A Colorized Look at 1930s Flour Sack Fashion

June 6, 2022

To say that money was tight and jobs were scarce during the Great Depression of the 1930s would be an understatement. The economic downturn caused by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 upended the American way of life. People lost their homes. Families split up. People starved. 

A clever housewife could stretch the family's budget by making clothing out of empty flour sacks. (secretsoftheeasternshore.com)

Housewives living through the Great Depression had to learn quickly to be resourceful. They had to make do with whatever resources they had available to them. Thanks to the Textile Bag Manufacturers Association and the Millers National Federation, 1930s housewives got a helping hand to keep them looking stylish in the face of great poverty. How did they do this? By printing their flour sacks with colorful patterns so that the fabric could be recycled into clothing for the whole family. As you can see from these colorized photos, many of the flour sack dresses were so cleverly made that it is nearly impossible to tell that the material started out serving a different purpose. 

The Cost of Fabric

Mills began printing patterns on their flour sacks, knowing that the material would go to make clothing. (lisalouisecooke.com)

About three yards of fabric were needed to make a basic woman’s dress in the 1930s. To buy that material in a dry goods store would cost between 60 and 75 cents. That’s pocket change for us today, but in the 1930s, the average weekly income was less than $15. That $15 had to go a long way to feed a family (and remember, family sizes were bigger then), pay rent, and more. They had to save every penny and make sure nothing goes to waste.

Feed Sack Bags

During the Industrial Revolution, when commercial textiles and sewing machines were invented, wheat growers switched from shipping and selling flour in wooden barrels to using the more cost-effective cloth sacks. Originally, these sacks were coarse burlap, but those gave way to finer weave fabric that kept more of the flour from seeping out. Consumers noticed the nice quality of the flour sacks. Well before the Great Depression hit, they were recycling the flour sacks into towels, rags, and other household items.