1950s Children's Fashion Display with Cowgirl Outfit

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

1950s Children's Fashion Display with Cowgirl Outfit — Archive & Atlas

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1950s Children's Fashion Display with Cowgirl Outfit — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-4E994C

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A mannequin dressed as a cowgirl stands in a showroom beside a yellow-framed display table and teal patterned sofa, modeling the kind of outfit American children wore to play in the 1950s: a denim skirt with red and white trim, an orange shirt, a tooled leather belt, and orange ankle socks with matching shoes. The setup is clearly a retail display, the kind of thing a department store or children's clothier would stage to show mothers what their daughters could look like in coordinated playwear. The mannequin is headless, as all retail mannequins are, which means the costume had to sell itself on the body alone: the bright colors, the Western theme, the sense that a child dressed this way was prepared for something, even if that something was just the backyard. The era had decided that children needed costumes before they needed clothes, and retailers had decided that mothers needed to see exactly how the costume worked before they bought it.

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