Please view the posters presented at the 18th Annual CityTech Faculty and Student Research Poster Session below. You can click on each poster to enlarge it and view the PDF version under the poster abstract.
We thank all presenters for sharing their innovative and informative research with the CityTech community and beyond!
8. From Feed Sacks to Dresses: Upcycling Consumer Goods Packaging During the Depression in the United States
About 100 years before the Great Depression in the United States, a change in the way that certain goods were transported—from wooden barrels to cloth sacks—had an unexpected impact on women’s fashion. During the Great Depression in the U.S., the unemployment rate exceeded 20 percent and nearly half of U.S. banks failed. Facing economic hardship, women found creative ways to use the humble feed sack (sacks filled with corn meal, flour, or other grains) to make clothes for themselves and their families. Companies that manufactured cotton feed sacks observed customers using the sack fabric for clothing. These companies responded by changing their packaging to fabrics with bright colors and prints, which helped attract women to specific client brands. In addition to this new marketing strategy, companies also began to print their sack logos with water-soluble ink, removing the stigma attached to using commercial packaging materials to make clothes. Eventually, national sewing contests were organized by trade organizations to demonstrate women’s skills and ingenuity fashioning feed sacks as well as the creative marketing strategies of bag manufacturers and their customers who were mainly flour and feed mills. View or download a PDF version of this poster.
