Overalls: Functional, Political, Fashionable

Abstract

The essay investigates the material uses and symbolic meanings of overalls through the differing notions of functional and political, masculine and feminine, and subversive and fashionable. Moreover, the comparative analysis covers its topic both historically and geographically. In their flatness and overall economy of style, overalls are an extremely simple garment, but precisely due to such characteristics they were equally appropriated by the Russian Constructivists in the 1920s and the Italian Futurist Thayaht in 1919. Historically, women started to wear overalls on the factory floor during World War One. On woman, this sexually neutral garment symbolized a technological progress, and even became a fashionable item. Functional and technologically advanced, the space suit is the ultimate overalls. In the 1960s, it was white and silver. Courrèges cleverly translated the 1960s space-craze into a range of stamped mirror-disc overalls. In fact, from the 1920s, categories such as functionality, simplicity and comfort increasingly migrated from the austere world of Utopia into the field of fashion. As a modernist phenomenon itself, but unburdened by any messianic programs or manifestos, fashion both readjusted and transferred utopian ideas into the everyday. Its commercial nature enabled fashion and its practitioners not only to envisage new outfits in geometric shapes, but also to efficiently produce them, and sell them either as elitist clothes or mass sportswear