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Fashionable Clothing from the Sears Catalogs: Late 1950s |
By Joy Shih |
| Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 4880 Lower Valley Road, Atglen, Pa., 19310, 1997, pp. 160 (each), $29.95 (each), paperback. |
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| Joy Shih offers a fun look back at what America was wearing during the late-50's to the mid-60s with Sears, the progenitor of the current clothes-shopping-by-catalog craze. Each book features 400 good color reproductions of catalog photographs, selected by the author, along with original descriptions and prices; Shih also inserts current values for the majority of items using brackets in these captions. Most interesting are the women's "career clothing" ("Even...nurses looked starched and pretty in tight waisted uniforms, hardy comfortable for jumping on a gurney to resuscitate an emergency room patient," writes Shih) and "beachwear" sections. The author believes that Sears catalogs can be a guide to fashion history, cultural history, and collectibles, and her presentation certainly proves her point.
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