19th Century Americas Clothing

North and Latin American Clothing Compared (1800–1900)

North American sources describe riveted long-wearing trousers, ready-made suits, and mail-order clothing catalogs; Latin American sources describe the china poblana, the charro suit under Maximilian in the 1860s, ponchos, and the gaucho's chiripá, replaced late in the century by bombachas.^{13,14,15,8,20,21,10}

Region	Garments and textiles
North America	Riveted long-wearing trousers; cheap ready-made suits from clothing depots; mail-order catalogs offering rural residents ready-made goods.13,14,15
Latin America	Mexico's china poblana and charro suit; Andean ponchos; the Río de la Plata gaucho's chiripá, which gave way to bombachas.8,20,21,10

For frontier dress, see American frontier clothing. For the European fashions that shaped North American dress, see nineteenth-century European clothing; for later dress, continue to modern Americas clothing.

North American Dress: Frontier to Factory

Nineteenth-century American fashion took its lead from Europe: magazines such as Godey's spread the idea that the best fashions came from London and Paris.¹⁴ But the realities of frontier life demanded practical adaptations, and in the West the trappers of the fur trade wore buckskin clothing.¹⁶ The California Gold Rush drew merchants as well as miners: Levi Strauss arrived in San Francisco in 1853 and opened a store selling everything mineworkers and pioneers needed.¹³ Reno tailor Jacob Davis had begun riveting the pockets of his work pants and soon made them of denim.¹³ Davis obtained a patent for reinforcing pocket openings with metal rivets or eyelets, assigned to himself and Levi Strauss & Co.; the grant was dated May 20, 1873.²⁴ The trousers were called "waist overalls"; Levi Strauss & Co. dates its adoption of the name blue jeans to 1960.²⁵ For decades they were work clothing for gold prospectors, lumberjacks, and other laborers.^1,13

For the urban middle class, the century brought a revolution in how clothing was obtained. Cheap clothing depots selling affordable ready-made suits helped democratize fashion, and department stores such as Wanamaker's, which opened Philadelphia's first in 1876 and sent buyers to Europe for the latest novelties, brought fashionable ideals within reach of middle-class shoppers.¹⁴ The sewing machine — Elias Howe patented his machine in 1846, and Isaac Singer's machine, patented in 1851, came to dominate the trade — was soon put to work making shirts and pants in a growing number of mills and sweatshops.^2,12 By 1900, Sears, Roebuck and Co. was one of the world's greatest merchandisers, and for rural residents mail-order catalogs offered ready-made goods like those found in city shops and department stores.¹⁵

Frontier and Indigenous Dress

The American frontier produced a distinctive clothing culture shaped by necessity, cross-cultural exchange, and the harsh demands of westward expansion. Mountain men and fur trappers, who supplied the beaver pelts for the felt hats fashionable in the 1820s and 1830s, went about in buckskin.¹⁶ Alfred Jacob Miller's pictures of trappers, based on his 1837 journey west, show heavily fringed buckskin coats, "Indian style" leggings of brain-tanned buckskin cut tight from knee to ankle, and moccasins; trappers were also known to wear fringed buckskin pantaloons cut with the buttoned front fall of the era's trousers — a practical fusion of European and Native American clothing traditions.¹⁷ Cowboys wore leather chaps, which descended from the chaparreras of Mexican vaqueros, along with riding boots and broad-brimmed hats such as John B. Stetson's "Boss of the Plains," introduced in 1865; the cowboy hat, the lasso, and pointed boots all trace back to the vaquero, and these practical garments became enduring symbols of the American West.^3,4,18

For a fuller account of what trappers, pioneers, miners, and cowboys wore, see American frontier clothing.

Indigenous nations maintained rich and diverse dress traditions throughout the century, even as wars, forced assimilation, and confinement to reservations undermined their ways of life.¹⁹ On the Great Plains, nations such as the Lakota and Cheyenne decorated clothing with porcupine quillwork and mineral-pigment designs, and after contact with glass beads made in Europe and obtained through trade; on a heavily beaded Cheyenne girl's dress, the beads added prestige and honor as well as weight.¹⁹ Lakota women's hide dresses of tanned deer hide featured intricately beaded yokes; a blue yoke, which became popular around 1850 to 1870, has been read as a lake reflecting the sky and a symbol of rebirth.⁵ Oglala Lakota leader shirts — painted buckskin fringed with locks of hair given by the wearer's followers — carried bands of quillwork and beadwork that recorded the life accomplishments of the man who wore them.⁶

In the Southwest, Navajo weavers made blankets of smooth wool handspun from Churro sheep, a breed the Spanish introduced in 1598, setting indigo blue from Mexico against natural white and brown-black wool; from the 1860s, triangles and diamonds appeared over the striped bands of their chief-style blankets, which Plains peoples avidly acquired through trade.⁷ The buffalo, at the heart of Plains life, was hunted to the brink of extinction by the U.S. government, ranchers, and railroads, yet in the reservation era Lakota women went on making heavily beaded dresses for ceremonies and special occasions, wearable expressions of pride at a time when personal expression was repressed.^19,5

