Native Dress

Photos courtesy Flickr

Cotton kills.

It’s back to school time, and I’m having flashbacks about sewing machines.

Local tribespeople wore cedar bark skirts, salmon oil, and glorious rain-shedding hats before the Europeans showed up. With lots of exercise and a good fire, that’s not a bad way to go, since shoes and clothing hold damp against the skin. At my local college, the students removed and carried their leather shoes when it started to rain, so they wouldn’t have cold feet in their next class.

Northwest Washington was contested by America and Great Britain, and until the Sixties, our wardrobes were Anglo to the hilt. Our climate, a rare one, is identical to England’s, and the best shopping was in Victoria, so families ferried over to buy conservative, high-end woolens to wear during the damp and chilly months when the sun is low in the sky. Local shopping was dominated by the Oregon outfit that specializes in plaid and tribal blankets.

There’s a shoe store on University Way in Seattle that serves the academic community. It seems as if half the place sells sensible high heels to instructors who work standing, and the other half sells inexpensive play shoes to frisky students. I like to cruise both outlets, and it was a surprise to find recently that the play shoes are displayed alongside old school preppie penny loafers (that can be resoled) from an old school manufacturer.

The economy is worse than I thought.

The Wall Street Journal ran an obituary for preppie culture when Brooks Brothers decided to sell a blue-violet shirt. If historical research is your thing, try The Preppie Handbook and Cheap Chic. Forgive Wall Street and get yourself something worth wearing.

Preppie, the folk wear of the United States, is an approach to wardrobe that wrings the utmost from every clothing dollar. It is essentially Anglo. I walked past Burberry downtown with an English friend during the first dot com boom, and asked her if it were true that English families do away with any child who can’t wear Burberry off the rack. Jennie nodded an enthusiastic yes.

That’s not true, of course, but it illustrates the core value of conservative dress: hand-me-downs. If God gave you cousins, it makes sense to invest in high-quality garments even if they will be outgrown. Good wool saves lives. If you don’t believe me, just read the Filson catalogue.

Traditionally, July and August are the months to prepare the winter’s clothing. Before people wore automobiles instead of coats, the females in a family would take to their sewing machines and knitting needles to ready skirts and sweaters for the winter. I will cheerfully snarl at anyone who advises me to sew my own clothing, but I will equally cheerfully shop for high-performance equivalents of the old stand-bys, whose cost per use is the lowest of all.

The essentials are little different from a school uniform. During the Fifties, even the most prosperous local families dressed their children in just a few outfits of decent quality. A few wool skirts or corduroy trousers, a few wool sweaters, and a few cotton shirts supplemented by leather shoes that could be resoled, wool or cotton socks, and a wool coat or slicker were it. There would be church and party outfits in reserve, and kids put on “play clothes”, jeans and tennis shoes, when they got home.

Wool pays off, and it’s easy to wash now that machines have gentle cycles and citrus-based detergent is on the market. I've had good results washing even wool skirts and jackets-cold and careful are the keys. Tie a special-handling garment into a white plastic grocery bag and note the instructions on the bag. Whoever else is doing laundry will either comply or skip over the bag. In either case, the item is protected from the one drawback of wool: finding a teeny shrunken surprise in the dryer.

-30-