Tag: winter

Boomers Participated in the Winter Outerwear Revolution

Mister Boomer has chronicled the many changes that Baby Boomers have witnessed across their lifespan, and now here is another: winter outerwear. The winter coats and jackets boomers wore as children are, in many instances, still available today, but now redesigned with fabrics and insulators that we could not even dream of fifty years ago.

People have lived in all sorts of cold-weather climates for millennia, and as such, each created their own method of keeping warm. Most did so with a combination of animal skin and wool. A young United States, mainly inhabited by Europeans at that point, brought the outerwear of their home region to the new country. Regional differences were the norm, as Scandinavian and Irish sweaters became prevalent in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest, while English and German wool and shearling coats spread across much of the other cold regions of the country as well. Increased trade routes, bolstered by advances in transportation and delivery via steamboat, the Erie Canal and the cross-country railroads, coupled with power looms adopted during the Industrial Revolution, helped homogenize the types of fabrics and clothing available.

Once the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, people found that even though factory work was incredibly demanding and difficult, for the first time, freed from the rigors of managing a farm, they had leisure time. This was time they might want to spend outdoors. To meet this rising “leisure class,” outerwear garments for winter leisure appeared around the late 1890s, and were made of wool. The Woolrich Company was a pioneer in this effort. By the early 1900s, L.L. Bean was making boots for the outdoors. Eddie Bauer introduced the first commercial cold-weather parka in the 1930s.

A decade later, men and women fighting during World War II were issued outerwear primarily made of wool, which hadn’t changed much since the previous war to end all wars. At the start of the Baby Boom, coats and jackets for men, women and children were made more attractive based on the fashion of the day, but were still mainly wool, leather or suede. By the 1960s, faux fur for women was becoming an in thing as man-made fabrics entered the picture.

Mister Boomer can recall all of the outerwear he wore during his boomer years. In his family, winter outerwear was especially intended to last as many years as the garment would fit, which for Mister B, was three to five years early on in the 1950s, and replaced more like every seven to ten years in the 1960s and into the ’70s. Consequently, his timeline of outerwear closely echoed what was commonly available in those years. Mister Boomer recalls he had wool coats in the 1950s and early ’60s. Then both he and Brother Boomer got shorter suede jackets with man-made pile lining in the mid-1960s. That was replaced with a longer corduroy coat in his high school years. Mister B did not own a parka until the 1970s.

Looking back, one of the striking memories for Mister B is how cold it was, inside as well as out. In Mister Boomer’s neighborhood, people generally wore sweaters indoors all day, every day. Mister Boomer still has the knit sweater a friend gave him for his eighteenth birthday in his possession, as well as the fisherman’s knit turtleneck that was a Christmas present a couple of years before that. The story goes that the Irish band, The Clancy Bothers, were to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 during a particularly cold spell. The mother of the band members sent them Aran sweaters, which they wore on the stage. The sweaters became their signature look after that. It just happened at the same time that the most famous Irishman in the United States was the President: John Kennedy, who was also photographed wearing these types of knit sweaters from Ireland. The sweater, though available for years, gained a new level of popularity.

In recent times, Mister B finds them too warm to wear except on the coldest days. This makes sense when you remember that houses built as late as the 1930s had little to no insulation, and double-paned windows were yet to be invented. Today’s advances in insulation, window technology and heating systems has eliminated the necessity of daily indoor sweater wearing for most people. Modern outerwear fabrics and insulators have also reduced the need for the extra layer of warmth a sweater would provide. Nonetheless, sweaters remain one of the most popular Christmas gifts.

How about you, boomers? Did your outerwear reflect the era or the country of origin of your parents or grandparents?

How Boomers Kept Warm

As winter makes a comeback this week across a good portion of the country, Mister Boomer is forever amazed at how thin the outerwear appears on the young Millennials he sees darting around town. If we saw coats and jackets like these back in the early Boomer Days, we would have put them in the same category as fashion from Star Trek — the stuff of science fiction. Advances in lightweight materials and especially insulation innovations have enabled modern outerwear to be a fraction of the thickness of what we had as kids, without sacrificing warmth.

If you were a kid in the late fifties and early sixties, your choices for winter warmth weren’t that much different than what your parents wore in the 1920s and ’30s. Wool and heavyweight cotton coats, hats, scarves and pants were the order of the day. While younger children had snow suits (as portrayed in the movie, A Christmas Story), older kids had snow pants that had buttons in the waistband to attach suspenders while teens tended to wear long johns under their regular winter-weight pants. Gloves and mittens were also wool or cotton, though lined leather gloves made it into Mister Boomer’s wardrobe for dress occasions such as Sunday church, family weddings and funerals.

As a youngster, Mister Boomer remembers wearing snow pants over his school pants, held up by suspenders. When he got a little older, he wore long johns under corduroy pants to school. The trade off was that warmth on the way to school gave way to potential overheating in the classroom. Jackets and coats were usually wool or had a wool lining, but as the mid-sixties introduced synthetics into the marketplace, acrylic pile linings were replacing the wool. For the most part, boys and girls wore the same type of garments, though in Mister B’s experience, girls tended to choose mittens and boys had gloves.

Most boomers will tell you they played outdoors every day. When kids expected to be outside for a few hours, they often doubled up on their layers. Two pairs of socks inside their boots, two pairs of gloves, a t-shirt, shirt and a sweater, and as previously mentioned, pants and snow pants or long johns and pants. Only the coldest of days would have much of an effect short-term, except when the fabric got wet from snowball fights, making snow forts, snowmen and snow angels. Mister Boomer and his siblings, when cold and wet, would enter the house through the back door and replace the wet garments with dry ones, hanging the wet ones on the clotheslines in the basement. We’d plan ahead leaving extra gloves, socks and pants for themselves since we didn’t want to cut into outdoor play time by having to remove our boots to walk through the house.

During the early years Mister Boomer remembers having black wool pants that had flecks of color threads in them. His parents often bought Mister B the same styles they got for his older brother. So the brothers had these pants and later in the sixties, matching brown suede pants, too. The wool pants were warm, though a little scratchy. In retrospect Mister B thinks the fabric must have been a quarter-inch thick. He wore them for several years, until he grew out of them. The suede pants were equally groovy, though not as warm.

As the sixties marched on and jeans became an everyday fashion, heavyweight or lined jeans were added into the mix for a lot of boomers. They were available for years, but in many areas jeans were not allowed in school, at least until the late sixties and early seventies. Too cool for black rubber galoshes, teens began wearing suede half boots that had a fleece lining. By then turtleneck and v-neck knit sweaters were popular for both boys and girls, and jackets were the choice more than three-quarter length coats.

Like everything we knew as kids, outerwear has evolved. While maintaining a fashionable silhouette indoors and out may have been top-of-mind for celebrities and wealthy folks, for the rest of us, form followed function. We needed warmth, and that meant bulk. Today’s kids have many more choices. Now if we could only convince them that “outside” isn’t a bad thing.

Do you have any fond memories of bulky outerwear, boomers?