Dress and Identity in America: The Baby Boom Years 1946-1964

By Daniel Delis Hill 

Dress and Identity in America is an examination of the conservatism and materialism that swept across the country in the late 1940s through the 1950s―a backlash to the wartime tumult, privations, and social upheavals.

The study looks at how American men sought to recapture a masculine identity from a generation earlier, that of the stoic patriarch, breadwinner, and dutiful father, and in the process, became the men in the gray flannel suits who were complacently conventional and conformist. Parallel to that is a look at how American women, who had donned pants and went to work in wartime munitions factories or joined services like the WACS and WAVES, were now expected to stay at home as housewives and mothers, dressed in cinched, ultrafeminine New Look fashions.

Through these examples it explores how the social constructs and identity traditions that men and women had fostered since the end of the war began to unravel at the beginning of the 1960s. As the Space Age dawned, their baby boom children rejected the conventions of their elders and experimented with their own ideas of identity and dress in an emerging era of counterculture revolutions.