No Hawaiian shirts on this post, nor any other casual-looking attire. We’re going for smart fashions on this post, all quite away from the relaxed dress codes of today. As you’ll see, today’s gallery is a collection of some rather sharp-dressing folks from the ’50s and ’60s, looking the best they could regardless of their family ride. Be it a Cadillac, Buick, or Ford, these folk aimed to look as first-rate as they were able to.
It was probably overdue I should put together such a gallery. On many of our previous ones, the stylish looks of folks in the past have been a common topic in the comments. And as some have noted, people took greater care of their appearance in public back then. Partly out of custom, and partly due to the dynamics of the closer-knit communities of those days. As expected, most of the photos date from the ’50s, with the sharply dressed falling in dramatic numbers by the time the casual ’60s arrive.
Some of us have memories of such days. My father, for one, took great care to look the best he could when going out, particularly on Sundays. As said, partly out of custom, and partly for fear he might come across some acquaintance looking ‘improper’. Not that I exactly long for his era, since I’m glad that nowadays I can go to the mall in shorts and have no worries about my looks. Regardless, as with everything, looking through these images I also have to admit that something has been lost.
Not a single low end (Chevy, Ford, Plymouth) sedan to be seen. Lots of convertibles and a hardtop or two, and of course the obligatory Buicks. But my favorite is the two women in front of the Corvair Monza coupe: it’s a real clash of late ’50s clothing fashion and the latest chic ’60s automotive fashion. And it confirms that my long-running theory that women loved Corvairs.
The ladies with the Corvair is my favourite of this selection.
I was wondering how they were going to drive in those heels. Or maybe they aren’t smiling because the photographer is driving and one of them has to ride in the back.
’57 Buick in the upper left background, behind the Corvair ladies.
My favourite, too. I think they’re mother and daughter and they’re going to something church-related – possibly a wedding. And if father doesn’t hurry up and take the photo, they’re going to be late.
I wore a suit and tie to work up until 10 years or so ago, when the ‘tech bro’ culture suddenly became fashionable. Covid and working from home seems to have dealt the final blow to dressing more formally.
Curious, what was your occupation? I dressed up for work in the 1980’s but had to ditch the coat and tie when in the manufacturing area in order to communicate effectively. By the 90’s was transferred to Palmdale, with 100+F summers and violent winds. Just not practical walking out on the ramp and “getting the job done” trumped most formalities.
Hello nikita, I was in research, with a strong client-facing component. To be fair, it’s quite a conservative profession and this is often reflected in the people it attracts and the way they dress. It’s got quite an academic / professional background to it.
Corvair is also my favorite of the lot. The woman on the right was dressed in a modern style that complements the car. Hat looks kind of “space age” a bit like a UFO.
Wonder why that is. I traded one project car for a project corvair since my wife wanted one (no way I’m letting her drive the comet).
Up until about 1965 Dad would rarely leave the house without wearing a hat, usually a Dobbs fedora for work and a trilby with smart feather on the side on weekend trips to the lumberyard. JFK changed all that as he rarely wore one. Clearly we have become a nation of slobs… public pajamas anyone? lol
Pajamas… sounds like Bellingham. People here look like they just woke up or look (and smell) like they’ve been camping for a week. Most of the cars in these photos look like they’ve had a fresh wash and wax.
What model of car is seen in photo # 8 ?
Dodge….my uncle had one.
Dodge, either a 55 or a 56
Gotta be a Dodge.
White gloves galore. I love it.
Love the to sharp and prosperous “Cadillac kids” in front of a swell car and lovely home.
That’s my favorite from this bunch as well. I wonder if the matching outfits were Christmas gifts from the kids’ grandparents?
Hats started going out of favor during the 1950s as enclosed automobiles became more common. Before this time, men’s dress/business attire included a top coat, a hat and often a pair of rubbers to cover leather dress shoes. Even today, men who commute into the city, are fully dressed for the weather if they use mass transportation.
Dress hats fell out of favor as dress clothing fell out of favor. St. Louis, once the world’s largest supplier of shoes and hats, started losing hat manufacturers and shoe manufacturing by this time. Hats, made in St. Louis, finally ended only a few years ago, while shoe manufacturing went from St. Louis to Italy and China.
So we really can’t point to Kennedy for killing off the hat. Kennedy did wear hats in public and actually wore a hat on his inauguration day, but didn’t wear it all the time commonly shown in video.
the Hat Capital of the USA and World was Danbury CT
Yep, JFK was no hat fancier, but he did wear a top hat to his inauguration, taking it off to give his address. Four years later LBJ went hatless, a trend that continues to this day.
