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Chapter One

À la Mode

"No woman, however hard pressed for time, has a right to look dowdy nowadays," the Ladies' Home Journal categorically declared in 1925, underscoring the premium America of the twenties placed on looking "smart" and fashionable. No matter where she lived, in the city or on a farm, the magazine continued, she could buy stylish, affordable clothes at her local dress shop or department store, order them from a catalog, or make them herself from pattern books. The modern American woman could also attend a fashion show, hear a lecture, and consult all manner of fashion magazines and guidebooks on the art--and science--of dressing well. With so many opportunities, she had no excuse for not looking her best at all times. Like their womenfolk, American men could also avail themselves of a growing number of sartorial options. No longer could they blame their wives for their lackluster or even shabby appearance. ("Men Neglect Clothes to Keep Wives Well-Dressed," proclaimed a headline in the New York Times , implying that cost-conscious husbands preferred to adorn their wives rather than themselves.) Now they, too, could purchase a great many things, including colored shirts. "Times have changed," observed the Saturday Evening Post in 1931, applauding the way color had emancipated modern man. A glimpse into the wardrobe of the well-dressed man would make the "explorers of Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb green with envy," asserted another student of contemporary mores, referring to the spectacular discovery of the ancient boy king's tomb a decade earlier. "His Royal Highness in Fashion" had nothing on the contemporary American gentleman.

Once the exclusive prerogative of the high and mighty, fashion by the 1920s had become a "social fact" that touched the lives of average people. Calling it one of the "greatest forces in present-day life," Paul Nystrom, a Columbia University professor of marketing, observed in 1928 that fashion had pervaded every field and reached every class. It was fashion that made men shave every day, crease their trousers, and wear shirts with attached collars and that encouraged women to change the "tint of the face powder, the odor of the perfume, the wave of the hair, the position of the waistline, the length of the skirt, the color of the hose, the height of the heels." In short, Nystrom concluded, "to be out of fashion, indeed, is to be out of the world." To be in fashion, though, was to be right on top. Offering a new form of identity to millions of Americans across the country, fashion placed within reach an expanded sense of life's possibilities. Women should never underestimate the "psychological effect of clothes," cheered businesswoman Bertha Rich. While a great deal went into making someone a success, the "one asset that every woman [could] count on as chief assistant" was her clothes. "First please the eye, and the rest will come easily." Journalist O. O. McIntyre couldn't have agreed more. Clothes not only make the man, he wrote, they "buoy [his] courage."

Rich, McIntyre, and increasing numbers of Americans like them associated clothing with pleasure and opportunity. Their parents and grandparents, citizens of the nineteenth century, probably did not. For them, assembling and maintaining a wardrobe was by no means easy. A drain on their finances and their energies, it took some doing. For one thing, those hankering for a stylish new dress or suit had first to purchase the fabric and then find a dressmaker like the chic-sounding Madame DeLyle or a distinguished firm of custom tailors like Howard, Keeler & Scoffield to transform cloth into clothing through the complicated rigamarole of draping, pinning, cutting, and fitting, a process likened to a "cabalistic art." The practice of having one's clothes made also demanded patience and ready cash, both of which were in short supply among everyone but the well-to-do. "I could afford to have only my best dresses made by a regular dressmaker," admitted Anne Aldworth in 1885, adding that her modiste's extravagance in cutting (and wasting) cloth had "long filled me with indignation." Little wonder, then, that most Americans considered a new dress or suit a rarity and stylishness a perquisite of affluence.

