Feed sack dress

The first use of fabric sacks can be traced to the early 19th century, when small farmers strapped a sack to the back of a horse to take their grain for milling. A barrel held of flour, and the first commercial feed sacks were sized to hold fractions of that amount. In October 1924 Asa T. Bales, a millworker from Missouri, filed a patent for "a sack, the cloth of which is adapted to be used for dress goods after the product has been removed or consumed." Bales assigned the patent to the George P. Plant Milling Company of St. Louis, Missouri, which by 1925 were manufacturing Gingham Girl sacks. During World War II, dressmaking-quality fabrics became in short supply as textile manufacturers produced for war efforts, and cotton yard goods were rationed. but feed sacks were considered part of the "industrial" category of uses, so feed sacks were still available. Recycling of them was encouraged by the US government. According to the Textile Research Center's Willem Vogelsang, "A bag that contained of sugar, for example, provided of cloth, while a bag provided slightly more than of material, with four sacks providing enough for one adult woman’s dress." At the industry's peak, of cotton fabric were used in commodity bags, in 1946 accounting for 8.0% of the cotton goods production and 4.5% of total cotton consumption in the US. After World War II, use of cloth sacks for packaging declined and was replaced with less expensive paper. Most feed sack production ceased by the early 1960s. == Feed sack garments ==

As early as 1890 the first osnaburg sacks were recycled on farms to be used as toweling, rags, or other functional uses on farms. Groups of women would get together to trade the sacks and itinerant peddlers bought and sold the empty sacks. By the 1930s companies regarded the sacks as a crucial part of marketing product. As garments wore out, they were often recycled again into quilts, rugs, and cleaning rags. A study by fashion historian Jennifer Lynn Banning analyzing 37 garments made between 1949 and 1968 by one Louisiana farmwife found that the garments and textiles were similar to those being shown contemporaneously in Good Housekeeping magazine to its middle-class reading audience and "had many of the same fashion features as mass produced garments that could be purchased in department stores nationwide". The garments are held in the collection of the Louisiana State University Textile and Costume Museum. The fabric and bags have variously been referred to as feed sacks, flour sacks, commodity bags, and chicken linen. == Cultural impact ==

During World War II it was estimated that 3 million women and children in the United States were wearing feed sack clothing at any given point in time. One participant in an oral history project stated that "everything on the clothesline was from feed sacks." There was an element of shame experienced by those dressed in flour sack clothing, as it was seen as a mark of poverty, so efforts were often made to hide the fact the clothing was made from feed sacks, such as soaking off logos, dying the fabric, or adding trim. According to the Smithsonian, "With feed sacks and flour bags, farmwomen took thriftiness to new heights of creativity, transforming the humble bags into dresses, underwear, towels, curtains, quilts, and other household necessities." According to Brandes, feed sack fashion was a reflection of rural culture in the first half of the 20th century. Brandes notes that fashion history has largely been written without including the fashion of rural communities. She called the feed sack garments part of the "cultural heritage of rural America." Banning notes that 20th-century costume history "has traditionally focused on fashion designers and the styles they created," resulting in a "top-rail bias," defined as history written from the perspective of the upper class. == References ==