I’ve always promised that I wouldn’t let this blog get so seri­ous that I couldn’t share the ephemera of life. In that vein, here’s a cau­tion for any would-be urban plain-dress hip­ster: it’s really hard to keep to the proper side­walk demeanor when your MP3 player queues up the Yardbird’s “For Your Love.“
Espe­cially when the bon­gos kick in.
This I know experientially.

A few years ago I felt led to take up the ancient Quaker tes­ti­mony of plain dress­ing. I’ve spo­ken else­where about my moti­va­tions but I want to give a lit­tle prac­ti­cal advice to other men who have heard or even got­ten ahold of the “Gohn Bros.” cat­a­log but don’t know just what to order. I cer­tainly am not sanc­tion­ing a uni­form for plain dress, I sim­ply want to give those so inclined an idea of how to start.

Just as back­ground: I’m a thirty-something Philadel­phia native, brought up with­out any for­mal reli­gion in a Philly sub­urb. I first started approach­ing Quak­ers (Friends) back in col­lege. In my early twen­ties, I started work­ing at a collectively-run paci­fist book pub­lish­ing house and liv­ing in what was then the sort of down­scale hip­ster neigh­bor­hood of West Philadel­phia. In 2002 I attended a week-long work­shop that had some plain dress­ing Friends and felt the nudge to exper­i­ment. I’ve left Philadel­phia to become a res­i­dent of a small farm­ing town in South Jer­sey (what love will do) but I still spend a lot of time in the city and in decid­edly urban set­tings. I don’t aim to be his­tor­i­cally cor­rect with my plain dress and I don’t want to sim­ply “look like an Amish” person.

Gohn Broth­ers is a store in Indi­ana that sells “Amish and Plain Cloth­ing.” It is cur­rently cel­e­brat­ing it’s 100th year in busi­ness. It’s known for it’s sim­ple print cat­a­log, which is updated every few months. It does not have a web­site. You should get a copy of the cat­a­log to get cur­rent cloth­ing and ship­ping prices. It’s address is:

PO Box 1110, 105 S. Main St., Mid­dle­bury IN 46540
Phone: (574) 825‑2400. Toll-free: 800–595-0031

When I first started “going plain,” I sim­ply wore reg­u­lar dark pants with sus­penders found at a generic depart­ment store. It was impor­tant to me that I was wear­ing clothes I already had, and I wanted to be “Sears Plain,” by which I meant I didn’t want to go to any extremes to find plain cloth­ing. When I first bought a pair of broad­falls (the zip­per­less pants favored by plain men), I didn’t wear them for months. Slowly I started started wear­ing them out and feel­ing more at ease in them. They were made of rugged denim, wore well and were quite com­fort­able.
As my pre-plain clothes have worn out, I’ve started replac­ing them with Gohn Brothers-produced broad­falls. They’re just as inex­pen­sive as any cheaply-made jeans from Old Navy but they hold up and are pre­sum­ably made in Indi­ana by seam­stresses earn­ing a decent wage.

Broad­falls

Gohn Broth­ers offers many dif­fer­ent weights and fab­rics for their broad­fall pants, num­ber­ing them for ease of order­ing. I have bought two pair, both of which I like:

• #66: 10 oz. solid grey denim, 100% cot­ton: $22.98
• #92: 100% cot­ton blue jean denim (11 oz.): $24.98

Coats

Gohn Broth­ers pro­duces a num­ber of coats, also called “over­shirts.” In these pur­chases I have tended to be more dis­tinctly Quaker. I have two Coats:

• #225: 9oz. Poly, cot­ton. $41.98 at the time of this post. I have opted for a few alter­ations: A “reg­u­lar cut” for $3.00, a “standup col­lar” for $2.00, “but­ton holes with metal but­tons” for $3.00 and a “quilted lin­ing” for $5.00.
• #125 9 oz. Black drill denim. Poly/cotton. Unlined Jacket, black drill. Alter­ations: “standup col­lar” for $2.00. (for this I had the default “snaps” in place of but­tons and the default “full cut”).

I’ve pref­ered the spe­cial­ized “reg­u­lar cut” coat over the stan­dard “full cut.” The reg­u­lar cut feels more like the stan­dard suit jacket that most pro­fes­sional men wear to work, while the full cut felt more like a wind-breaker. I also pre­fer the but­tons, as the snaps con­tributed to the wind-breaker feel.

