100 Years Ago: The Overall Craze

Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? The online videos of people getting a bucket of ice-cold water poured over their heads to promote ALS research? Viral campaigns such as this happened way before the social media era. A hundred years ago, The Overall Craze swept North America with waves reaching even the far corners of the Canadian West. People, mostly middle-class men, opted to wear denim overalls instead of their regular business outfits in protest against high clothing prices.

The movement started in the Southern United States and quickly spread to other major centres in April 1920. People from all walks of life pledged to wear denim as their new uniforms, including university students and people working in a wide variety of professions, including firefighters and public officials. Clubs dedicated to wearing denim were even organized.

The goal of the campaign was to pressure clothing retailers to bring down their prices. The immediate effects, however, were peculiar. The prices for overalls quickly tripled. Some people started wearing overalls to seem fashionable, and not in direct support of the ultimate goals of the campaign. A celebrity in Chicago was spotted wearing denim with an expensive silk shirt underneath. Some politicians had their overalls tailored to their fit.

In Lethbridge, the trend started with local high school students. “When the bell rang this morning… the teachers were astonished and amused to see about forty of their male pupils parade to their seats like an army of day wage earners.” A priest in Fort Macleod delivered a sermon while wearing a pair of overalls. A Lethbridge Herald reader suggested that gingham dresses could serve as a female equivalent to wearing overalls.

The viral trend dissipated after two months, but it appears to have planted seeds for the jeans culture we know today. You can learn more about the history of clothing at the Galt’s new exhibit Pockets of Possibilities, on display until February 14, 2021.