all the rage
In Laura Ingalls' Kingsbury County, that is. Read on, from a period advertisement:

"Fashionable suspenders are all the rage, especially if embroidered by your best girl.

"Formerly the average man was content with almost any kind of shoulder brace which would hold up his trousers securely and comfortably. That time is no more. Your trousers may not have creases in them like a cheese knife or may not have been constructed by a past master in sartorial aestheticism, but if they are not sustained at the proper poise by one of the multifarious revelations which the chappies pronounce worshipful your claim to be called a man of fashion will rest upon a foundation of sand.

"One of the very newest agonies in braces is the style known as the crochet weave. It is of pure silk and the fabric is woven to resemble the hand-crocheted pattern which every beau a few years ago received from his best girl as a New Year's gift. The woven article is stouter and more compact than the hand-made affair...

"The crochet weave suspender, as indeed do all of the reigning favorites, comes in solid colors. Heliotrope is the favored hue, but others are of Nile green, sage, Quaker blue, tobacco brown, old rose, baby blue, or navy blue. Black is not fashionable because it has ceased to be novel...

"The embroidered suspender has not grown passe, but has been transformed and idealized. The heavy splashes of red flowers on blue are only worn by rural swains. The exquisite effects now in vogue represent sprays of hyacinths, lilies of the valley, violets, chrysanthemums and other fashionable flowers....

"Embroidery should be done by hand, and for that reason braces are suitable gifts for a young lady to make to her betrothed or to her male relatives...."

Poor Pa, to be a considered a rural swain.
- posted by pioneergirl at 3:19 AM