Crazy Fur Real

**This transcript comes from a previous broadcast. There may be small changes between the audio you hear above and the text.**

ED: This is BackStory, I’m Ed Ayers. Earlier this summer pop star Pharrell stirred up controversy when he wore an Indian headdress on the cover of a fashion magazine. But what strikes some as offensive today, would have been welcomed 100 years earlier, when of all people, a group of museum curators tried to define the American look.

ANN MARGUERITE TARTSINIS: They were even letting fashion designers pin the hide jackets and Siberian coats to dress forms.

ED: Today on the show, a history of fashion. From the Revolutionary War, when made in America was all the rage, to the Civil War, when a bushy beard was the key to being all you could be.

SEAN TRAINOR: You will be stronger, you will be, more virile. You can go out and do these mainly things that perhaps they’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t do, because they didn’t have facial hair.

ED: Plus, the suit that have opposite meanings on each side of the Atlantic. Fashion in America, today on BackStory.

PETER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey there Brian.

BRIAN: Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Hello Brian.

BRIAN: And we’re going to kick it off today in 1956, at a party in New York City. The host of this party were a couple named the Salzmans. They were Greenwich Village bohemian types, and on the night of his party, Sue Salzman was steamed. Earlier that day, she had lost out on an incredible bargain at the local Salvation Army. It was an authentic, 1920s, full length raccoon fur men’s coat.

JENNIFER LE ZOTTE: She recounted a near grappling match between herself and another Salvation Army patron over this coat, which was a relic of the furry fad from the 1920s.

PETER: This is Jennifer Le Zotte, a historian at Colby College. She says that in the Roaring ’20s, these raccoon coats had been all the rage on Ivy League campuses. But when the stock market crashed, affluence went out of style, and so did the coats. By the 1950s, they were a relic of a bygone era.

BRIAN: One of the guests at the Salzman’s party had turned out, had a relative with a warehouse full of pre-war men’s clothing. After hearing about the Salvation Army drama, the guest offered Sue a crack at any raccoon coats that might be in the warehouse. But it quickly became clear, that everybody at the party also wanted a coat. So the Salzmans decided to go into business.

PETER: In the following days they called around to secondhand stores and warehouses and bought up all the raccoon coats they could find. Which they promptly turned around and sold to their artsy downtown friends.

JENNIFER LE ZOTTE: It wasn’t very long until Glamour magazine actually published a photo of a coonskin coat and named the Salzmans as major suppliers.

BRIAN: Letters and phone calls started pouring in, including one from Gordon Taylor. Before long, the very same moth eaten coats that had spent 25 years packed away in boxes, were hanging on the racks of New York’s poshes department stores.

JENNIFER LE ZOTTE: These department stores were promising shabbily genteel coats full of lovely holes in a snobby seediness. The Salzmans fueled fur’s romantic images, by often reporting that– for example in one coat we found a revolver and a mask and in another, a list of speakeasies.

PETER: This of course was hardly the first fashion revival in American history, but the raccoon coat craze of 1956 and 1957 was something new. It was a craze not simply for the old style, but for the actual coats themselves. Which explains why the craze only lasted two years.

JENNIFER LE ZOTTE: They ran out of coats.

PETER: But short-lived as the fashion may have been, Jennifer Le Zotte says that it had huge impact on secondhand clothing culture.

JENNIFER LE ZOTTE: It really wasn’t until this raccoon coat craze, that, vintage clothing became something that was desirable, not just old, not just secondhand, not just used.

BRIAN: The raccoon coat craze was the first time clothes were marketed as vintage. It was the beginning, says Le Zotte, of what has become a very familiar phenomenon, wealthy people paying more for an item because of its aura of authenticity.

JENNIFER LE ZOTTE: Recently I’ve actually seen a 1970s mesh back trucker hat, which emblem of blue collar work, that was being sold for nearly 50 bucks.

BRIAN: Now, it’s true that there’s a tradition of wearing secondhand clothes as an anti-consumer statement, a tradition that goes back to the 1960s. But Le Zotte says that the raccoon coat story reveals a still older tradition, of spending top dollar to appear counter-cultural.

JENNIFER LE ZOTTE: It simply doesn’t avoid the system. It’s anti-consumerist, consumerism.

ED: Whether or not we are particularly fashionable, the clothes we wear necessarily say things to the people around us. Sometimes those clothes say, hey we want to fit in, we want to belong. Sometimes they say, no we reject the status quo. Either way we wear layers of meaning, many of which come to us from the past.

BRIAN: Which makes the topic of fashion prime for the picking by us Backstory hosts. And so today on the show, Ed, Peter, and I are walking the runway of fashion’s history here in the United States. We’ve got the story of a group of anthropologists who tried to put their stamp on America’s early 20th century look, of spinster sisters who succeeded where those anthropologists failed, and of the sartorial lightening rod known as a zoot suit.