Youth-Centered Fashion

Consumerism at an Early Age.

With the prosperity of the 1950s in full swing, American clothing manufacturers discovered—or perhaps created—new markets eager to buy their goods: children and teenagers. Television and printed advertisements instilled in 1950s kids at an early age a rampant consumerism that their parents had never had. The oldsters, after all, had grown up during the Depresssion, when thriftiness was next to godliness.

HEARTBREAK HAIRDO

Swept up in the Elvis Presley rage, seventeen-year-old Susan Hull of Grand Rapids, Michigan, stunned her boyfriend and made the pages of Life magazine when she cut off her foot-long ponytail, dyed black what hair remained, and slicked it back in homage to the King of Rock 'n' Roll. In reacting to his girlfriend's new coiffure, Lew Potter voiced the bitterness of many Michigan boyfriends and husbands whose Presley-obsessed women...

[The entire page is 956 words long]

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