Friday, January 18, 2013

Spring and Summer 1942 Sears Catalog

Over the summer my mom found a great Sears catalog from the Spring and Summer of 1942 at an antique shop for only $14! It is chock full of fabulous images featuring drool worthy dresses and lust inducing shoes. I thought that I'd share some of these images with my lovely blog readers. My internet is being terribly finicky about uploading photos, so I can only upload a few in each post. I will post multiple posts featuring all the lovely images. I also hope to do a post about the weird and wacky things the catalog sold, such as a cream made by Nestle designed to make a toddler's hair curly.



Look at this adorable cover!


I really like the pink skirt shown in the top row.

I
I love all of these dresses but the white,, green, and red one is lust worthy!

Just look at those swoon worthy play suits!

This is adorable as well!

I had to take an up close picture of this outfit. A play suit with a matching cape? Yes, please!

This is such a smart looking outfit!

I would wear this every day if I owned it.

These fabrics are the other choices for the dress in the previous image.

As I said earlier, I have so many more images I can post. Is there anything in particular anyone would like to see next? I was thinking of posting all the shoe pics next. There are also lots of pictures of foundation garments, but they are almost entirely in black and white. Is anyone interested in black and white pictures or only color ones? I had always thought it would be so strange to order clothing when the picture was in black and white. Much to my surprise there is a card in the back of the catalog, in color, with what looks like very small paint samples with corresponding numbers. The number of the available colors were in the descriptions and you matched it to the corresponding number on the card! How neat is that?


6 comments:

  1. Oh how fun.. thank you for sharing.. I so enjoyed looking at them.. I love the cover dresses. Mom and daughter.how cute..
    Hard to think of a dress costing $2.98, ha..

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  2. What an awesome catalog! I'd love to get my hands on something like that.

    p.s. I'm so glad I found your blog! I've been sewing for a long time myself but in so very many ways I'm such a wannabe that has tons to learn!

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  3. Wow--some great dresses in there.

    My vote would be to see some of what was offered in the Home Sewing section.

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  4. Back in the 60's my Mum use to have this catalogue sent to her (the old snail-mail route). It was quite trendy to be a mail order person back then. I remember the catalogue as it was like a telephone book! Filled with amazing things that we here in Australia had never seen. I will be happy to see any of the pages, but shoes would be a great treat...J

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  5. Love this! Look at all those beautiful prints!

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  6. I sort of remember those clothes and wanted my mother to buy them. In reality, the workmanship was a little shoddy and the fit was skimpy. But oh, the style was wonderful. My mother would take us shopping at Sears, scoff at the quality then she'd buy fabric and make the clothes for us.
    As a kid, I could never understand how the clothes could look so glamorous in the picture and not look the same in person. Thanks for this article, it brought back memories.

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