In the early twentieth century, America’s wealthiest women were crossing the Atlantic to assemble their wardrobes because there was little to be found in the way of high fashion closer to home. The United States fashion business was comprised almost entirely of the garment trade—factory work. The New York fashion industry, one of the biggest employers in the city, consisted of musty workrooms filled with striving immigrants from countries like Poland, Austria, and Italy who were trudging toward the middle class one laborious stitch at a time.
Clothing production had always been dangerous work. In 1911, the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed more than one hundred young women and men. Trapped behind locked doors, they perished—many of them leaping to their deaths from the building’s highest floors to escape the lunging flames. Witnesses watched in horror as girls plummeted toward the cobblestone streets, their bodies hitting the pavement with gut-wrenching thuds, because the firefighters’ ladders proved too short to reach them.1
In the shadow of that tragedy, unions grew in size, vitriol, and moral authority, among them the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Union bosses fought to rid the city of its soul-sapping, deadly sweatshops, but they also used their mighty membership, which at its peak reached into the hundreds of thousands, to influence the politics of the day. By the mid-1920s virtually every aspiring politician felt compelled to parade through the Garment District in hopes of securing the support of the unionized dressmakers, patternmakers, fabric producers, and the like.2 In the years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the American fashion industry had influence and scale, but not much in the way of original style. It was safer work, but it was a world of cigar-smoking ruffians and callused seamstresses, whirring sewing machines and clacking mills. With few exceptions, there was little enviable or glamorous produced in the Garment District, which was centered around New York’s Seventh Avenue.
Those exceptions, however, hinted at what was possible. A handful of women and men were striding down a more refined path and making names for themselves. Hattie Carnegie, who began her fashion career as a milliner, opened her own dress salon in 1928, selling original designs.3 She established an enviable reputation with high-end, ready-to-wear, and a deep backroom that served as the training ground for designers Norman Norell, Claire McCardell, James Galanos, and others who would go on to fame and influence.
Elizabeth Hawes, a contemporary of Carnegie’s, was an early fashion populist, believing that well-designed, functional clothes should be readily available. She was convinced that creativity could flourish outside the French ateliers. Hawes ran her company from 1928 to 1940, first with her partner Rosemary Harden and then on her own.
And Nettie Rosenstein was, for a time, the American queen of fancy ready-to-wear. She opened a dress house that bore her name in 1916 and kept it in business until 1961. Along the way, it grew into a million-dollar company trading in dresses that retailed from $98.50 to $500—quite expensive for the time. Paris prices, actually. But Rosenstein built her business, in part, by embracing a quintessentially French idea: the little black dress, which had originally been declared fashionable by French designers. Rosenstein made it accessible to middle-class American women.4
In the mid-twentieth century department stores had more brand recognition and cultural influence than any individual designers. Stores like Lord & Taylor, Ohrbach’s, and Bergdorf Goodman dictated the fashions of the day, not the designers themselves. Rosenstein was one of the first exceptions to that rule. Department stores competed to carry her dresses, which could be supremely chic with narrow waists and buoyant skirts. Stores were eager to advertise the Rosenstein brand. Such was Rosenstein’s prominence that she created Mamie Eisenhower’s 1953 inaugural ball gown, a pale pink, sleeveless peau de soie confection embroidered with two thousand rhinestones. More debutante sweet than sophisticated, the dress now resides in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
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Into this small but burgeoning world of American fashion waltzed a young woman who would later transform the industry. Eleanor Lambert grew up in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a tiny city about 150 miles southeast of Chicago and home to Wabash College, a private liberal arts school for men. With $100 tucked in her little handbag to fund her new life, Lambert arrived in New York just before the start of the Great Depression. She was only twenty-two years old, but she was endowed with bulldozer determination, a love for the arts, and the soul of P. T. Barnum. (Her father had been an advance man for the Ringling Brothers Circus.) She came east, as so many did, looking for glamour, prospects … herself.
She had studied at the Chicago Art Institute and aspired to be a sculptor. She adored antique furniture and porcelains. She was captivated by contemporary painting. But she was obsessed with fashion. While in school, she’d dabbled in fashion writing and served as a freelance fashion illustrator for local department stores.
Lambert was neither exceedingly wealthy nor was she a classic beauty of Vogue standing. She was a brown-eyed midwestern girl of modest means who needed to work for a living and who hid her fine, lank, sandy brown hair under a turban.
