WWI Paper Suit Interactive

“In a tour of Frankfort, we saw woolen suits at $200, others in shoddy cotton at $75, and still others of paper at $12.”

                                    Lincoln Eyre. "CONDITIONS IN GERMANY AS FOUND BY A CORRESPONDENT OF THE POST-DISPATCH." St. Louis Post - Dispatch (1879-1922), Dec 26, 1918. 

A suit made of paper? In post-Armistice Germany? Who wore such a thing, and why? And what exactly was a paper suit?

Thanks to some curious travellers, two such suits were donated, in 1923, by two different donors, to the Newark Museum, in New Jersey. One of the donors was a paper company executive, and had perhaps acquired the suit at the end of the war as a souvenir of a novel technology. Today, these suits also remind us of the fact that during World War I, Germany and her allies were shut out of most of the global trade in textile fibers, particularly wool and cotton. And as a result, substitutes had to be found.