Sometimes the internet can seem like an echo chamber of “inspiration”–the same images and stories posted and reposted until you’ve they run together in blur of archival LIFE magazine photos, naturally lit kitchens, photogenic food, bearded dudes squinting into the middle distance, and beautiful women wearing vintage cowboy hats at sundown. So I’m always happy to see something I’ve never seen before. Lesli at Archival Clothing found this amazing patched up jacket on the Minnesota Historical Society’s flickr–the society also has the matching overalls. It reminded me of David Sedaris’s line about Kapital designs: “The clothes they sell are new but appear to have been previously worn,
perhaps by someone who was shot or stabbed and then thrown off a boat.” Original owner Selmer Saglow “distressed” these clothes working on a farm in Vining, Minnesota, and his sister patched them up and kept em going.
It’s nice to know that places like archives and historical societies are doing the hard work of researching, cataloguing, and broadcasting the past.