Sus­penders

Also known as “braces,” all you need are dark broad­falls and sus­penders to really look “plain” to the world. “Tabbed” sus­penders fit over but­tons in your pants, while “clip-on’s” use alli­ga­tor clips to fas­ten onto stan­dard pants. Tabbed look bet­ter but I can’t help think­ing of Michael Dou­glass in “Wall Street”; a lot of ordi­nary anabapist men I see have clip-on’s.

I’ve heard the story that there’s a good-hearted rib­bing between the Iowa and North Car­olina Con­ser­v­a­tive Quak­ers about whether thin or wide sus­penders is more plain. I’ve started to throw my lot in with Iowa and have got­ten the three-quarter inch sus­penders. (Fash­ion­istas will remem­ber that thin sus­penders were pop­u­lar with a cer­tain kind of high school geek in the mid-1980s–think Cameron in _Ferris Beuler’s Day Off_; fair dis­clo­sure requires that I admit that I wore them around Chel­tenham High). Again Gohn Brothers:

• #550T 3/4″ tab. Black: $7.98
• #552C 3/4″ clip. Black: $6.98

Hats

While Gohn Broth­ers does hats, I haven’t bought any of theirs. Instead I’ve gone for the Tilley T3 hat. I’m not com­plete happy with this, as Tilley’s seem to be asso­ci­ated with a cer­tain kind of clue­less trav­eler, but I’ve noticed that there are a lot of men in my yearly meet­ing who wear them, I think as an uncon­scious nod toward plain­ness. The Tilley is also friend­lier to bike com­muters: its tie-down strings wrap eas­ily around bike han­dle­bars, and it’s very crush­able and washable.

Not a Uniform

Again, let me stress: I am not try­ing to spec­ify a mod­ern plain dress uni­form. The only time you should adopt plain dress is when you’re feel­ing actively led by it. Some­times that lead­ing is an intu­tion, which is fine, but you need to fol­low it on your own terms. My prac­tice has evolved over time and yours should too. I’ve become more plain since I started this wit­ness sim­ply because I had to replace worn clothes and couldn’t see spend­ing more money for shod­dier clothes than I could get at Gohn Broth­ers. You don’t need to get broad­falls to be “plain,” as “plain­ness” is as much a state of mind and an atti­tude toward God and your spir­i­tual com­mu­nity as it a set of clothes. I think of it now as a spir­i­tual dis­ci­pline, one very fit­ting for our con­sumeris­tic times.

I’d love to hear from oth­ers about their plain dressing.

A guest piece by “Melynda Huskey”:mailto:mghuskey@msn.com
When I was a kid, I yearned for plain dress like the kids in Obadiah’s fam­ily wore. I loved the idea of a Quaker uni­form and couldn’t imag­ine why we didn’t still have one… And now, at nearly 40, after 35 years of bal­anc­ing my con­vic­tions and my world, I’m still han­ker­ing after a truly dis­tinc­tive and Quak­erly plainness.

Con­tinue…

I think it’s fair to say that inter­net search engines have changed how many of us explore social and reli­gious move­ments. There is now easy access to infor­ma­tion on won­der­fully quirky sub­jects. Let the Super­bowl view­ers have their over­pro­duced com­mer­cials and cal­cu­lated con­tro­versy: the net gen­er­a­tion doesn’t need them. TV view­er­ship among young adults is drop­ping rapidly. Peo­ple with web­sites and blogs are shar­ing their sto­ries and the search engines are find­ing them. Here is a taste of the search phrases peo­ple are using to find Mar­tin Kel­ley Quaker Ranter.

Con­tinue…

See also: “Resources on Quaker Plain­ness”

This was a post I sent to the “Pearl” email list, which con­sists of mem­bers of the 2002 FGC Gath­er­ing work­shop led by Lloyd Lee Wil­son of North Car­olina Yearly Meet­ing (Con­ser­v­a­tive). Eighth Month 20, 2002

I thought I’d share some of my jour­ney in plain-ness since
Gath­er­ing. There’s two parts to plain dress: sim­plic­ity and plain-ness.

