on the issue of fashion, urban life and democracy

1939 movie "Gone with Wind" captures antebellum dress.

1920s attire featured into Harlem's vogue moment.

Postwar wealth's rising hemline.

The college "uniform"

"The Nineteenth Century City," a course I generally teach in the fall, provides a reason to to reflect on how far we have come on the issue of women's fashion in the United States. An expanding mass consumer market, innovations in technology, the growth of the "ready-made" clothing industry, and a host of other things have made it possible for people to make decisions about what they want to wear and moreover, to even change the meaning of what looks fashionable and what does not.

These days, one does not have to wear a dress and corset obviously to look fashionable, hip, or with the times, pun intended.

How did we make this transition? It's worth thinking about and even mulling over how urban living figures into this transition.

Gunther Barth is a historian to whom this course often turns because of how he positions emerging urban life. He says we saw it come into being in the United States between the years 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade.

Evidently, we can look way back to start pondering the many answers to the aforementioned question (How did we make this transition?). Along the way, we will be required to think about women's growing presence in public spaces and how people from very different backgrounds feel included simply because they can wear something wealthy people wear despite ongoing structural oppression. That they can figures  into many complex American experiences and yet another way democracy is a word on which we can think deeply -  the next time we dress to go out on the town, or the Quad.