Colonial Clothing
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     In colonial days most people made their own clothing.  They used wool, linen, and leather.  The colonists would grow the flax plant to make linen thread and they raised sheep to get wool.  Many times a person would have two sets of clothing, one for everyday and one for Sunday.  They would wear the same thing almost everyday.  That meant the clothing would get very smelly because most people only took baths a few times a year.

     Every person in the family would have to make clothes.  The children would gather berries and roots to make dye to color the thread. Grandmother would card the wool and girls and woman worked at the spinning wheel.  Young girls learned how to knit and they would make stockings and caps.  Boys and men would weave clothes on the loom and the woman would make the clothes for the whole family.  Everything was done by hand.  Families worked all the time to make clothing.  While boys watched the sheep in the field, they would use a small loom to weave. Sometimes a woman would tie a spinning wheel on the back of a horse and use it to spin thread while they went visiting.  Colonial people thought it was a sin to be idle, so they found work to do all the time.

     The colonial people liked bright-colored clothing.  Yellow, red, purple, and blue were their favorite colors.  Thread was dyed with poke berries and it was used to make red capes for woman ands girls.  Woman and girls would keep their hair covered all the time.  They wore mob caps.  Boys had long hair and an odd fashion craze was the wig for men.  The wigs were human hair, goat hair, or horse hair.  If a person was really poor, his wig was made out of thread.  The wig would fit very tight on the head and the worst thing for a man would be that he "flipped his wig" or the best thing would be to be known as a "big wig" because that meant that the man was wealthy.

     Shoemakers would make shoes that fit either foot.  There was no right or left shoe.  The men would wear knee-length pants called breeches, a waistcoat, which would be called a vest today, and a coat.  Young boys wore loose-fitting dresses until they were five and then they began to dress just like their fathers.  Young girls dressed like their mothers.  Wealthy ladies wore stays.  These were undergarments stiffened with whalebone and laced up so tightly that women could hardly breathe.  Poor women would not wear these undergarments because they could not do their work.  Babies would wear a soft pillow around their middle to keep them from getting hurt when they fell.  If they did fall, they fell right on his pudding which is what the pillow was called.

Typical dress for a colonial man

Typical dress for a colonial woman

After the age of six, boys dressed like their fathers

Created by Isabel and Roni

Solomon Schechter Day School

June 2006