Latin American National Dress and Cultural Fusion

Across Latin America, the 19th century was an era of independence movements and nation-building, and clothing played a role in defining new national identities. In Mexico, the china poblana ensemble — a richly embroidered blouse with a sequined skirt — became a national symbol during the mid-century Wars of the Reform, a costume distinct from both Indigenous and European upper-class dress (its popular attribution to the 17th-century Puebla figure Catarina de San Juan has little historical basis, since the modern dress was invented in the 19th century).^8,9 Mexican charros wore a distinctive horseman's outfit, a short jacket and fitted trousers with silver buttons under a wide-brimmed sombrero; it began as practical ranch workwear, was taken up by the upper classes after Emperor Maximilian adopted the dress of Mexican landowners in the 1860s, and became an enduring national icon.²⁰

In the Andean regions, the poncho evolved from Precolumbian tunics.²³ The Met describes its open sides as more practical for riding and its replacement of tunics during the viceregal period; the Carlos Museum links the change to colonial horseback riding.^23,21 After synthetic aniline dyes were invented in the mid-19th century, the intensity of color in Bolivian and other Indigenous dress increased dramatically, and since chemical dyes reached the Andes in the late 19th century, the practice of natural dyeing has declined sharply.^21,22 In the Río de la Plata region, the gaucho wore the chiripá, a rectangular cloth passed between the legs like a diaper and held by a belt called a tirador, sometimes over white lace-fringed leggings; in the late 19th century it gave way to baggy imported bombachas trousers.¹⁰ In Brazil, Afro-Brazilian women in Bahia wore shoulder shawls and headwraps reminiscent of the West African gèlè, and the pano da costa cloth they wore was a potent sign of West African heritage and prestige; the baiana dress of their descendants carries that long legacy of expression through dress.¹¹

Sources

1. Jacob Davis: His Life and Contributions — Levi Strauss & Co. Archives.Reference 1
2. Sept. 10, 1846: The Sewing Machine Patent War — Allen Pusey, ABA Journal, 2015.Reference 1
3. History of the Cowboy Hat — National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.Reference 1
4. How the Spanish vaquero gave way to the American cowboy — Melodie Edwards, Wyoming Public Radio, 2022.Reference 1
5. The Art of Cultural Survival in Lakota Clothing — Rebecca West, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, 2014.
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6. Treasures of the IACB: Oglala Lakota Leader Shirt, ca. 1890–95 — Indian Arts and Crafts Board, U.S. Department of the Interior.Reference 1
7. Chief's-Style Blankets — Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona.Reference 1
8. China Poblana — Mary Kay Vaughan, Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (via Encyclopedia.com).
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9. From South Asia to Mexico, from slave to spiritual icon, this woman's life is a snapshot of Spain's colonization — Diego Javier Luis, Johns Hopkins University, The Conversation, 2024.Reference 1
10. Chiripá — Richard W. Slatta, Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (via Encyclopedia.com).
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11. Sartorial Practices — Afterlives of Slavery project, University of Chicago.Reference 1
12. Isaac M. Singer — William B. Ashworth Jr., Linda Hall Library, Scientist of the Day, 2025.Reference 1
13. Levi Strauss: A Bavarian-American Success Story — Tanja Roppelt, Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte (House of Bavarian History).
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14. Fashioning Philadelphia: Ready to Wear — Wendy Woloson (guest curator), Library Company of Philadelphia, 2018.
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15. Sears, Roebuck & Co. Mail-Order Catalog, "Ladies' Misses and Girls' Clothing, Fall & Winter, 1907-1908" — The Henry Ford.
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16. Mountain Men and Trappers — Gateway Arch National Park, National Park Service.
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17. Trappers, Auguste and Louis — Fur Traders and Rendezvous: The Alfred Jacob Miller Online Catalogue, Ricketts Art Foundation, Buffalo Bill Center of the West and Museum of the Mountain Man.Reference 1
18. The Cowboy Goes East: Howdy, Hungary! — National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, 2022.Reference 1
19. The Plains: Hudson Museum Virtual Tour Video Transcript — Hudson Museum, University of Maine.
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20. Charrería: How a plant and an emperor shaped Mexico's sport — Gabriela Solis, Mexico News Daily, 2026.
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21. Kapote (Man's Poncho) — Threads of Time: Tradition and Change in Indigenous American Textiles, Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.
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22. Colorful Messages: The Revival of Natural Dyes in Traditional Cuzco Textiles — Andrea M. Heckman, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 2006.Reference 1
23. Poncho, Sica Sica region, 2018.927 — Metropolitan Museum of Art (evolution from Precolumbian tunics, colonial adoption, and open sides for riding).
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24. U.S. patent 139,121 — Jacob W. Davis, 20 May 1873, primary patent specification (pocket fastenings and assignment).Reference 1
25. The History of Denim — Levi Strauss & Co., 2019 (company adoption of the name jeans in 1960).Reference 1