It's raining all down the East coast of Australia, and I've spent the last few days staring out the window waiting for it to stop. Meanwhile, my mind has turned to raincoats, so here is a selection from 1909.
Though they are cut on fashionable lines, they are slightly less ornamented and more, well, serviceable than ordinary coats of the era. They are made of "rubberized" materials (from left to right, rubberized mohair, rubberized taffeta, rubberized silk bengaline, Watercress silk moire and rubberized grosgrain moire). Rubberisation was a method of waterproofing fabrics by coating them with rubber. First developed by a Scotsman, Charles Macintosh, in 1823, the earliest "macintoshes" were heavy and smelly (reeking of a combination of trapped perspiration and rubber). They went in and out of fashion quickly—only to regain favour as technical advances made rubberised material lighter and less odorous.
The first raincoats for women were produced in the 1870s, around the time when the kind of women who could afford them were starting to live more active lives. From the beginning they were designed along simplified but fashionable lines—like the examples above.
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