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.
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
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.
Gingham Girls Sacks
Millworkers across the country knew that their customers were converting their empty flour sacks into clothing – in fact, their own wives were doing this – so in the mid-1920s a millworker in Missouri patented a flour sack that was designed to be sewn into a garment. This man, Asa T. Bales, used his patent at the St. Louis-based George P. Plant Milling Company which began selling Gingham Girl flour sacks. With a distinctive red and white checkered pattern, the Gingham Girls sacks were a selling point. The company noticed an uptick in sales because housewives wanted to get the printed sacks to make dresses for their daughters and themselves.
A Great Marketing Tool
Mills around the country took notice. They, too, believed that they could increase their sales and gain new customers by using patterned flour sacks. The Textile Bag Manufacturers Association, together with the Millers National Federation, began to offer classes and booklets to show housewives how to maximize the cloth in the flour sacks. They offered patterns and tips for dressmaking with the flour sacks. The Textile Bag Manufacturers Association even standardized the sizes of the flour sacks, so housewives always knew exactly how much fabric was in each sack. Several newsletters, published by The Household Science Institute, were in circulation in the 1930s, including “Sewing with Cotton Bags” and “Out of the Bag”.
Sack Swaps
As the Great Depression wore on, nearly every mill in the country offered patterned flour sacks in a variety of colors and prints. There was no shame in wearing a dress that started life as a flour bag. Everyone was wearing them. Some patterns were more popular than others and sometimes, a housewife had to search high and low for a second sack of the same pattern so she could make a complete dress. In many communities, women formed groups to swap flour sacks with each other. There were even entrepreneurial-minded individuals who started their own small businesses by buying and reselling empty flour sacks for the fabric.
The End of Flour Sack Fashion
All available resources went to the war effort during World War II, so flour sack dresses continued to be popular. Following the war, however, the U.S. enjoyed a time of prosperity. Families could finally afford to purchase new fabric or even buy ready-to-wear garments. Additionally, goods like flour were now being packaged in paper or plastic wrapping, rather than cloth. These factors marked the end of the era of flour sack fashions.