1910s reunion costumes

Costumes Thrive, Floats Revive

The century’s second decade saw elaborate outfits proliferate, up until the P-rade got cancelled in 1917 and 1918 during World War I. Then costumes came swirling back in 1919, for the biggest Reunions yet. Floats and stunts got banned twice (1915 and 1919), but resumed in time to usher in the Roaring Twenties.

The fad for extravagant head-to-foot ensembles grew apace in the 1910s. It was still largely confined to 10th Reunion classes or younger. The graduating seniors mostly stuck with simply carrying Japanese parasols. Sailor suits remained the popular choice for 1st Reunions. Other off-years produced some of the more outlandish creations. A few classes did begin a more moderate trend, designing a gaudy blazer in lieu of a costume. Yet the prevailing fashion was for complete outfits that personified some sort of character. After 1914 when WWI broke out overseas, several classes adopted exotic military uniforms—French zouaves, Greek evzones, British “Tommies”, khaki-clad aviators, even “Plattsburg Rookies” (U.S. basic trainees). But those were just a small topical subset of the decade’s facetious panoply of sartorial themes.

These included myriad clowns (at least 3 different classes), jockeys, convicts, cooks, baseball players (2 classes), farmers (2 classes), cowboys, gladiators, toreadors (3 classes), artists (2 classes), Pierrots (2 classes), Roman emperors, Chinese pallbearers, Tyroleans, Hibernians, “Irish Gondoliers”, Uncle Sams, and more. The kilted Highlanders of ’04 annually kept on wearing 5th Reunion garb as their “permanent costume”. So did ’11’s toreadors. Interestingly, quite a few costumes featured color schemes that departed from the conventional orange-&-black Princeton palette.

Some ensembles came complete with theme-specific accessories to wield in the P-rade. The pirates of ‘11 brandished “vicious” cutlasses at their 3rd. In 1913, the locomotive engineers of ’10 carried “oil” cans filled with beer.

“Plain Citizens”

That said, costumes were far from ubiquitous. Older alumni still kept wearing ordinary suits or sport coats. In 1919, PAW’s P-rade recap quipped that they were costumed as “plain citizens of the U.S.A.” Their classes distinguished themselves mostly via hatbands, ribbons, badges, or buttons. A few issued class hats. (One younger class issued hats with matching spats.)

Supplying identical parasols, pennants, or canes remained popular ways of boosting P-rade uniformity while avoiding outlandishness. Quite a few classes achieved quasi-uniformity by having every classmate march in his own dark coat, white pants, and straw hat. The classes taking this frugal approach typically included the graduating seniors (apart from brief flirtations in 1919 and 1920 with wearing their beer suits).

Schedule-wise, costume remained largely a Saturday thing. Some young alums did start roaming around in character on Friday evening, if outfits were ready to issue then. But most received theirs on Saturday morning and doffed them soon after the P-rade, or later that evening. For the semi-formal events held during the rest of Reunions (which back then could last till Tuesday), a handy new option began to arise in the form of uniform class blazers.

Floats & Stunts

The custom of staging vaudeville-style stunts in the P-rade proliferated through 1914. Meanwhile class floats got more elaborate. The catafalque with which ’06 “buried” the Bulldog in 1911 took 32 classmates to maneuver. The 20-seat tour-bus driven by ’01 that same year may have been the first motorized float. And certain floats wrapped around & atop a car took the shape of much grander vehicles—notably ’10’s full-size locomotive replica in 1913 and 1914.

In 1915 the marshals kept stunts and floats out of the P-rade (“too much delay”). Both phenoms quickly returned in 1916, then ceased during WWI. When Reunions resumed in 1919 for the huge Victory Commencement, floats were again excluded to shorten the P-rade. (The only one that slipped through was ’99’s litter-borne Sacred Bird.) It’s not quite clear how floats were treated in 1920, but they had definitely returned by 1921.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

This essay hits many of the decade’s sartorial high spots. But even more profuse details are available on file. Interested readers can find the data arrayed in this Table of Tiger Attire. It systematically pulls together scads of fragmentary research findings about what specific classes were wearing, carrying, trundling, or performing during specific P-rades. (The spottiness of the available info reflects the perennial haphazardness of P-rade reportage.) Many entries are enlivened with verbatim snippets of primary-source prose. Line-items rendered in orange identify costumes that have already been depicted with a photo on the main page of this “Reunion Costume Collection” exhibit.

Sources:

The final column of the Table spreadsheet indicates the primary source(s) from which the info in each line-item is derived, using the following abbreviations:

PAW = The Princeton Alumni Weekly DP = The Daily Princetonian
RB = Reunion books issued by individual classes LC = Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Other abbreviations or punctuation used in the Table: NFI = Not further identified “ ” = Direct quotes from the Sources listed above [ ] = Info summarized/paraphrased from Sources’ text and/or inferred from photos