When Lambert went looking for her first New York job, she did not land at any of the young, quixotic fashion firms. Instead, the art school graduate patched together the beginnings of a career with two part-time engagements. In the morning she helped design book jackets for Franklin Spear, a small public relations and advertising firm, and in the afternoon she worked in consumer research for a retail consultant.
She crossed the threshold into public relations when she began to bring her own clients into Franklin Spear. From the moment she arrived in New York, Lambert had been drawn to the city’s artists and art galleries. She headed to Fifty-seventh Street, where there were rows of galleries, and pitched herself to the art world. With a combination of charm and determination, she formed relationships with photographer Cecil Beaton, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and painters Jackson Pollock and Salvador Dalí.5 Her new art clients each paid her $10 a week.
For years, Lambert concentrated her energy on artists. She threw herself into helping to create the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she became the press agent. She became the public relations representative for the American Art Dealers Association, which she’d help found. In 1934, on a trip to Europe to help promote the American Pavilion of Contemporary Art at the tenth Venice Biennale, she met journalist Seymour Berkson. They married two years later.
As the years passed, the American fashion industry began to change, in part due to World War II. The upheaval during the war, along with rationing of materials and the closure of France’s great fashion houses, served as an opening for American designers. Women needed clothes and stores needed to fill their racks.
The American fashion industry had another growth spurt. Hattie Carnegie’s former employees Claire McCardell and Norman Norell, as well as Chicago-born Main Rousseau Bocher, all launched their own businesses during this period.
Norell made a name for himself as the dean of bourgeois American taste. His showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue was entirely black and white, with a reception area that smelled of his signature fragrance and a desk adorned with orchids. For the pleasure of visitors, there was a little satin bench, a mirrored table, and an enormous arrangement of calla lilies. His workers wore white coats and would carefully drape garments across their outstretched arms to present them to clients. It was every bit as overwrought as it sounds.
Norell was the rare American designer who had his own cabine of models, just as the French did. He worked consistently and exclusively with the same group of women, his women. Norell was enthralled with the work of French painter Kees van Dongen and inspired by the artist’s stylized depiction of women. All the models in Norell’s showroom resembled van Dongen’s 1920s flappers, with dark eye makeup, three sets of false eyelashes, and slicked-back dark hair. Norell was not a fan of blondes.6
“He was my first idol,” admits designer Louis Dell’Olio. “What a naive kid I was—a kid from Long island with a summer job at Norman Norell!
“I thought everything on Seventh Avenue was like this,” says Dell’Olio, recalling his 1966 internship. “What a rude awakening. This was not the norm. This was the exception.”7
Decades later, First Lady Michelle Obama wore a vintage Norell cinched-waist black party dress to a Washington Christmas celebration in 2010. It was a fine reminder of the kind of 1950s decorum that guided the era’s well-dressed ladies. But it was also a look that was derivative of French taste.
Although he was unquestionably American, Main Bocher set up shop in Paris, calling himself Mainbocher and pronouncing the name with a French twist. He became an international sensation thanks to his fine fabrics, simple silhouettes, and the snob appeal of being based in Paris. He created the pale blue gown American socialite Wallis Simpson wore to marry the Duke of Windsor.
Claire McCardell became one of the most influential founders of American ready-to-wear by emphasizing function, practicality, and ease. She made signature use of brass hardware, patch pockets, the Empire waist, and madras plaids.
These designers all had gumption and a marketing strategy. But in large measure, it was Dorothy Shaver who elevated their stature. Born in the small Arkansas town of Center Point in 1893, Shaver eventually became president of Lord & Taylor—a major feat for a woman—and was dubbed “Fifth Avenue’s First Lady” by Time magazine in 1945. She championed American designers with a public relations blitz called “The American Look.”
“She made them happen,” recalls fashion editor Marylou Luther. “In those years, you really needed a store to send you off. Stores were gods.” 8
It was a designer who wanted to make a name for herself, rather than rely on the power and largesse of department stores, who was responsible for nudging Eleanor Lambert into the fashion world. Annette Simpson, an American designer who had participated in a fashion show at Lord & Taylor in 1932, had gotten a taste of applause and adulation. She wanted more. She’d seen the newspaper stories that Eleanor Lambert had engineered on behalf of artists and she wanted Lambert to represent her.9 Lambert agreed, but the difficulty in doing so was a lesson. Lambert learned that Lord & Taylor had opened women’s eyes to American products, but with the exception of a few standouts—designers like Norrell, Mainbocher, and McCardell—consumers and the media remained uninterested in the individuals and personalities behind them.
