Oregon Armories

Styles of military uniforms did not change often

The American model for military uniform dress is derived from concepts in tactics and weaponry introduced into European armies in the mid-seventeenth century. Uniforms became a vital element in these new European national standing armies with large numbers of soldiers. Brightly colored, distinctive uniforms made soldiers recognizable on crowded and smoke-filled battle fields. Equally important, uniforms shaped actions and habits, imposing a discipline that transformed individual strength into collective power in these modern, permanently mobilized armies. Uniforms embodied a hierarchy of organization within the military and overt political references outside of it.

Styles of military uniform did not change as often as civilian fashion until late in the twentieth century. The military wardrobe expanded to accommodate a larger, modern, and less-isolated armed force with styles often indistinguishable from civilian casual dress. Distinctive military features have been sustained over long periods, however, or have reappeared in tribute to the heritage of the population from which the armies are drawn. Epaulettes, for example, were first used on army and navy uniforms to attach a shoulder belt for a sword or a bugle and to protect the shoulder while carrying a musket. Later they were decorated with rank or service insignia. Now epaulettes are used primarily for ceremonial dress. Shoulder boards with rank insignia are a derivation of epaulettes and are a feature of most contemporary uniforms. Likewise, horizontal rows of braid on the chests of the uniform coats of West Point cadets, band uniforms, and other “full dress” uniforms descend from the Hungarian national costume via Hungarian Hussars serving with the Austrian army in the late-seventeenth century.

In America, when pre-revolutionary military clothing and the independent volunteer companies wore uniforms, they wore British uniforms. British and French officers garrisoned in colonial America often followed the example of Native Americans and colonial irregulars like Rogers’ Rangers, wearing indigenous clothing such as fringed shirts, moccasins, leggings, cocked hats (with brims later swept up to become bicorns and tricorns), and deerskin trousers. American Indian feather headdresses may have inspired the striking Scots Highlanders’ feather bonnet that appeared when the Highlanders were serving in colonial America. The frontier style, worn by some American forces through the War of 1812, introduced features that would later emerge in post–Civil War martial wear: the buckskin coats of George Armstrong Custer and his officers; the Indian Scout uniform that in the late nineteenth century combined traditional Indian leggings and moccasins with regulation army uniform items; and at the turn of the twentieth century leggings and puttees, precursors of World War II paratrooper.

From 1776 until late in the nineteenth century, standard uniforms for American armed forces followed the styles of European uniforms. Blue uniforms, British in appearance, were officially designated for the American army during the Revolutionary War, and blue remained the national American uniform color for more than a century. The American navy and marine services, like virtually all maritime services, followed a tradition set early by the British navy, issuing dark blue winter apparel and white summer apparel. Unlike the army, which authorized special summer wear only intermittently before the twentieth century, from the start the navy had separate winter and summer clothing. Naval uniforms were formally regulated in the late nineteenth century.

The colorful close-fitting jackets, tight trousers, and outsized headwear of the Napoleonic style of military uniform manufacturer swept Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Although subdued in American uniforms, the Napoleonic influence is evident in the design, if not the color, of the first West Point uniform in 1816 and of American uniforms during the half century that followed.

Another colorful French contribution to military apparel, the Zouave uniform, reached America in the mid-nineteenth century. First adopted by French colonial soldiers in North Africa in the 1830s, the popular costume with balloon trousers and cropped jacket quickly spread worldwide. In the Civil War, dozens of Zouave units fought for and against the Union. Most Union soldiers wore an unstructured sack coat modeled after fashionable informal civilian jackets, foreshadowing modern American uniforms. Worn with the celebrated French-styled forage cap or kepi, sack coats were the comfortable and popular predecessors of the fatigue and multiple-function uniforms of the expanding armed forces in America.

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