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The hidden history of American fashion : rediscovering twentieth-century women designers
This book is the first in-depth exploration of the revolutionary designers who defined American fashion in its emerging years and helped build an industry with global impact, yet who have been largely forgotten. While names such as Charles James, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein are familiar, their once-eminent forebears have been largely erased from the canon of fashion history in the United States. From one of America's first couturiers, Jessie Franklin Turner, to Zelda Wynn Valdes, who dressed the likes of Josephine Baker and Ella Fitzgerald, the book captures the lost histories of the luminaries who paved the way in the world of American fashion design. Focusing on unsung female designers, the authors reclaim a place in history for the women who contributed to the rich tapestry of the industry as it stands today, including designers who dressed celebrities and socialites, and millions of fashion-conscious American women. This lavishly illustrated collection takes us from Hollywood to Broadway, from sportswear to sustainable fashion, and explores important crossovers between film, theater, and fashion, including couture, tailoring, millinery, costume, and accessory design. Uncovering fascinating histories of the design pioneers we should know about, the book enlarges the prevailing narrative of fashion history and will be an important reference for fashion students, historians, costume curators, and fashion enthusiasts alike.
Book
Zoot Suit
ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit. -Cab Calloway,The Hepster's Dictionary, 1944 Before the fashion statements of hippies, punks, or hip-hop, there was the zoot suit, a striking urban look of the World War II era that captivated the imagination. Created by poor African American men and obscure tailors, the \"drape shape\" was embraced by Mexican American pachucos, working-class youth, entertainers, and swing dancers, yet condemned by the U.S. government as wasteful and unpatriotic in a time of war. The fashion became notorious when it appeared to trigger violence and disorder in Los Angeles in 1943-events forever known as the \"zoot suit riot.\" In its wake, social scientists, psychiatrists, journalists, and politicians all tried to explain the riddle of the zoot suit, transforming it into a multifaceted symbol: to some, a sign of social deviance and psychological disturbance, to others, a gesture of resistance against racial prejudice and discrimination. As controversy swirled at home, young men in other places-French zazous, South African tsotsi, Trinidadian saga boys, and Russian stiliagi-made the American zoot suit their own. InZoot Suit, historian Kathy Peiss explores this extreme fashion and its mysterious career during World War II and after, as it spread from Harlem across the United States and around the world. She traces the unfolding history of this style and its importance to the youth who adopted it as their uniform, and at the same time considers the way public figures, experts, political activists, and historians have interpreted it. This outré style was a turning point in the way we understand the meaning of clothing as an expression of social conditions and power relations. Zoot Suit offers a new perspective on youth culture and the politics of style, tracing the seam between fashion and social action.
eBook
The lost art of dress : the women who once made America stylish
\"A tribute to a time when style--and maybe even life--felt more straightforward, and however arbitrary, there were definitive answers.\" -- Paris Review As a glance down any street in America quickly reveals, American women have forgotten how to dress.We lack the fashion know-how we need to dress professionally and beautifully.
eBook
Young Originals : Emily Wilkens and the teen sophisticate
\"In the early 1940s, American designer Emily Wilkens went beyond her previous experience in children's wear to create costumes for two teenage characters in a Broadway play. Recognizing the growing importance of the teenager in American culture, she soon launched Emily Wilkens Young Originals, the first designer label specializing in upscale, fashionable clothing for teenage girls. Within the space of a few years, Wilkens skyrocketed from obscurity to national recognition, yet even today many fashion insiders would not recognize her name. Fashion historian Rebecca Jumper Matheson explores intertwining stories of female agency through the history of Wilkens and her teenage clientele. Wilkens retained both artistic and business control over her label in an era when most American ready-to-wear designers were anonymous employees of manufacturers. Wilkens parleyed her relative youth into a big-sister image which, like her dresses themselves, allowed her to mediate between the concerns of her teenage clients and their parents. Contrary to popular wisdom, Wilkens's designs declared that even a teenager could be fashionable. In doing so, Wilkens laid the foundation for the seismic shift that would occur later in the twentieth century, when youth became the fashionable ideal. Young Originals traces Wilkens's career from fashion illustrator in the 1930s to spa and beauty expert in the 1980s, emphasizing her consistent ideal of healthy, youthful beauty\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fashion and Fiction
During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization-shedding ethnic origins and signs of \"otherness\" to embrace a constructed American identity-was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives toGone with the Wind,and from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the writings of Barack Obama. Such rhetoric feeds American myths of progress, upward mobility, and personal reinvention.
InFashion and Fiction,Lauren S. Cardon draws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, she argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends. Cardon illustrates how canonical twentieth-century American writers, including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, symbolically used clothing to develop their characters and their narrative of upward mobility. As the industry evolved, Cardon shows, the characters in these texts increasingly enjoyed opportunities for individual expression and identity construction, allowing for temporary performances that offered not escapism but a testing of alternate identities in a quest for self-discovery.
eBook
American runway : 75 years of fashion and the front row
New York Fashion Week has served many purposes throughout its long history, but it has always remained at the center of the American fashion world. During World War II, Fashion Week challenged the dominance of French couture; in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a showcase for American sportswear stars who became household names; in the 2000s, it was the stage for celebrity designers using the runway as vehicle for entertainment; and now, it is the place to see and be seen by contemporary reality TV and social media stars. Now, this illustrious history is told as it's never been told before, in a book packed with designer interviews, backstage ephemera, and exclusive photographs culled from all 75 years of New York Fashion Week. Part historical over-view, part scrapbook, and part fashion-industry field guide, American Runway will bring to life the people, places, and over-the-top runway productions of New York Fashion Week--and will sate the appetites of die-hard fashion fans and casual fashionistas alike.
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Screen style : fashion and femininity in 1930s Hollywood
Revealing the fascination of Hollywood movies in the thirties with strong-willed women-from the ambitions of gold-diggers, working girls, and social climbers to the illicit appeal of female androgyny and ethnic exoticism-Sarah Berry presents a lively, accessible, and lavishly illustrated look at 1930s films, fashions, fan magazines, and advertising.
eBook
1950s American fashion
United States had always relied on Europe for its style leads, but during World War II, when necessity became the mother of invention, the country had to find its own way. American designers looked to what American women needed and found new inspirations for American fashion design. This book follows the American fashion industry, from New York's 7th Avenue to the beaches of California in search of the clothes that designed 1950s American fashion.
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When Broadway Was the Runway
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009When Broadway Was the Runwayexplores the central and largely unacknowledged role of commercial Broadway theater in the birth of modern American fashion and consumer culture. Long before Hollywood's red carpet spectacles, Broadway theater introduced American women to the latest styles. At the beginning of the twentieth century, theater impresarios captured the imagination of their largely female patrons by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle. Theater historian Marlis Schweitzer examines how these impresarios presented the dresses actresses wore onstage, as well as the jewelry and hairstyles they chose, as commodities that were available for purchase in nearby department stores and salons. The Merry Widow Hat, designed for the hit operetta of the same name, sparked an international craze, and the dancer Irene Castle became a fashion celebrity when she anticipated the flapper look of the 1920s by nearly a decade. Not only were the latest styles onstage, but advertisements appeared throughout theaters, in programs, and on the curtains, while magazines such asVoguevied for the rights to publish theatrical costume sketches andHarper's Bazarenticed readers with photo spreads of actresses in couture. This combination of spectatorship and consumption was a crucial step in the formation of a mass market for consumer goods and the rise of the cult of celebrity. Through historical analysis and dozens of early photographs and illustrations, Schweitzer aims a spotlight at the cultural and economic convergence of the theater and fashion industries in the United States.
eBook