Shoulder pads are a type of fabric-covered padding used in clothing to give the wearer the illusion of having broader and less sloping shoulders. In the beginning, shoulder pads were shaped as a semicircle or small triangle and were stuffed with wool, cotton, or sawdust. They were positioned at the top of the sleeve to extend the shoulder line. A good example of this is their use in "leg-o'-mutton" sleeves or the smaller puffed sleeves which are based on styles from the 1890s. In men's styles, shoulder pads are often used in suits, jackets, and overcoats, usually sewn at the top of the shoulder and fastened between the lining and the outer fabric layer. In women's clothing, their inclusion depends on the fashion taste of the day. Shoulder pads in clothing can compensate for people with narrow or sloping shoulders. They can also compensate for certain fabrics' natural properties, most notably suede blazers, due to the weight of the material. There are periods when pads intended to exaggerate the width of the shoulders are favored. As such, they were popular additions to clothing (particularly business clothing) during the 1930s and 1940s; the 1980s (encompassing a period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s); and the late 2000s to early 2010s.
1930 to 1945 The shoulder pad was initially invented in 1877 for American football by a Princeton football player. By the second decade of the twentieth century, shoulder pads were appearing in non-athletic menswear. In women's fashion, shoulder pads originally became popular in the 1930s when fashion designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Marcel Rochas included them in their designs of 1931. Though Rochas may have been the first to present them, Schiaparelli was the most consistent in promoting them during the 1930s and '40s and it is her name that came to be most associated with them. Both designers had been influenced by the extravagant shoulder flanges and small waists of traditional Southeast Asian ceremonial dress. Costume designer Travis Banton's broad-shouldered designs for Marlene Dietrich also influenced public tastes.
Soon, broad, padded shoulders dominated fashion, seen even in eveningwear and perhaps reaching a peak of variety in 1935-36, when even Vionnet showed them; Rochas presented high, pinched-up shoulders; and Piguet outdid Rochas by extending his widened shoulders vertically like oars or paddles. Amid all this competing extravagance, the widest shoulders were still said to come from Schiaparelli, who hadn't given them up even when they briefly dropped out of favor with designers in 1933.
War was in the air during this entire period, and fashion reflected it in epaulettes and other martial details, but after World War II began in 1939, women's fashions became even more militarised. Jackets, coats, and even dresses in particular were influenced by masculine styles and shoulder pads became bulkier and were positioned at the top of the shoulder to create a solid look that sloped slightly toward the neck.
The shoulder-padded style had now become universal, found in all garments except lingerie, so standard that when US designer Claire McCardell wanted to remove them from her garments in 1940, her financiers feared their sales would suffer and insisted that pads be retained. McCardell's innovative response was to put them in with very simple stitching so that they could be easily removed by the wearer, prefiguring the flexibility of the velcro-fastened shoulder pads of the 1980s. The following year, British designer Molyneux also eliminated shoulder pads, part of a prophetic trend in high fashion that would be carried further by Balenciaga in 1945 and culminate in Dior's slope-shouldered 1947 Corolle collection.
Big shoulders were still popular in 1945, when Joan Crawford wore a fur coat with wide, exaggerated shoulders, also designed by Adrian, in the film Mildred Pierce.
In men's fashion, jacket and coat shoulders were also generally broad, often due to padding, though that varied from year to year. Zoot suits had their own share of popularity. Basically, a zoot suit is based on a "regular" 2-piece suit, yet one or two sizes larger, so it was supposed to be "padded like a lunatic's cell".
During this period, stiff, felt-covered cotton batting was the material used for most shoulder pads, a combination that allowed for easy adjustment but didn't hold its shape very well when washed.
1945 to 1970 Balenciaga's 1945 endorsement of sloped shoulders signaled the direction that fashion was heading, and this was confirmed with Christian Dior's transformative 1947 Corolle collection, characterized by a striking natural shoulder line.
The popularity of shoulder pads with the public, too, ultimately tapered off later in the decade, after the war was over and women yearned for a softer, more feminine look.
During the late 1940s to about 1951, some dresses featured a soft, smaller shoulder pad with so little padding as to be barely noticeable. Its function seems to have been to slightly shape the shoulder line. By the 1950s, shoulder pads appeared only in jackets and coats — not in dresses, knitwear or blouses as they had previously during the heyday of the early 1940s.
Examples of 1950s jacket and coat padding: When Chanel reentered the fashion world in 1954, her jackets contained light padding. Some of the rounded-shoulder, barrel-shaped coats of the late 1950s, particularly those of Balenciaga and Givenchy, contained shoulder pads to widen the rounded line.
Through the early 1960s, coat and jacket shoulder pads slowly became less noticeable (with Marc Bohan's fall 1963 collection for Dior a notable exception) and midway through the decade, shoulder pads had disappeared. The rare times shoulder pads were seen in the final years of the decade, as in a Betsey Johnson tunic from 1967, they were seen as unusual and not as part of a trend.
