Modest apparel: Mennonite clothing in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1800-1900

Abstract

This paper will examine Mennonite dress and ideas of plainness throughout the nineteenth century in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. These ideas include religious plainness as expressed by the Quakers as well as secular expressions of plain and simple lifestyles in reaction to the consumerist focus of the nineteenth century. Mennonites conflated "fashion" with vanity and pridefulness--worldliness. The adoption of plain dress shows the wearer's abandonment of those worldly values in favor of a simpler, more Christ-like, way of life. These sentiments took shape in the last part of the nineteenth century alongside several secular movements reacting against the mainstream Victorian material culture and supporting the return to a minimalist lifestyle.