Fashion repeats itself, and supporting skirts from beneath - whether by a farthingale, hoops, or a crinoline, depending on the century - is a style that keeps coming back. We've featured it here on the blog many times, including here and here.
But until I came across this feature from a 1938 Fall Fashion issue of Life Magazine, I'd no idea that hoops had also had a brief resurgence for evening wear in the late 1930s, an era that I'd always thought was defined by slinky, body-conscious bias-cut gowns.
The editorial copy in Life describing this "new" fashion in dance frocks, above left, is amazingly snarky, even for fashion reporting, including this gem: "American women, notoriously hippy, are expected to pounce upon the bell-shaped silhouette. The nipped-in waist, the wide-spreading skirt, are perfect camouflage for excess pounds below the waist...." And this was from a mainstream American magazine!
Click here to read the entire feature on Fall Fashion, available online courtesy of GoogleBooks - including what must have been a pretty racy photoshoot of a model in a revealing black hoop petticoat and corset.
Below: "What Every Girl Should Know About Wearing Hoopskirts", illustrations from Life Magazine, Sept. 5, 1938.
One of us -- 
4 comments:
For all their challenges, I'd still opt for a hoop skirt over a mini skirt.
In 1957 there was a brief resurgence in short hoops. The skirts were ankle length and the hoops were more crinolines with flexible hoops sewn in -- and not as wide as the long ones. They were hard to keep down; hard to sit in. The ladies of the 18th and 19th centuries grew up with them so learned early how to handle them-- saw their mothers and older women wearing them -- women who could advise about the proper way to walk, sit, and move.
I wonder if the resurgence of the longer hoops in the late 30's had any connection to the filming of Gone with the Wind?
I'd say that you're right on the nose with the Gone with the Wind idea!
go look at the cover of the Life at the link Bobby Rigges is in there too. Plus Queen Vickey
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