Bz Gyotoku

Posts Tagged ‘Modern Clothes’

People have been wearing clothes for tens of thousands of years, and they have been hanging them up for just as long. It is surprising then that the modern clothes hangar, shaped in the form of sloping shoulders, appears to have been invented no earlier than the time of Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Jefferson is widely thought to have produced the first clothes hanger shaped like the shoulders, with two two sides sloping downward and a hanging hook in the center.

However, the clothes hanger was not seen or used until the end of the 19th century, when various merchants and inventors began to patent different forms of the clothes hanger. O. A. North of Connecticut in 1869 invented a coat hook that inspired the wire hangar similar to the ones we find today. At the same time an employee of a wire company invented a wire coat hanger to sell their wire; this company was the Timberlake Wire and Novelty Company.

Even with this invention, the clothes hanger was slow to catch on. It appears that the first merchant to display his clothes for sale on hangers was Meyer May, a Grand Rapids, Michigan clothier. This display began in 1906, and is memorialized in a museum — these original hangars are displayed in the Frank Lloyd Wright “Meyer May House”.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that the wire hanger was improved by surrounding the wires with narrow cardboard tubes; that way the clothes touch only the rounded cardboard and not the wire so clothes don’t wrinkle as easily. There is a famous scene in the movie “Mommie Dearest” where Joan Crawford wakes and screams at her daughter after she finds her daughter’s clothes hanging from wire hangers. “No wire hangers ever!” she screams, and in fact even if less stridently, many people prefer the wrinkle free improvements over the wire hanger.

Today hangers are available in inexpensive plastic, expensive woods, and of course, the original thin wires. The clothes hanger is an essential part of the clutter free home, and it is hard to imagine how we ever lived without them.