1920s Sporting Attire

 With the generous support of the Friends of Mills at Staatsburgh, our site has hosted a research intern from Bard College this summer. Celka Rice, a literature major at Bard, has researched various aspects of 1920s fashion, helping Staatsburgh explore the possibility of presenting accurate costumed interpretation during the 100th anniversary of the Roaring ‘20s. Although Celka’s interdisciplinary studies cover a broad background which include history, anthropology, art history, classics, and photography, the internship called upon another of her diverse interests: her expertise in vintage clothing and fashion history. For her summer project, Celka has researched retail sources for reproduction and vintage clothing, and has written three blogs on fascinating 1920s fashion topics.  This essay, the second, explores sporting attire in the 1920s.

Gladys Mills Phipps, daughter of Ruth & Ogden Mills, frequently played golf and even won tournaments!
Photo: International News Service, circa 1910s

In the 1920s, organized sport gradually shifted from being a folk practice enjoyed mostly by upper class families such as Ogden and Ruth Mills, to being an entertainment practice for both spectators and participants from many sectors of society. This is not to say that the sports enjoyed by Ruth and Ogden Mills earlier in the century—tennis, golf, fox hunts, croquet, horse racing, and yachting—became entirely available to the masses. However, with the increased ease of travel and the refinements made during the decade to radio and photographic technologies, as well as the use of athletics in training programs for WWI, a number of sports which had previously been reserved for the wealthiest members of society--most notably tennis, golf, and swimming—became significantly more accessible to citizens of other castes, at least whites of the middle class, both as a players and as a spectators. At the same time, sports which had previously been played only on a small scale, experienced huge surges in popularity within the professional and leisure realms, specifically baseball, football, and basketball, whose complementary seasons of play covered the majority of a given year. “Modern people” note the editors of Vogue Magazine in 1925 “stay longer in the country than they did some fifty years ago.” These editors continued on to write that:

the pleasures that go with existence in woodlands or at watersides are more and more within the reach of the many… Open air and an open-air life, fishing, shooting, sailing, boating, swimming, riding, playing tennis golf, and any other game that the fancy of the day endorses are as dear to the simplest as they are to the most sophisticated and equally enjoyed. Yet, such people do not love the country as country. One has only to see the awful havoc they make in beautiful places to know this. They love just what they can get out of being in it and no more.

Of course this shift in sports culture brought about a shift in sportswear. In particular, popular styles worn by female golfers, tennis players, and swimmers were essential in bringing the realms of men’s and women’s fashion closer together. This often simply meant that what had typically been termed menswear was adapted in order to create womenswear (rarely did the reverse occur), but there were also cases in which entirely new ideas of femininity (most notably that of the flapper) emerged.

Golf

Female golfers showcase the newest styles in the Bonwit Teller Sports Catalogue, ca. 1925.  The player on the left wears a divided skirt, while the player on the right wears a matching skirt and sweater set.

Indeed the golfers of the 1920s were certainly stylistically influential. Golf as a sport shifted the relationship between womenswear and menswear, and women and men more generally, by providing a zone in which it was acceptable, even expected, that women would dress and act similarly to men. After all it is no coincidence that Jordan Baker  is a golfer (Baker is a female fictional character, androgynously named after two car manufacturing companies, who stands in for the modern girl as a whole in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and according to the author “wore all her dresses like sports clothes”) Of course, Baker was not merely a construction of Fitzgerald’s imagination; she is widely believed to have been inspired by the real life socialite and golfer Edith Cummings nee Munson, nicknamed “The Fairway Flapper.” In any case, the blurred lines between the masculine and the feminine within the world of early 20th century golf can be most easily observed in the etiquette books of the era. In fact, as early as 1895 the golf course was one of the only places where it was acceptable for a woman to wear something akin to trousers; Godey’s Lady’s Book reported that “Knickerbockers and divided skirts are as popular for the wheel as for golf. The divided skirt… extends halfway down the leg, where it is met by strapped leggings of either cloth or leather.” The fact that an etiquette book (a typically conservative publication) was suggesting that women wear such styles shows a sort of slow shift which was rooted in traditions of sportswear and which laid the groundwork for a greater popularity of trousers for women in the 1920s. This is not to say that female golfers did not wear skirts: matching two piece dresses were still frequently worn, generally paired (as were knickerbockers and divided skirts) with a sweater or sweater vest.

Champion golfer Edith Cummings (1899-1984) in 1923.

Tennis

Barbara Phipps (later Janney) playing tennis at the Royal Poinciana Courts in Palm Beach, FL, circa 1928.  Barbara, the granddaughter of Ruth and Ogden Mills, was 16 at the time.  Here she sports the shorter hemline which was popular among female tennis players of her era.

Like golf, tennis was a sport which soared in popularity among various social classes during the 1920s. It brought changes in gender and class relations which carried over into the world of fashion. Of the sport, Hallie Erminie wrote that: “In tennis, as in golf, sporting women players seek no handicaps, hunt for their own balls, and take defeat, when it comes, in good part.” During the 1920s, tennis players of both genders became pop culture celebrities for the first time as the sport became increasingly easy to play and spectate. The popularization of the automobile and radio played a large role in this trend. This partial democratization of court was a meaningful one, as tennis was saturated with class signifiers; Charles V of France is said to have actually attempted to arrest members of the lower class for playing the sport, which he felt was entirely above their station.

Suzanne Lenglen (1899-1938) leaps through the air during a tennis match in 1922.

Lenglen and Helen Wills shaking hands at "The Match of the Century" in 1926.