I was wondering what make is the gray-ish green car with the droopy-eyeed headlights in photo #3.
Looks like a 1949 Olds
I found some of those fox sashes at Grandma’s house, but I can’t remember ever seeing any in use in photos. Hers had legs and feet and a way to connect the two noses.
My favorite is the sharply dressed family next to the ’49 Ford convertible. I think that a lot has been lost as minimum wardrobe standards have fallen so far. I’m sure that a lot of these photos were of people in their Sunday best on their way to church and later breakfast/brunch, and social calling.
Back about 10-12 years ago when my Son was off at college, he told me that a group of his friend’s got dressed in sports coats and slacks and went out for dinner. He said that it was a pleasurable experience and that dressing better, made it feel more special. Maybe a little more modeling after the Rat Pack, instead of the Rat’s Ass!
When I was in my 20s (in the 1990s), I worked at a retail store where employees dressed casually, in jeans, shorts, etc. At one point, a friend and I decided to “dress up” at work on Saturdays, wearing a shirt and tie. We were both amazed at how differently people treated us – much more respect when you’re not looking like a slob. We continued to dress up on Saturdays for the rest of the time I worked there.
Back in the late 70’s, while in grad school at Cal, I bought five sport coats in Navy to Camel to Herringbone. In clinic one is dressed at the time. I found a small shop on Channing near Bancroft where there was this old time tailor. Had him adjust all the coats to fit perfectly and they still fit perfectly today.
My wife, son, and I went out to dinner for our wedding anniversary. My wife is Filipina and she knows how to dress up. I got dressed in white shirt, rep tie, gray slacks and Navy Blazer. Made my son put on a tie also which I tied. Ah, dad! Walk into the restaurant at 7 PM to the reception desk. You could see the girl looking. At the table one could feel everyone’s eyes on us being the only people formally dressed. Nice dinner, extra attention, what ever my wife wants, and a complimentary dessert for all.
I wonder how many here can tie a full windsor, half windsor, or four-in-hand?
I’m a Half Windsor guy myself, but I don’t often wear ties anymore.
I was a half-Windsor for years. Learned it from my dad, who learned how to do it in OCS–he said that the Navy usually did full Windsors and he sort of hacked this with the half-Windsor. Problem with the half-Windsor is that it takes a lot of tie and so I always asked for the extra-long tails (the Girls in my family had much better taste in ties than I did). Most of my colleagues in medicine did 4-in-hands (skinny knot, slightly skewed) and I noticed that ties were in decline (except on clinic days) on the wards starting in the late 1990s. I stopped wearing a tie in the early 2010s, and the only men that wear ties nowadays is senior management when they expect meetings with Grand Poobahs or comms people with cameras.
What? A full windsor takes a wrap around either side while the half takes a wrap around one side only like the four-in-hand. More tie for full windsor or, as in my case, carefully spacing the two lengths out so when finished both sides ended up the appropriate length. That took practice while the other two were easy.
The 4-in-hands I know didn’t have an extra wrap on either side. A half-Windsor with one side wrap on a regular length tie would take up about half the tail if I wanted to have the front part to be long enough to just barely touch the buckle (otherwise I’d look like Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction with a front part just halfway down the front; and it especially looked silly if I still had my stethoscope ear tubes still pinched on my neck). The knit ties (it was a thing in the ’80s, so were really skinny ties) I did with no wrap (which I thought was 4-in-hands) because they were so short to begin with.
I couldn’t help notice how shiny these cars look in the pictures. My grandmothers never went anywhere without gloves, and mom only wore gloves to church.
It is wonderful to see how well dressed folks were back in the day. There is also one other thing of note: not a single person in this photoset is overweight, much less obese. I attribute it to the rise of fast food and Big Gulps. When I was a kid, the first McDonald’s in Canada were opening. As a child, I was bombarded with TV ads for for the Golden Arches. It was no surprise that I pestered my parents to take me there. Even then, it was an occasional treat as my mom almost always cooked at home.
Now we have fast food everywhere. I even see Uber Eats (that’s another story) delivering a $15 Big Mac meal with an extra $7.50 delivery charge. Times sure have changed, and not for the better.
As recently as the mid ’90’s, you’d regularly see kids (and adults) in any given neighbourhood, outside walking or playing. Most communities are dead quiet now. People indoors, and online.
