I wish I had kept the clothes I had then. Oh well, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

My love still lies in 40's wartime to just post war, but I do dabble up to the mid 50's.

I am learning to love mid 30's to wartime from admiring the patterns, pics and catalogs you all post for our consumption. I don't think the clothing flatters me as well so I haven't tried wearing it but I have a few patterns on standby to sew "some day."

Like Lauren, I was initially attracted to historical costume, and worked my way up from there, but I've also had a long-standing interest in the WWII period. So my first yearnings for vintage were more influenced by the films of the late '30s-'40s than by the 50s/pinup/rockabilly look. But that look was still an influence, and I think my first attempts to dress 'vintage-inspired' resulted in a '50s look. It's easier for the mainstream to 'read' a '50s style and accept it as artsy, but still normal.

50s here too! I have no plans of ever leaving it in the dust, though. As much as I do love Elvis it's my dad who has always been my inspiration. He was born in '49 and his tastes never really changed after he came back from Vietnam. I grew up listening to the oldies, the Beatles, and stories about my grandma while poring over family photos.

When I started to get more into clothing/discovering my style, I liked high-waisted things and thought it was flattering, and it occurred to me it'd be easier to find if I looked in a different era.

I love the 30s and have admittedly been more focused on them lately, but 50s are forever!

I really love the 50s. It's my "main era", if you like. I do like earlier eras, but I'm much more likely to buy something from the 50s.

My gateway was the 60s. My Dad was very big on the 60s when I was growing up so I've always loved that decade and it developed into the 50s when I was about 15.

I guess I count as a 50's veteran of sorts at 37. Strangely I think I find myself slipping forward rather than backwards - I find myself coveting early 60's styles lately! My initial interest in vintage as a kid was fairly unfocussed - I loved anything from victorian to the 60s. As a teenager I experimented with 20's - 50's (often mixing them all at once!) but settled firmly on the 60's for a couple of years. I drifted toward the 50's from them on and have stayed there for the ensuing decades. I dip back into the 40's very occasionally - wide leg trousers are so practical and comfy - but my hair is resolutely fifties and doesn't really go. When I was learning to do vintage hair (which is only in the last few years) I often ended up looking 40's by accident and I often found 40's styles easier to do, but now my hair is short-ish and curled it sits in the right decade. I respect and adore the fashions of older decades, I just don't want to wear them. The main difference with my style as I get older is that my style has become smarter and more 'grown-up' - wearing heels with tailored skirts and suits instead of capris, ballet flats and a ponytail.

Noticing at last that I am in the Powder Room...

...I'll also comment that 50s style is the earliest a man can wear without other, average men noticing it and thinking he's gone a bit swishy.

Again, this has to do with the cutoff date for "modern" culture, as well as our collective memory (which lasts at most 50+ years before the oldest active generation starts remembering in soft focus).

So the 50s are not just a gateway - they are now also a threshold.

In America, at any rate, god created the heavens and the earth during the first week of December, 1941, and Adam and Eve were driven from the garden on Pearl Harbor Day. We now date our consciousness as a nation from that point.

Interesting question... as a teenager (in the late 1970s/early 1980s) and then in college, I was all over the vintage map - ranging from Victorian all the way to the 1960s. On any given day, I might wear a 1920s dropped-waist dress or a 1950s circle skirt or a 1960s hippy-chick outfit complete with fringe and psychedelic patterns. I'm still eclectic in my tastes, but the range has narrowed a bit, 1920s to 1950s. Guess the 1950s is my fence rather than a gateway

Looking back on how I came to love vintage, I think my gateway wasn't so much a specific era, as it was treasures from many eras found at the thrift stores and auctions that my grandparents took me to as youngster. Add to that a keen interest in family history (grandparents who experienced the Depression and WWII), Sunday afternoons watching old movies on PBS, and exposure to contemporary movies/television/books set in other eras (Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew, Grease, 1941, Bonnie & Clyde, Ellery Queen, Paper Moon, etc.)... well, you can see why I'm all mixed up, vintagely speaking. lol

A Real Vintage Lady

Hi all, It's fun to read everyone's story. I find that the late '40's and early '50's is an era I connect with very much. As a kid growing up much of the world of the '30's/'40's/50's was reality to me even though it was the '60's and '70's. Most of my surrounds were an intact environment of these previous decades. So as a kid I never had a sense of age to anything. It was all reality and new to me. As my tastes evolved it was all a product of these eras and not at all current to the time. This included music, styles, entertainment, everything. I was an only child and wasn't around other kids much. If I wanted to be a part of what was going on I had to learn to interact with the adults so I grew up fast. As I grew older I expected to find more of the world I had always known. I never had much in common with kids of my own age and didn't fit in. It took me to my teen years to realize that I was normal but was a product of previous generations. After finding what the current scheme of things were, I found it a sad disappointment to what I had know all my life. So I decided to stay where I was at and have spent the rest of life doing just that. So I haven't really become a vintage person. I've just always been here to start with. I've worked hard at surrounding myself with what makes me comfortable and deal with the current world where necessary but my personal life exists in another time. One of the few new age things I enjoy is the computer and internet but I just use that to find more old stuff. I look at that as a trade off. Years ago we could just pick up the Wards catalog and order what we like brand new. Now we use the computer to hunt and find what we like after it's 60 years old or what ever era you like.
In another thread they talked about living a '50's life. Well my husband and I live little different than that everyday. He graduated from high school in 1956 so it's no stretch for him. He still combs his hair dresses and looks much the same as then. Being that I've been doing this all my life I've accumulated a lot of stuff. Most of the things I live with everyday would be considered vintage. This includes vehicles, household stuff. We're even putting a wood cookstove in the house that I plan to use.
Well now that I've put you all to sleep that's my story

FountainPenGirl said:

It took me to my teen years to realize that I was normal but was a product of previous generations. After finding what the current scheme of things were, I found it a sad disappointment to what I had know all my life. So I decided to stay where I was at and have spent the rest of life doing just that. So I haven't really become a vintage person. I've just always been here to start with. I've worked hard at surrounding myself with what makes me comfortable and deal with the current world where necessary but my personal life exists in another time.

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Perfectly said.