The most impor­tant part of the sim­plic­ity work has been sim­pli­fy­ing
my wardrobe. It’s incred­i­ble how many clothes I have. I sus­pect I have
a lot fewer than most Amer­i­cans but there’s still tons, and never
enough room in the clos­ets & dressers (I do have small clos­ets but
still!). I’d like to get all my clothes into one or two dresser draw­ers
and donate the rest to char­ity. Two pairs of pants, a cou­ple of shirts,
a few days worth of socks and under­gar­ments. This requires that I wash
every­thing fre­quently which means I hand-wash things but that’s okay.
The point is to not worry or think about what I’m going to wear every
morn­ing. I’ve been to a wed­ding and a funeral since I started going
plain and it was nice not hav­ing to fret about what to wear.

I also appre­ci­ate using less resources up by hav­ing fewer clothes.
It’s hard to get away from prod­ucts that don’t have some neg­a­tive side
effects (sup­port of oil indus­try, spilling of chem­i­cal wastes into
streams, killing of ani­mals for hide, exploita­tion of peo­ple
con­struct­ing the clothes at hor­ri­ble wages & con­di­tions). I try my
best to bal­ance these con­cerns but the best way is to reduce the use.

These moti­va­tions are simple-ness rather than plain-ness. But I am
try­ing to be plain too. For men it’s pretty easy. My most com­mon
cloth­ing since Gath­er­ing has been black pants, shoes and sus­penders,
and the combo seems to look pretty plain. There’s no his­toric
authen­tic­ity. The pants are Levi-Dockers which I already own, the shoes
non-leather ones from Pay­less, also already owned. The only pur­chase
was sus­penders from Sears. I bought black over­alls too. My Dock­ers were
vic­tims of a minor bike acci­dent last week (my scraped knee & elbow
are heal­ing well, thank you, and my bike is fine) and I’m replac­ing
them with thicker pants that will hold up bet­ter to repeated wash­ing
& use. There’s irony in this, cer­tainly. If I were being just
sim­ple, I’d wear out all the pants I have–despite their color–rather
than buy new ones. I’d be wear­ing some bright & wacky pants, that’s
for sure! But irony is part of any wit­ness, espe­cially in the begin­ning
when there’s some lifestyle shift­ing that needs to hap­pen. As a per­son
liv­ing in the world I’m bound to have con­tra­dic­tions: they help me to
not take myself too seri­ously and I try to accept them with grace and
good humor.

But prac­ti­cal­ity in dress more impor­tant to me than his­tor­i­cal
authen­tic­ity. I don’t want to wear a hat since I bike every day and
want to keep my head free for the hel­met; it also feels like my doing
it would go beyond the line into quaint­ness. The only type of cloth­ing
that’s new to my wardrobe is the sus­penders and really they are as
prac­ti­cal as a belt, just less com­mon today. A few Civil War
re-enactment buffs have smil­ingly observed that clip-on sus­penders
aren’t his­tor­i­cally authen­tic but that’s per­fectly okay with me. I also
wear col­lars, that’s per­fectly okay with me too.

The other thing that I’m clear about is that the com­mand­ment to
plain dress is not nec­es­sar­ily eter­nal. It is sit­u­a­tional, it is partly
a response to the world and to Quak­er­dom and it does con­sciously refer
to cer­tain sym­bols. God is what’s eter­nal, and lis­ten­ing to the call of
Christ within is the real com­mand­ment. If I were in a Quaker com­mu­nity
that demanded plain dress, I expect I would feel led to break out the
tie-die and bleach and manic-panic hair col­or­ing. Dress is an out­ward
form and like all out­ward forms and prac­tices, it can eas­ily become a
false sacra­ment. If we embrace the form but for­get the source (which I
sus­pect lots of Nine­teenth Cen­tury Friends did), then it’s time to
cause a ruckus.

Every so often Friends need to look around and take stock of the
state of the Soci­ety. At the turn of the 20th Cen­tury, they did that.
There’s a fas­ci­nat­ing anti-plain dress book from that time that argues
that it’s a musty old tra­di­tion that should be swept away in light of
the social­ist ecu­meni­cal world of the future. I sus­pect I would have
had much sym­pa­thy for the posi­tion at the time, espe­cially if I were in
a group of Friends who didn’t have the fire of the Spirit and wore
their old clothes only because their par­ents had and it was expected of
Quakers.