Food is cheap (as a percentage of labor/income) and convenient today. For almost all time, food has been the major product of human labor and has been variously scarce, dangerous, and difficult to acquire. Our brains are hardwired to eat and to plan to eat. It’s especially problematic for women because women who don’t eat enough can’t reproduce. People alive today are the descendants of people who were especially motivated and skilled at finding or producing food, then eating it.
My favorite: the young lady standing by the white convertible (Olds?). I love the casual way she carries her white gloves. By the way, people didn’t feel like matching glove colors to the rest of their outfits?
They weren’t always white – they could be a contrasting or complementary colour to add a bit of interest. White was the classic colour, though and it demonstrated that you hadn’t needed to sully your hands by touching anything remotely dirty.
Seeing a woman today wearing a dress and white gloves would be as shocking as seeing Aunt Bee (from he Andy Griffith Show ) in ripped skinny skinny jeans and a cropped T shirt.
The lady holding her white gloves — I’ll call it a ’61 Pontiac.
But is it a Bonneville … or a [Canadian] Parisienne ?
The just-out-of-focus lettering shows on the fender.
Same number of letters in both Bonneville & Parisienne !
I’ll bet it is a Canadian Parisienne. I don’t think US Pontiacs used that V symbol on the front fender since they were all V-8s.
Canadian cars had the 261 cid straight six standard, with 283 or 348 Chevrolet engines optional.
Very nice car either way.
Good eye! I think you nailed that oddball…Chevy chassis and dash, with a shortened Pontiac body!
Every one, a fantastic pic! I find the various neutral colours, quite elegant, and dignified-looking.
We have family photos from Christmas of 1961 (I believe) and all of the adult men are wearing white shirts, jackets and ties, and all of the women were in dresses. I can still remember those years. It wasn’t long after that the ties went away, and then the dresses.
“It wasn’t long after that the ties went away, and then the dresses.”
Goodness, your family photos after that point must be a bit startling.
The people and the cars are pure class. It seems that people took pride in how they look ( very unlike today) . What an era to be an American.
The gloves! They’re what drew my attention. Even in scenes that aren’t obviously winter, more often than not the women are wearing gloves. Or holding them, in the case of that ’61 Pontiac.
I remember a few years back an older relative gave my daughter several pairs of gloves handed down from two or three generations earlier. Her own daughters weren’t interested, which seems a shame. Ruth was absolutely entranced by the sheer style and craftsmanship of them. I remember my mother weaing gloves on the few occasions she and dad went anywhere ‘gloveworthy’; I’d assume Ruth has them, along with others handed down.
I remember as a boy being taken shopping to the local menswear store, and seeing an illustrated poster next to the full-length mirror loudly proclaiming “A Man Looks Better Wearing A Hat”. It seemed incongruous to me; by the late sixties only older men wore hats on a daily basis, it seemed. On leaving the city in ’90, I discovered hats were still a much-needed part of daily attire up-country, for funtional shade not fickle fashion. I still have the Akubra I bought then, not sure which style it is; to me it’s just something I needed. And I discovered that some older folk had an appreciation for hat styles; I was told ‘Nice Rabbit’, by an octogenarian upper-class lady nodding in the direction of my hat; to this day I’m not sure what she saw in it.
Interesting, how she pulled a rabbit out of your hat. Was she on stage?
Very old men – quite possibly not especially old in fact – still wore hats when I was a kid in the ’70’s. And certain old ladies, from beneath the steering wheels of their Austins. And newly-minted coppers certainly wore white gloves in the middle of city intersections on traffic duty in my memory, though that has a practical aspect, of course. (No finger prints on the phonebooks, say certain folk!)
Hats just aren’t suitable for some people, and I’m one. I have a big, boofy head, and by the time the hats fits, I look like I’m under something the size of a water tank.
And yet, in this world-capital country of skin cancers, they have a role. You’ll notice every primary-school kid isn’t even allowed out to play any more without one. (By secondary school and teenagehood, the’ve given up and the attitude seems to be to let their grumpy hormoned brains boil, but I digress). Country folk never stopped wearing them, as you say, and practicality rules – the women sure aren’t wearing ditzy flowerpots any more.
I love how the photographer brought the camera down low so that it’s looking up at the Cadillac kids. It really makes the picture.
No, Kennedy did not cause men to stop wearing hats.
Stylish men in the late 1940s and 1950s had already hung up their hats.
