- Breeding
- Horse Breeding: Covering a Mare
- Feeding and Management of Horses During the Transition from Warm to Cool Weather
- Horse Breeding, Part 3: Birth and Care of a Foal
- Buying a Horse
- Equine Experts Send Us Your Best Tip - Win $750 Worth of KAM’s Healthy Horse Products and More
- How to Buy Horses: A Step by Step Process
- What to Look For When Buying a Horse
- General Horse Articles
- The Truth Behind Bran Mash - Its Uses & Disadvantages
- Traditional verses Specialty Equine Education
- Choosing The Horseback Riding Vacation That’s Right For You
- Horse Feeding
- The Truth Behind Bran Mash - Its Uses & Disadvantages
- What Makes Good Hay
- An Equine Electrolyte for All Seasons - Electro-Ryte™
- Horse Grooming
- Equine Experts Send Us Your Best Tip - Win $750 Worth of KAM’s Healthy Horse Products and More
- What do do when the Panic is On to keep our Horses Safe!
- Keeping Your Horse Beautiful with Horse Products
- Horse Health Issues
- An Equine Electrolyte for All Seasons - Electro-Ryte™
- Calcium - More than Just Bone
- Understanding Horse Teeth
- Horse Training
- What do do when the Panic is On to keep our Horses Safe!
- Starting Early: Training the Foal
- Training Mythunderstandings: More Early Lessons for the Green Horse
- Horses & History
- A Brief History of Horse Breeding
- The Missing Equine Link: How the Modern Horse Came to Be
- Top 5 Strange and Unusual Horses
- Horses & Sports
- Halter Horse Show
- Relive Southern Eighths/Nikon Three-Day on YouTube
- How to Prepare for Your First Equestrian Competition
The History of Overalls
01/23/2009 - By Susan Jones
I sell a lot of overalls in my store, and had a customer ask me the other day how long overalls had been around. I started doing a little research, and came across this interesting information.
Overalls are invaluable on the farm. They are comfortable, practical and durable.
THE HISTORY OF OVERALLS:
They've been worn by slaves and sharecroppers, railroad engineers, college students, children in sandboxes and, more recently, rap music artists. Overalls have clothed Americans at work and play since the 1700s, becoming a national icon in the process.
Their origins are murky, but overalls date back to the 18th century and were first called "slops," according to costume historian Sandra Ros Altman.
At first, they weren't very comfortable and people who wore them were looked down upon, says Nan Enstad, an American history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "They didn't fit well, they were made of coarse and durable cloth, they were cheap, and they definitely marked the status of the people who wore them," she says. "They were low-status clothing and carried a stigma."
But darts and custom pockets for watches, rulers and pens were added and in a sign of their popularity overalls became among the first mass produced clothing. By the mid-1800s, the colors were standardized -- painters and plasterers wore white overalls, farmers wore blue or brown. Railway workers sported a variety of pinstripes.
"Dirty work called for angled pockets and hardy denim," Ulaby reports. "Carpenters added the hammer loop. Sturdy buckles and vest backs made overalls ideal for industry."
Rosie the Riveter came to symbolize the millions of women who worked in factories during World War II. But the celebration of women dressed in overalls goes back earlier than that. In 1914, The Hazards of Helen silent movie serials featured actress Helen Holmes jumping from a moving car onto a train, while wearing overalls.
But overalls are perhaps best associated with rural America and country music. The Grand Ole Opry often featured overalls-wearing musicians. The cast of television's country variety show Hee Haw had them on as well. Charles Wolfe, who teaches folklore and popular culture at Middle Tennessee State University, finds irony in that. "You have this ludicrous situation where people like Buck Owens and Grandpa Jones and Roy Clark and these major country music stars that have millions of dollars to their name are dressing up in bib overalls," Wolfe says.
Today, some hip hop artists wear them "and make more money than most people can even dream of, which is a great way of getting the last laugh," Enstad says. "So overalls have been redefined by the very people who were either excluded from them like women, or stigmatized by them like working class people."
Hope you enjoyed this!
Take care,
Susan
www.ranchwearunlimited.com
