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The Great Depression plunged families across the United States into unimaginable poverty. Not even they themselves, who before the crash of 1929 had enjoyed a period of prosperity and unusual development in their history, could not have thought that they would reach the extreme that the photographs of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange documented.
The hardships of the North American inhabitants were such that the absolute priority was to obtain food. Everything else was luxury. Dressing became secondary. The scarcity led many of them to dress in rags.
You had to resort to what little you had. Anything was susceptible to being reused. The sacks of flour thus became the solution that some women found to dress their children and themselves. And not only that: they also served as rags, towels or curtains. Sometimes they were even used to create dolls and toys.
When the manufacturers of flour and animal feed found out about these events, they decided to help these families in a simple way and at a cost they could afford, since they were not going through the best of times either.
Aware of the use that women gave to their sacks, they began to make them with patterned fabrics. In this way, the dresses or rags made from them would be more attractive than the boring and rough jute fabrics.
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO MEASURE PASTA SO I MAY HAVE ACCIDENTALLY COOKED ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE
— Kayleb ✭ 🎪 Fri Feb 19 00:17:19 +0000 2021
The success of the proposal was such that the manufacturing companies even decided to print the legal and informative texts on paper labels or in an ink that could be removed with a couple of washes. In this way, the cloth could be used in its entirety.
There were even manufacturers who, along with the jackets, printed advertisements giving advice, ideas or patterns to make certain garments.
What at first was an emergency solution during the Great Depression ended up lasting until after World War II, almost into the 50s. During the war, everything was destined to supply the fighting army. The largest textile factories were devoted almost entirely to the production of uniforms and other military clothing. For this reason, flour brands had to replace these companies to supply fabrics to the humblest population.
After the war and the economic crisis ended thanks to the recovery brought about by European reconstruction during the postwar period, the American population no longer needed to solve their clothing problems by resorting to jackets.
Paper sacks replaced cotton ones. The dresses made with them became part of the past.
At the end of 2016, the writer and editor Linzee Kull McCray published the book Feed Sacks: The Colorful History of a Frugal Fabric, a volume that was presented wrapped in different papers that reproduced those fabrics and that rescued the history of this phenomenon with lots of information and photos.
To promote the book, Uppercase Magazine organized an exhibition showing some of the original sacks. Something difficult to achieve since most of them became garments that managed to dignify, even minimally, a totally devastated population.
Yorokobu for free in digital format!
Read Future magazine for free by clicking here.