Today the sit­u­a­tion is changed. We have many Friends who have
blended in so well with mod­ern sub­ur­ban Amer­ica that they’re
indis­tin­guish­able in spirit or deed. They don’t want to have com­mit­tee
meet­ing on Sat­ur­days or after Meet­ing since that would take up so much
time, etc. They’re happy being Quak­ers as long as not much is expected
and as long as there’s no chal­lenge and no sac­ri­fice required. We also
have Friends who think that the peace tes­ti­mony and wit­ness is all
there is (con­fus­ing the out­ward form with the source again, in my
opin­ion). When a spir­i­tual empti­ness sets into a com­mu­nity there are
two obvi­ous ways out: 1) bring in the fads of the out­side world
(reli­gious revival­ism in the 19 Cen­tury, social­ist ecu­meni­cal­sim in the
20th, Bud­dhism and sweat lodges in the 21st). or 2) re-examine the fire
of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions and fig­ure out what babies you threw away with
the bath­wa­ter in the last rebel­lion against empty out­ward form.

I think Quak­ers really found some­thing spe­cial 350 years ago, or
redis­cov­ered it and that we are con­stantly redis­cov­er­ing it. I have
felt that power/ I know that there is still one, named Jesus Christ,
who can speak to my con­di­tion and that the Spirit comes to teach the
peo­ple directly. I’ll read old jour­nals and put on old clothes to try
to under­stand early Friends’ beliefs. The clothes aren’t impor­tant, I
don’t want to give them too much weight. But there is a tra­di­tion of
Quak­ers tak­ing on plain dress upon some sort of deep spir­i­tual
con­vince­ment (it is so much of a cliche of old Quaker jour­nals that
lit­er­ary types clas­sify it as part of the essen­tial struc­ture of the
jour­nals). I see plain dress as a reminder we give our­selves that we
are try­ing to live out­side the world­li­ness of our times and serve the
eter­nal. My wit­ness to oth­ers is sim­ply that I think Quak­erism is
some­thing to com­mit one­self wholly to (yes, I’ll meet on a Sat­ur­day)
and that there are some pre­cious gifts in tra­di­tional Quaker faith
& prac­tice that could speak to the spir­i­tual cri­sis many Friends
feel today.

In friend­ship,
Mar­tin Kel­ley
Atlantic City Area MM, NJ
martink@martinkelley.com

Related Posts

• Plain Dress­ing at the FGC Gath­er­ing (Sev­enth Month 2004)
• Gohn Broth­ers and some plain dress­ing tips (Sev­enth Month 2004)

Con­tinue…

This is a list of tes­ti­monies, guides, books and resources on the Chris­t­ian tes­ti­mony of plain­ness, his­tor­i­cal and present. It focuses on the tra­di­tion­al­ist Quaker under­stand­ing of plain­ness but it’s not restricted to Quaker notions: you’ll find links and dis­cus­sions to the related con­cepts of mod­est dress and sim­ple dress.

If thou wilt be faith­ful in fol­low­ing that inward wit­ness that has been so long plead­ing with thee, thy sins shall all be for­given and I will be with thee and be thy pre­server.
–William Hobbs, quoted in Hamm’s Trans­for­ma­tion of Amer­i­can Quak­erism. (p.3)

Back in the sum­mer of 2002 my wife and I became inter­ested in Quaker tra­di­tions of plain dress (here’s some idea of how we look these days). Try­ing to dis­cern the issues for myself, I found very lit­tle on the inter­net, so here’s my page with what­ever tes­ti­monies, tips and links I can find. I’m start­ing to col­lect stories:

• My Exper­i­ments with Plain­ness, my own story, Eighth Month 2002
• Plain Dress–Some Reflec­tions by Melynda Huskey, Fourth Month 2004
• Avoid­ing Plain Dress Designer Cloth­ing by David/MQuadd, Sev­enth Month 21 2004
• Buy­ing My Per­son­al­ity in a Store by Amanda, Ninth Month 8 2004
• On Dress­ing Plain from Rob of “Con­sider the Lil­lies,” Sec­ond Month 15, 2005.
• Quaker blogs on Plain­ness from QuakerQuaker