My father was born in 1924 and only wore a hat during the time he was in Navy. WWII.
BTW: LEVINE HAT CO. in St. Louis still makes and sells hats and has done so for over 100 years.
The shoe industry was huge there at one time, making over 30 million shoes year.
Love those lovely ladies in their hats and gloves. It was a time when people didn’t go out looking like escapes from the rag bag. I think it also mirrors the decline in moral values in our country. My favorite picture was the front view of the 1951 Cadillac
I grew up in Southern California so the winter garb was a bit ‘foreign’ to us but such great pictures.
The two women in front of the Corvair remind me of my mother and one of her sisters.
I remember Sundays waaay back when (I was born around the Korean conflict), nearly everyone around us attended church. Floral print dresses, white shirts and ties for my Dad, my brothers and me. My grandparents would stop by, still in their Sunday clothes, for lunch. They drove a ‘50 Riviera. I’m the only one left alive from my family, so these photos are priceless.
Thank you for posting these pictures. Fond memories.
If it weren’t for the car and the clothing, I’d think the younger woman in the color photo above the ‘58 Chevy is looking at her phone.
Great pictures.
However, I’m awfully glad to have grown up across an era where all the formalities started to fall off (so to speak). Most garb-related fussiness is either meaningless or has connection to other issues (like hats and women and gods, or lawyers in gowns), or is pointedly useless, to whit, The Tie. I’m particularly glad to be living now through its fading, as it has always struck me a particularly absurd adornment, right the first day I had to be strangled by one to go to school. “What’s it DO?”, I asked, not unreasonably, and was told “Shut up and just put it on!”, which seems to be about as far of discussions about the dumb things was ever allowed to proceed until this recent and liberating retreat.
I’m with you in much of this. If the dress code contains the word Formal, that translates as I Wouldn’t Want To Be There Anyway. Most of the ‘dress-up’ in these pictures has some root in climatological realities – in a day when car heating was largely theoretical the coat and gloves made some sense. Those women’s hats though…..
And I totally agree on the Tyranny of the Tie – ‘what’s it DO?’ indeed. My state school (sixties) had an interesting approach to ties – it was part of the boys’ outfit when your parents bought the uniform, but at no time was it required to be worn, and there were no repercussions for going tieless. Go figure.
Ah. The days when the main form of vehicle transportation was the sedan and people didn’t look like they just climbed out of bed and threw on some dirty cloths that they could find quickly.
The businessman in a summer suit and two-tone wingtips beside his Pontiac is fighting a wicked crosswind! He’s leaning into it lest his hat fly off, his roomy trousers are flapping against his legs and he’s trying to keep the suit jacket in place too.
Would the car be of the Business Coupe style, useful for carrying samples on a sales trip?
Years ago, my wife was looking through one of my family’s old photo albums. She asked me “where are you going with your dad in this one?” (As we’re standing by the open trunk of his 1966 Pontiac and I’m holding a salmon net, it should have been obvious.)
I replied: “We’re heading to Maine for salmon, you can get them trolling flies right after ice-out.”
She said: “Fishing? Why are you wearing ties and sport coats?”
A pretty good question when posed in the 1980’s. But in the mid-60’s, my family and most others dressed up a bit whenever “traveling.” (Once there, the nice clothes were left alone until we left at the end of the week.) Yes, it seems weird today.
Dad had a Chevy Bel Air when I was born in 1954 but as soon as he got promoted he moved up to Oldsmobile which he drove until GM ended them. I knew it was over for Detroit when we came to O’Hare one Christmas and my WW2 dad picked us up in … a Lexus. Late into the Sixties mom wore a hat and gloves to go shopping.
I relate best to the first photograph with the Buick (1950?). The only difference between the ’50 and ’51, from this angle, would be the slightly lower-appearing taillights on the 1950: we cannot see if this Buick has the 1950 “waterfall” grille.. My father wore a suit-and-tie, leather shoes, and a fedora, his entire long life. Saddest to ne in these pictures is not the loss of formality (in warmer weather, those clothes were terribly uncomfortable!), but the reminder of all of the people I knew in 1950, who are no longer here.
Yes, I love this site for the fashions and the cars and the locations where the photos were taken. I just love seeing what life was like “back in the day.”
Unfortunately, I can’t imagine being physically responsible for not just the laundering, but also for all the ironing of those crisp dress shirts. And the cooking, cleaning, etc. Everyday a full-time housekeeping wife job.