U.S. Army Uniforms of World War One - Trench Coats
The Donut Dollies, Nurses and Hello Girls needed trench coats, too. This link will display the printable image of a 1918 advertisement for one of the first American trench coats made for women.
"Comprising the latest improvements for overseas -The Trench Coat 'De Luxe'! This ad proudly announces that the Thresher and Glenny trench coat pictured is like the one worn during "the first winter of the war" -those first brisk days along the river Marne when the Hun finaly understood that he would have to wait a bit longer for that Paris dinner. Let the word go out here and now to all "stylists" and "fashion journalists" as well as all the other assorted fops who like to play fast and loose with the language; we know who you are and we know your game. The term "trench coat" will not suffer the same abuse as the word "Martini". Both have clear, lucid definitions; there can be no such thing as a "chocolate Martini" and those actors in the movie "The Matrix" were not wearing trench coats (they were wearing frocks). A quick waltz through this section illustrates well the characteristics shared by all Great War trench coats: they were double-breasted (although it is said single-breasted did exist), they must be belted, and they must be cut like a sac, and they must have wrist-straps. Raglan sleeves, storm patches and billows pockets were all optional -and most important: there were NO D rings, those were added later. No doubt, the fashionable minds who sat so comfortably in America, far removed from the dung and destruction of the European war, would thumb through magazines such as "Leslie's", "Collier's" or "Current History" looking for fashion's newest "thing". How pleased these fops must have been that the ink-stained photogravure boys didn't let them down! The Brothers Guiterman in Minnesota must have been numbered among these macaronis because they seemed to have been the first to begin production of a trench coat intended solely for civilian production (although it must be remembered that during the war, trench coats were a "private purchase" item, available only to officers sold only by haberdashers and privately-owned military furnishing establishments). The raglan sleeve, gaberdine trench coat made by Tunmer was yet another of the many choices made available to the officers of the Entent Cordiale. |
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