In any case, female athletes in particular became fashion icons. Tennis champions Suzanne Lenglen (usually dressed by the French fashion designer Jean Patou, who regularly credited  her sport as inspiration for his designs) and Helen Wills were regular features in the pages of Vogue. That same magazine declared in 1929 that “women are all eyes and legs, hats down, hair off, skirts to the knees,” and in this description one can’t help but see the echoes of the sorts of attire that Lenglen and Wills sported, particularly their knee length pleated skirts. Indeed the shortened hemlines which we associate with the 1920s were legitimized, in great part, by these female tennis players, whose wholesome athleticism was more acceptable to the general public than the casual knee flashing of the infamous flappers, associated as they were with more taboo topics such as drink and sexual promiscuity. Of course men, too, were influential within the world of fashion; the eponymous label of tennis superstar René Lacoste would go on to become a bastion of prep, placing the polo shirt in the prime spot of the vocabulary of popular fashion that it still occupies today.

René Lacoste sporting his still popular polo shirt. 
Photo: https://www.heddels.com/2019/04/history-polo-shirt-rene-lacoste-ralph-lauren/

Swimwear

Even as many more citizens during the 1920s found it easier than ever before to reach the golf links or the tennis court, so too the beach resort became a more popular destination spot, accessible by not only train, but also car. Swimming and yachting grew exponentially in popularity, both bringing closer together the realms of men’s and women’s fashion. Women, whose typical swimwear had previously been more along the lines of a dress than anything else, began in the 1920s to wear the sorts of suits that men had always worn, consisting of wool jersey tanks worn over shorts. This shift received tacit acceptance from the establishment; the editors at Vogue in 1925 wrote that:

Many who must perforce stay on land criticize the abbreviated—yet comfortable and safe—bathing suits which the younger generation affect. Let these remember, however, that young people have never been so generally at home in the water as they are now, and that both health and safety demand a general knowledge of swimming… But this is not to say that, however smart be the suit or wearer, to parade scantily covered through suburban streets, or to lie about on the sands, smoking and daringly postured, is not reprehensible. Bathing suits are essentially for the water, not for the air.

These suits were repurposed with an entirely different aim by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, founder of the Chanel label, who designed the costumes for a Ballet Russes production titled Le Tren Bleu. This performance featured Russian ballerinas dancing in knitted swimsuits, unisex except in their coloring (the female dancers wore pink, the male blue).

Costumes that Coco Chanel designed for Le Tren Bleu, c. 1924

Indeed the Chanel brand was one strongly associated with resort culture; the house’s original maison de couture was opened in Biarritz, and was frequented largely by wealthy vacationers. Like the golfers of the 1920s, Chanel’s resort goers also played a role in popularizing early variations on the trouser. Her “yachting pants,” inspired by the trousers of French sailors, were originally so wide-legged that they could be mistaken for a skirt. Typically worn paired with a matching jacket for leisure activities along the Riviera, their automatic association with the wealthiest and most-privileged vacationers from around the world did a great deal for the popularity of women’s pants.

Chanel yachting pants 

“Sports clothes,” wrote M. E. Brooke, a reporter for Tatler Magazine, in 1928 “have been developed to such an extent that they may go to lunch at the fashionable restaurants; as a matter of fact they are often worn until the hour of cocktail.” And indeed by the end of the decade, the styles popularized by golfers, tennis players, and resort-goers had been largely integrated into the canon of style. Many associated with this shift, including Chanel, boasted of having freed the body (and particularly the female body) from the constraints of an older era. And it is true that by this time whalebone corsets were largely a thing of the past, but they had been replaced by equally restrictive regimes of bodily regulation: diet, exercise, and softer, elasticized corsets designed to flatten curves instead of accenting them (advertised as “foundation garments” in order to avoid the at-that-point taboo term “corset”). Writing again on the newfound national passion for sports, the 1925 editors of Vogue remind their reader that:

"...while many of us come comparatively new to some sports, the love of them is spreading very fast and with it, thank goodness, a proper admiration for the fine, well-developed human body which may some day be fit to carry a fine, well-developed human mind. Nothing can be better for a nation than open-air athletics, and, the more we sprout golf clubs and tennis clubs, boating and swimming clubs, the better for us.”

In the early 20th century, the American government, and governments around the world, became particularly fascinated by ensuring that the body politic was made up of so-called “healthy bodies,” an using an adjective which was increasingly measurable and moralizable in relatively new units such as the calorie. The clothes popular during the era reflected this shift, but they also shaped it, by shaping the bodies out of which it was formed.


Sources:

From the Staatsburgh Library and Archives:


Photography of Barbara Phipps playing tennis, Palm Beach FL, 1928

Social Usage: Manners and Customs of the Twentieth Century, Helen L. Roberts, G.P. Putnam’s Sons and The Knickerbocker Press, New York and London, 1913 (228, 388)

The Complete Book of Etiquette with Social forms for All Ages and Occasions, Hallie Erminie, Rives, John C, Winston Co., Great Britain, 1926, 45, 287

Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, Editors of Vogue, Conde Nast Publications, New York, 1925

Bikes & Trikes of Long Ago, John E. Duncan, Americana Review, 1975

Fifty Years of Popular Mechanics: 1902-1952, Multiple Authors, Simon and Schuster, New York

The World in Vogue, Edited by Brian Holmes, Katherine Tweed, Jessica Davies and Alexander Liberman, The Viking Press, New York, 1963

Harper’s Bazaar: #54 Jan-Dec 1919

Leisure and Entertainment in America, Donna R. Braden, Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan


From the Bard College Stevenson Library:

The Automobile and American Life, John Heitmann, McFarland & Company Inc., Jefferson


From the Victoria and Albert Museum Archives:

Costumes for Le Tren Bleu, designed by Coco Chanel, Paris, 1924