THE SWEATER WE HAD TO HAVE

 

by Shirley A. Ramaley



In the large metropolitan high school I attended in the early 1950’s, there was only one sweater girls just had to wear: the raglan sleeve cashmere. No matter that they cost more than a good pair of shoes or three or four “regular” sweaters, we wanted cashmere.

My mother would tell me she could buy me a very nice cardigan and pullover for $6.98 from a good department store. I didn’t want synthetic or cotton, I wanted cashmere! All my friends wanted cashmere.

And not just any cashmere. The sweaters had to have raglan sleeves. Almost as important, we liked only three or four companies. Those labels were gold to us. After all, how could we be “in” without those sweaters?

Of course we all exaggerated how much we had to have those sweaters, and we plotted together what to tell our mothers. Since a dollar in 1953 is worth about $7.62 in 2007, and those wonderful sweaters that we had to have cost about $15 to $20 each, they were indeed expensive.

Cashmere in 1953 was heavy and luxurious. There were no cheap cashmere sweaters then. It was selfish of us, of course, to continually whine about not having enough cashmere.

If we couldn’t have a cashmere sweater for our birthday or Christmas or when school started, then we’d ask for lambs wool. These sweaters were considered “okay” for occasional wear because to be realistic, few of us had parents who could buy us cashmere sweaters for every day of the week.

And of course, we only wore each sweater once a week at most. When a new girl in class wore the same sweater twice within three days, that was the talk of all my friends. “Did you see what she has on? Didn’t she wear that same sweater two days ago?” We’d all stare at the poor girl, and just knew the “important guys” wouldn’t ask her out. Of course, they never asked me out either but that was beside the point. She should have worn something different!

Because they were so expensive to buy, we learned to carefully hand wash our sweaters, laying them out to dry on a towel. There was no way our parents would pay dry cleaning bills for those sweaters. If we’d asked for dry cleaning, our parents would have insisted on us getting along with synthetic fiber sweaters and we couldn’t have that!

As high school graduation approached and we gained a little maturity, and made plans for college and careers, the importance of cashmere began to fade. Oh sure, we still treasured our cashmere sweaters, and I kept mine for many years.

When I got to the university, and met a variety of students from many cultures and experiences, my cashmere sweaters no longer seemed that important. I wore them on special dates or activities, but during the day at class I learned that a variety of clothes was perfectly acceptable.

Today I own one cashmere sweater. It’s not even an expensive one. I do like it, maybe because it reminds me of friends in high school. But I sure know now I was a selfish teen to insist my mother buy me cashmere sweaters.

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