This article by Ray Spitzenberger appeared first in IMAGES for July 22, 2021, East Bernard Express, East Bernard, Texas.
One of the striking features about school pictures of my brother and me when we attended Dime Box Rural School was that we were wearing bib overalls. Usually made of blue or blue-striped denim, “bib overalls” were also called “bib-and-brace (straps) overalls.” The other boys in our class photos were also wearing bib overalls, so we blended in with everyone else.
Not only did rural boys wear them to school, but most of our fathers, with maybe the exception of the dads who were preachers or teachers, wore overalls. Many fathers, and almost all of our grandfathers were farmers, and their usual attire was denim bib overalls. My father worked for the railroad, as did some of the other fathers, and they too wore overalls.
The widespread wearing of overalls began right after the Great Depression. They were durable, long-lasting, and less expensive than more “refined” garments, so they had great appeal to folks in farming communities. In fact, you could even make your own overalls by ordering a pattern and some material, such as drill, duck, khaki, or denim, from Sears and Roebuck. Denim was the most popular, of course. My mother was a superb seamstress, but she never made overalls for us boys or our father.
Her reluctance to sew such garments for her family was mainly due to my father’s firm insistence on wearing only the J. C. Penney overalls brand, Big Mac. Each Christmas season, we would have to drive to Brenham, the nearest place with a J. C. Penney store, to buy him a pair or two of Big Mac’s for Christmas. There were also available in various stores Big Ben, Blue Bell, Dickies, Lee’s, Levi Strauss; and the Sears Roebuck brand, but Daddy refused to wear anything but Big Mac’s.
My father was a very humble, unassuming, hard-working man, who lived by the philosophy, “Make do or do without.” Except for two or three things in life. In addition to “no overalls but Big Mac’s,” he also insisted on one-brand-only pocket knives, worms only for fish bait, mesquite wood live coals only for barbecuing, and Ford-only automobiles!
The popularity of bib overalls in rural communities back then was rather phenomenal. Bib overalls weren’t “invented” until 1911, when Henry David Lee made the first ever bib-with-straps overalls. Prior to Lee’s creation of this very durable and very comfortable denim work-suit, men wore denim trousers with suspenders (no bib, of course). Even though bib overalls were created before the Depression, they didn’t become really popular until afterwards.
The preference for wearing bib overalls has never fully ended for American farmers, and the history of clothing saw them catch on outside of rural communities. In the 1960’s, hippies in San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington wore them as a kind of “anti-establishment” statement. They became a trendy look with both sincere “Flower Children” as well as with pseudo-hippies.
It’s amazing how fashion trends can cause a change in who wears a garment, as well as, a change in the “looks” of the garment itself. Overalls became popular with young people in both cities as well as rural towns in the 1990’s, an era when trendy young people stopped calling them “bib overalls,” replacing the term with “farming jeans.” Non-farmers calling them “farming jeans” seems rather ironic to me.
In 2020, there was a resurgence of overalls as trendy fashion, and they were even worn in England, where they were called “dungarees” (a term known but not used for bib overalls in the United States). They were also trendy in Canada where they were called both “overalls” and “dungarees.”
The overalls fashion trend among the younger generation has continued in 2021, with new colors, like red, green, and copper replacing blue. They are now worn by young women as well as men, the women usually opting for short trousers, and often corduroy rather than denim.
I haven’t worn a pair, new style or old school, since the late 1940’s, and I rather miss them. I think it’s kind of touching that the younger generation has rediscovered overalls; it’s a good sign.
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Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor, and author of two books, It Must Be the Noodles and Open Prairies.