These button-up sweaters became known as “Sloppy Joes.” They were generously long and bagged over the hips, with long sleeves pushed up above the elbows. This look was inspired by the outfits worn by male Ivy League students, who took pride in looking a bit slipshod.
The Daily Californian wrote that only the “most self-satisfied of men students” wore filthy cords, sloppy sweaters, and embraced general disorder. They were “proud of their neglect” and thought it showed a “superiority of mind over other men.” It didn’t take much time for the all-women’s schools on the east coast to take on the same look.
“They began to wear Sloppy Joes around the same time they started to wear pants,” Deirdre Clemente, a historian of 20th century American fashion, told The Week. “These young women were saying, ‘we’re not adhering to your concept of prescribed femininity, we’re doing our own thing.’”
The public backlash was massive. Men hated the cardi because it concealed women’s bodies and obscured their curves. The media dubbed the women who wore them “Sloppy Sues.” A 1947 article in Life lamented the sweaters and was shocked that these women “sometimes even ventured out of dormitories in rolled-up blue jeans and large men’s shirts with the tails out. … like a girl who does not care whether or not she looks like a girl.”
In 1937, college men at Northwestern complained that women were “handicapping themselves” with their sloppy dress and they should “make themselves prettier,” to deserve their attention. In 1944, one WWII veteran even waged a one-man protest against sloppy sweaters at the University of Minnesota. He declared that “co-ed” dressing wasn’t what he’d fought for in battle, and likened the fashion trend to the horrors of war.
Mothers also worried about their daughters traipsing around in sloppy clothing, which was thought to equal sloppy manners, sloppy thinking, and sloppy morals. Some thought the disheveled look foreshadowed an equally disheveled housewife. Others thought it broadcast loose morals, since so many cardigan-wearing women were forgoing the girdle beneath. One mother claimed her daughter’s slovenly look would drive a man to drink later, to which her daughter responded: “It’s comfortable and I don’t care how it looks.”
Indeed, dressing masculine was a gift of independence. “Society felt like it deserved access to women’s bodies, and Sloppy Joe cardigans obscured that access,” says Clemente. “It’s why the push back was so vehement.”
As a librarian I am honor bound to reblog this
Same.
(via cosmomoore)