“Shopping in the forty-odd stores we had in New York, it wasn’t about designers, but about classifications of merchandise. If you wanted a dress, you went to the dress department. If you wanted a sweater, you went to the sweater department,” explains Joan Kaner, who retired from the retail industry in 2005 as fashion director for Neiman Marcus.10
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In the 1950s and ’60s, companies such as Bonwit Teller, Ohrbach’s, Lord & Taylor, Bergdorf Goodman, and Saks Fifth Avenue were the names that carried prestige. Yet most of the clothes they were selling weren’t original designs; they were copies of Paris’s creative output. Copying was not just standard practice for American stores and designers, it was formalized and conducted in the light of day.
Regularly one could open the pages of Vogue magazine to find a photo story offering “Paris Copies—for U.S.A. Wearing.” In it, image after image would depict original garments from haute couture designers such as Christian Dior, Nina Ricci, Pierre Cardin, and Guy Laroche, along with helpful captions detailing where a reader might find the American imitations.
Dior red wool coat, with incisive seams making the point of a very controlled flare. This, imported and copied by Saks Fifth Avenue.
In wool fleece, a pair of Dior coat-points—well-shaped flare, the colour taupe. Copied by Frank Gallant for Saks Fifth Avenue.
Wide-flaring yellow-orange wool double-breasted coat, copied by Frechtel for Lord & Taylor.
Coat of red chinchilla wool with a long fling of scarf, no collar, rounded skirt. Imported by, and copied for, Macy’s.
The idea that the industry so openly copied Paris designs may seem shocking today. The American fashion industry has spent years lobbying Washington for copyright protections on its most original designs, and the protection of intellectual property is a principle concern of trade negotiations with countries such as China. And in Paris, design houses like Chanel once experienced such paroxysms of paranoia about photographs of their collections becoming instantly available by computer that they have gone so far as to ban online media outlets from shows and bring legal action against photographers who post unauthorized images online.
But two generations ago, the American department stores pioneered the system of approved copies. The French fashion unions signed off on the scheme because it meant more money for its members and it magnified France’s influence in the marketplace. By the 1960s, these commercial entities—retailers, not individuals—accounted for the bulk of couture purchases.11
To enter the system, a store was vetted for cachet, aesthetics, and financial solvency. Then it paid a caution—French for a kind of security deposit against future purchases—for access to the haute couture ateliers. That fee might have been a promise to purchase a minimum number of ensembles, or it could have been a flat dollar amount. In her detailed analysis of the business, Couture & Commerce, scholar Alexandra Palmer notes that the caution at Balenciaga was a minimum of two ensembles, while at Dior it was $300 for store buyers and $1,000 for manufacturers.12
Bergdorf Goodman, for example, paid its caution and sent its representatives to Paris twice a year. They bought original couture designs from Yves Saint Laurent, along with the patterns and high-quality fabrics used by the couturier. Once back home, the new season’s offerings were presented to the local well-to-do clientele in a “mini haute couture show.”13 Customers made their selections and then had fittings as required by the agreement with the design house, with the construction carried out by the store’s own in-house dressmakers. Clients could ask for changes and tweaks, but the finished garment would bear the label YVES SAINT LAURENT FOR BERGDORF GOODMAN.
The store could also buy the Saint Laurent dress in a simple muslin and commission Seventh Avenue manufacturers to reproduce it in a variety of reasonably priced fabrics. The label in these dresses would simply read BERGDORF GOODMAN. It would be modeled after Saint Laurent, but it would not bear his imprimatur. And its cost would reflect its more distanced connection to the original Paris atelier.14
Marshall Field had a particularly close relationship with Christian Dior.15 Its lead buyer attended the Dior couture shows and purchased entire collections for the store. In the 1950s, Marshall Field was one of the largest couture customers. In Chicago, the store organized three fashion shows. One was to educate the staff about the season’s trends; the second was for American designers and manufacturers who could not attend the Paris couture shows; and the third was for special clients.
The designers and manufacturers attending this second show would receive a detailed packet with line drawings of the garments, technical measurements, and in some instances, the matching fabric itself. This booklet gave manufacturers a clear directive for the new season so they could produce copies of couture designs that Marshall Field and other stores peddled to the masses. For the fall 1952 season, for example, the look book titled “Couture Collections: Marshall Field & Company” read “There’s a new fashion feeling abroad! In essence, it’s effortless elegance. Each important designer interprets it in his own way.” What followed in the eleven-page booklet were detailed descriptions of the collections of Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Madame Grès. A Dior coat “looks deceptively simple but actually achieves the streamlined curves of an ideal feminine figure.” It has a molded bodice, rounded sides, and a belt that is curved but “never tight.” A Balenciaga suit has “lower pockets,” “longer skirt,” “absence of detail,” “lowered, square neckline,” and a “touch-me-not waistline.” For each garment, the booklet included instructional sketches highlighting the shape of the sleeves, the type of fabric, the cut of the skirt, or the volume of the coat. Every part of a woman’s wardrobe was discussed, from coats and jackets to suits and dresses, along with a full-page “Paris Headlines” section dedicated to hats.
