Although fashion is conceptual and time stamped, the importance of duds could be seen as a percentage of relative salary. Some quick googling has revealed to me that in 1900, the average wage in the United States was $10 a week. Poking through a Macy's catalogue from the same era brought me to this page:
If you add the shirt, gitch and a hat, the price was around ten bucks for a full outfit. So a weeks wages for a set of daily wearing clothes. Google also tells me that the average weekly wage in the US in 2025 is $1231. Using my own moderate fashion sense, my daily wearing clothes, including a hat if I wore one, would come out to around $200.00.
Glenn, I believe your supposition is correct, people seem to have placed a lot more importance on their duds in the past. However, my bet is that the variety of clothing was very much reduced. The poor fella probably wore that one suit every time he ventured in public, as I'm sure the average working stiff could only afford one set of Macy's finest.
If we compare canoe prices from 1900 -
So a base line pleasure canoe was roughly 2.5 times the average weekly salary of a 1900's working stiff. Using our average daily wage for 2025, that amount comes to around $3000.00. That's somewhat in the ball park for a then and now comparison, a reasonable tandem recreational "dating" canoe could probably be had for $3000.00 now.
According to my scientific sampling of social media (tiktok, youtube, instagram), it seems like canoe dating is currently a vehicle for wrecking first dates, as every video seems to end with a traumatic capsize, with much screaming, all very low class. This leads me to your second conjecture, that the modern population of the US is composed of fatties, or to be somewhat diplomatic, canoe unfriendly body types. Google tells me that the average weight of a US man in 1900 was 165 pounds. In 2025, it is 200 pounds. Once again, your suspicions are confirmed. However, I would suggest that your supporting argument is limited. Watching the videos from 1900, everyone was walking everywhere. Very few people had personal methods of transport that did not involve human powered energy. According to my internet sources, maintaining ten thousand steps a day will keep me svelte and sexy. Those people from 1900 probably had 10,000 steps in before noon. To be sure, their diets were probably healthier, but one can't mandate good eating habits, and humans are opportunistic eaters. If McDonalds and KFC had existed in 1900, I'm sure they would have been heavily patronized, but our good ancestors may well have walked off the pernicious effects before they day was over.
In any case, I was finally able to set up new bed racks for my new truck yesterday, after months of agonizing about how to do it, and we are experiencing torrential rains, so I am stuck in doors, pontificating on the internet in order to kill time. Probably in 1900, I would have been a lot tougher, and just carried my 90 pound canoe through the driving rain for three miles and paddled upstream in my 10 dollar leisure suit just to catch a glimpse of my future bride, as she sat under an umbrella on her porch. Oh my, how the times have changed.
