Getting the Sack: The Controversial Late 1950s Fashion

This article analyses the 1950s sack dress within the context of American and English fashion. The garment, featuring an undefined waistline and a shorter, more constricted hemline, was by all accounts as popular (and controversial) as the changes in women’s fashion in the years after the Second World War. While the sack’s zenith can be clocked to the autumn of 1957 and spring of 1958, this article contextualizes this moment against the trajectory of less figure-defining fashions throughout the 1950s. The uproar against the style has become legendary, centred around expectations of how a woman (and her figure) was supposed to appear in clothes, and the attendant discipline suggested by and required for that appearance. To term the style a failure, which later reminisces have repeatedly done, glosses over both the sack’s popularity at the time, as well as its legacy as a harbinger for more youth-centred fashions in the 1960s. Through an understanding of the precedents, timeline, manifestations and press reactions to the garment, including a material culture analysis, this article contextualizes the sack’s moment in dress history and its contribution to twentieth-century fashion.