The special clients attending the third show were allowed to order individual and personalized looks that were produced in-house, usually with a shared label, like CHRISTIAN DIOR FOR MARSHALL FIELD.16
For the American customer, there was no shame in buying copies. Everyone did it. Even at the height of haute couture’s popularity, only a small group of exceptionally wealthy and influential American women traveled to Paris to purchase wardrobe selections for the season. Most well-off women simply waited for the copies to arrive at their local department store—that moment preceded by gushing advertising campaigns and breathless reports in the pages of Women’s Wear Daily, which would pinpoint the exact day and hour the new styles would reach these shores. Women of modest means and more frugal types were even further down the delivery chain, but they still took their marching orders from Paris.
As late as 1972, two fashion presentations at Ohrbach’s department store in New York drew more than four thousand women “from all over the country, many of whom supplement their original couture designs with Ohrbach’s ‘translations,’” Washington Post fashion editor Nina Hyde wrote.17
The shows drew not only middle-class and upper-middle-class strivers, but also public women of note, such as Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her sister-in-law Jean Kennedy Smith. Both women made hefty purchases, such as Dior suits, Saint Laurent dresses, and Ungaro coats.
Ohrbach’s buying team had paid $3,000 for a Christian Dior suit in gray flannel, lined in electric blue. The fee was twice what a private client paid, Hyde explained, and it gave the store the right to copy the design—but not use the Dior name. Ohrbach’s publicity office simply referred to Dior as “Monsieur X.” Customers paid $395 for the reproduction.
A Valentino two-piece black chiffon short dress with a beaded top cost a couture customer $3,500. The Ohrbach’s client paid $199.95 in the original fabric and only $155 in an alternative one.18
The purchases of prominent women were reported upon in a manner that underscored fashion’s importance in matters of decorum, status, and acceptability. Fashion was a respected measure of cultural change, a reflection of social order, and a point of pride. Well-chosen fashion, even made-in-America copies of Paris originals, could provide an entry point into society for a woman who was not well-born. One American woman’s dress might be couture and another’s might be a Seventh Avenue reproduction, but both ladies were engaged in the same conversation. Fashion had not yet diverged into countless stylistic tribes, each with its own codes and hierarchies. There was a kind of democracy embedded in the fashion industry’s tyranny.
Fashion’s rules could be cruel and unrelenting for everyone. The language of fashion focused on the new shapes, the right hemline, the seasonal color. To be appropriate meant wearing the appropriate silhouettes, whether that was the wasp waist of Dior’s “New Look” or the shapeless sack dress and pillbox hat as defined by Balenciaga. Fashion was not a choice. It was a requirement, handed down not by a royal court but by ateliers located all the way across the Atlantic.
Occasionally, American women fought back. Fashion historian Timothy Long recalls news clips from the 1940s and ’50s that chronicled a trip Christian Dior made to Chicago. Women rose up in protest, declaring, “We abhor Dior! We abhor skirts to the floor!”19 One can imagine them, with their hands clenched into tight fists that pumped the air.
But as much as those fashion rebels might have abhorred Dior, opting out was not much of a possibility. American closets featured styles conceived in Paris; the backrooms of Seventh Avenue manufacturing houses and the grand department stores were filled with talented men and women charged with copying Paris originals. Even American designers who had made names for themselves owed a debt to Paris.
“They always talk about Norman Norell as a great American designer. I remember Norman Norell paying his caution to go look at the [Paris] collections and getting his toile from Balenciaga,” recalls Oscar de la Renta. “American fashion was copying French haute couture clothes. That was the basis of American fashion.”20
For all the fillips of respectability and laudatory shows in the United States, American designers were cogs in a mom-and-pop industry of knockoffs and industrial production. Even in the late sixties, one could walk out on Seventh Avenue and find clusters of tailors sitting on the street curbs munching on a lunchtime meal of salami sandwiches.21 There weren’t restaurants to speak of in the Garment District. Fashion was overwhelmingly blue-collar work. Everyone brought his own lunch. And then went back to copying.