Lit­er­ary Plainness

• Friends accom­plished in the min­istry were often encour­aged to write jour­nals of their lives in their later years. These jour­nals had a dis­tinct func­tion: they were to serve as edu­ca­tion and wit­ness on how to live a proper Quaker life. As such, they also had a dis­tinct lit­er­ary form, and writ­ers almost always gave an account of their con­ver­sion to plain dress. This usu­ally accom­pa­nied a pro­found con­vince­ment expe­ri­ence, wherein the writer felt led to cast aside worldly fash­ions and van­ity. Howard Brin­ton wrote about some of the lit­er­ary forms of the clas­sic Quaker Jour­nals.

Books on Plain­ness, a short bibliography

• The Quaker: A Study in Cos­tume. By Amelia Gum­mere, 1901 (out of print, gen­er­ally avail­able used for around $50). As the sub­ti­tle sug­gests, Gum­mere is crit­i­cal of the “cos­tumes” of plain dress­ing Quak­ers. She argued that Friends needed to cast aside the musty pecu­liarisms of the past to embrace the com­ing social­ist world of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury. Although unsym­pa­theic, this is the most-frequently ref­er­enced book on Quaker plain dress. To get a sense of the turn-of-the-century Quaker embrace of moder­nity, I rec­om­mend Jerry Frost’s excel­lent talk at the 2001 FGC Gath­er­ing, “Three Twentieth-Century Rev­o­lu­tions.”
• “Why Do They Dress That Way?” By Stephen Scott, Good Books, Inter­course, PA, 1986, 1997, avail­able from Anabap­tist Book­store. A well-written and sym­pa­thetic intro­duc­tion to modern-day reli­gious groups that con­tinue to wear plain dress.
• Quaker Aes­thet­ics. Sub­ti­tled “Reflec­tions on a Quaker Ethic in Amer­i­can Design and Con­sump­tions,” this is a 2003 col­lec­tion of essays put together by Emma Jones Lap­san­sky and Anne E. Ver­planck. There’s lots of good stuff in here: see Mary Anne Caton’s “The Aes­thet­ics of Absence: Quaker Women’s Plain Dress in the Delaware Val­ley, 1790–1900″ which does an excel­lent job cor­rect­ing some of Gummere’s stereo­types. Although I’ve only had time to skim this, Caton seems to be argu­ing that Friends’ def­i­n­i­tions of plain­ness were more open to inter­pre­ta­tion that we com­monly assume and that our stereo­types of a Quaker uni­form are based in part in a way of colo­nial re-enacting that began around the turn of the century.
• Meet­ing House and Cout­ing House: Tolles’ book has some ref­er­ence to plain­ness on page 126. Have to look into this.

Posts and web­sites on Plainness

• Dis­cus­sion thread on Quaker Plain­ness on QuakerRoots
• Short His­tory of Con­ser­v­a­tive Friends: Most plain dress­ing Friends today are part of the Wilburite/Conservative tra­di­tion. This online essay does an excel­lent job show­ing this branch of Friends and is a good coun­ter­point to his­to­ries that down­play the Wilbu­rite influ­ence in con­tem­po­rary Quakerism.
• A num­ber of the blogs I list in my guide to Quaker web­sites fre­quently deal with issues of plain dress. See also: Quaker Jane.
• Anabap​tists​.Org and Anabap​tist​books​.com. Through­out most of the last 350 years, Friends have been the most vis­i­ble and well-known plain dressers, but today the Amish, Men­non­ites and other Anabap­tists have most faith­fully car­ried on the tra­di­tion. Quak­ers have a lot to learn from these tra­di­tions. These sites are put together by a Con­ser­v­a­tive Men­non­ite in Ore­gon. His wife makes plain dresses, for sale through the bookstore.

Cloth­ing Sources

• My wife has been happy with The King’s Daugh­ters and I’ve heard good reports about Plain­ly­Dress and Ves­sels of Mercy.
• Men might want to write away for the paper-only Gohn Broth­ers cat­a­log (105 South Main, Mid­dle­bury, IN 46540).
• There are lots of infor­ma­tion links at Costume.org’s reli­gious cos­tumes link.

Online tuto­ri­als

• My own guide to order­ing Quaker plain men’s clothes from Gohn Broth­ers.