In menswear, shoulder pads would remain pronounced in suits and sport jackets through the first half of the 1950s, but shoulders were narrowing, and they continued to diminish in size through the end of the decade. This would culminate in Pierre Cardin's influential 1960 men's collection, in which he emphasized a slim, youthful look that included a shoulder line that he described as "respected but unexaggerated," saying that big-shouldered "Tarzans" were now out of fashion. The most influential menswear designer of the 1960s, Cardin would eliminate shoulder pads in many jackets to achieve his fitted look.Multiple sources:
1970s Shoulder pads made their next appearance in women's clothing in the early 1970s, through the influence of British fashion designer Barbara Hulanicki and her label Biba. Biba produced designs influenced by the styles of the 1930s and 1940s, and so a soft version of the shoulder pad was revived. Ossie Clark was another London designer using shoulder pads at the time, showing forties-revival suits as early as 1968. During the first five years of the 1970s, a number of designers in other fashion capitals also presented padded shoulders with an explicit 1940s inspiration, constituting a minor trend that peaked in 1971. In 1970, Yves Saint Laurent showed forties-themed padded shoulders; in 1971, Angelo Tarlazzi, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé, Marc Bohan for Dior, Valentino, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Guy Laroche, Michel Goma for Patou, Michele Aujard, Thierry Mugler, and many New York designers; in 1972, Jean-Louis Scherrer and Scott Barrie; in 1973, Valentino, Jean-Louis Scherrer, and Daniel Hechter; and in 1974, Jean-Louis Scherrer and Nino Cerruti. These padded shoulders never reached mainstream acceptance, though; Saint Laurent's forties-revival attempts in particular were widely criticized, and so the look was relatively limited in reach, with designers showing and the public preferring the relaxed, natural, often jeans-based clothing styles typical of the times.Multiple sources:
During the mid-1970s, Saint Laurent and a few others did show an occasional padded-shoulder jacket scattered among the popular ethnic and peasant looks, but sensibly proportioned, easy, and contemporary in appearance instead of being part of a forties look,Multiple sources: suitable for the standard officewear women were preferring as they entered the workforce in greater numbers during the decade, a look codified with the 1977 publications of John T. Molloy's The Woman's Dress for Success Book and Michael Korda's Success!. The shoulder padding occasionally seen in these business blazers was unobtrusive, no more pronounced than in a standard men's suit jacket, and the most high-fashion versions carried no pads at all, in line with the unconstructed Big Look that dominated the fashion world at the time.
Fall 1978
For fall 1978, designers in all fashion capitals suddenly endorsed wide, padded shoulders across the board, introducing the broad-shouldered styles that would characterize the 1980s. There had been some signs of a move toward broader shoulders the previous year, but it would be a January 1978 collection from the most influential designer of the time, Yves Saint Laurent, that would be accepted as the first clear expression of the trend when Saint Laurent showed a handful of jackets with exaggerated shoulder padding over slim trousers. Jean-Louis Scherrer showed somewhat similar square-shouldered designs two days before Saint Laurent, but it was Saint Laurent's shoulders that made an impression on the press. In later years, there would be various claims about who began the eighties big-shoulders trend, with Norma Kamali, Giorgio Armani, and several others variously cited as the exclusive originator, but Saint Laurent was the designer credited by fashion writers at its 1978 inception with launching the trend.
When most of the rest of the fashion world showed broad-shouldered looks a couple of months later, there would be two distinct versions of it. The first, favored by Paris designers like Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé, Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Pierre Cardin, Jean-Claude de Luca, Anne Marie Beretta, France Andrevie, and a number of others, was an explicit but exaggerated 1940s-revival silhouette based largely on tailored suits and dresses, though more a slim-skirted haute couture forties look than the flared-skirt, World War II Utility Suit-inspired shapes flirted with by Saint Laurent in the early seventies, no platform shoes or snoods this time. This first version was referred to as retro and included 1940s accessories, some mid-20th-century sci-fi looks, and military influences. A very dressy but subdued version of this 1940s-50s-derived look was adopted by designers like Givenchy, Valentino, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and a number of others.
The second version of the new broad-shouldered silhouette was a more contemporary sportswear look in which shoulder pads were added to easy but slimmed-down casualwear, favored largely by US and Italian designers like Perry Ellis, Norma Kamali, Calvin Klein, and Giorgio Armani.
This time, the shoulder line was usually continuous from outer edge to neck, without the dip toward the center seen in the 1940s, and the pads used, even when enormous, were much lighter and held their shape better than the ones used in the 1940s, now most often made of foam and other lightweight, well-shaped, moldable materials. As shoulder pads hadn't been this common in womenswear in decades, some in the fashion industry worried that the tailoring skills necessary for them had been lost and measures were taken to train workers in their proper placement.