Instead, they made do by making their own. Armed with needles, pins, scissors, and thread, thousands of women across America took up sewing. As Aldworth noted, "I cannot help thinking that there must be many others like myself, anxious and ready and willing to do their own simple dress making if only they knew just where and how to make it easy." Aldworth was fortunate: she had her aunt Mary to help her over the rough spots. Sitting at her aunt's side, she watched and took notes as the older woman ran through a series of complicated exercises: "Secure the seam at the waistline first and be very careful not to stretch the cloth ... then pin about an inch above that, and from there towards the bottom of the waist with the front towards you. Now turn it so that the back will be towards you and pin from above the waistline towards the top. Baste in the same way." A sensible womanly skill transmitted from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter and from Aunt Mary to her niece Anne, sewing was held in high regard as much for its pedagogic value as for its utility. "Learning to cut, fit and make clothes, pretty clothes," it was widely believed, was critical to the making of a proper young woman. The "practice and art of making clothes which are so far as possible graceful, simple, economical, beautiful should be taught to girls and employed by them in a nation-wide movement if we are to have the best development of our race that our young women are capable of," insisted one fan of this household art, dreaming of an ambitious moral crusade with sewing at its core.

Then again, being clever with the needle was also a vehicle of rectitude, a way of demonstrating the American attributes of thrift and resourcefulness. The "vast army of mothers all over the land" who made their sons' clothing, cheered Good Housekeeping , were to be commended for their "practice of economy." The Ladies' Home Journal , in turn, approved of those who, dressing themselves as well as their children, knew how to stretch their wardrobes. "To appear well-dressed on a limited income one must be able to sew neatly, must understand how to renovate old materials and have the knack of being able to use and make the most of pieces of old trimming and left-over scraps," advised Emma Hooper, author of the popular monthly column "To Dress Well on a Small Income." A new collar could "brighten up an old bodice as nothing else can," she recommended, while a "circular flounce of broadcloth" did wonders for an otherwise skimpy skirt. Farm women were even more receptive to the art and craft of "clothing renovation," the high-minded name social reformers gave to the process, born of necessity, by which the life of things was extended. Well into the 1910s and 1920s, economically straitened farmers' wives watched and listened carefully as "clothing specialists," home-demonstration agents hired by statewide agricultural extension programs, fanned out across the country teaching them resourcefulness. "Next to poultry, clothing ... has perhaps the greatest economic and social value of any project in the state," declared agent Agnes Ellen Harris. The program gave the "country woman self respect and self confidence by making her feel ... as well dressed as city women." Every year, specialists like Harris and Mary Shaw Gilliam spent thousands of miles on the road, teaching rural woman, especially in the South, how to make, and care for, their clothes. "Good taste in renovation just does not happen," explained Gilliam. "It is ingenuity, plus skill."

Ingenuity, skill, and pedagogy, along with a penchant for language drawn more from the doctor's office than from the sewing room, came together in classes on the making of "children's clothes from leftovers" and at so-called clothes clinics where "worn, cut, `dejected' garments would be rejuvenated." A South Carolina woman who attended one such clinic recalled that "club members and friends gathered and brought every imaginable kind of clothing and hats. The doctor (agent) and nurses (local leaders) examined these garments and prescribed the necessary treatment." At the end of the day, 337 dresses and 19 hats had been remodeled, 101 boys' suits made from men's old clothing, and 141 slips fashioned from old nightgowns and "thin dresses." Elsewhere in the South, clothing specialists experimented with the "humble flour and food sack," using the sturdy material to create inexpensive and durable clothing for the entire family. The experiment turned out to be a great success, inspiring several Alabama women like Mrs. M. E. Bishop of Talladega County and Mrs. Wilbur Hull of Limestone County to turn chicken-feed bags into an ensemble of dresses and matching hats. These items "would have done credit to a professional modiste," crowed one eyewitness. "Everyone seemed to think they were so pretty."

Despite such encomia, sewing was arduous work. Almost as laborious and time-consuming as fittings at the dressmaker's, the domestic production of clothing required nimble fingers, a good eye, and a sense of proportion, qualities that were often as hard to find as patience. As a result, homemade clothing frequently looked homemade, with a distinctive, sad-sack appearance. Two technological improvements, though--the advent of the domestic sewing machine and the mass production and dissemination of inexpensive paper dress patterns--not only made sewing easier, "as if done by fairy fingers," but also professionalized the final product, rendering it more attractive. By the 1870s, women everywhere could be found carefully spreading tissue-thin dress patterns on their kitchen tables or parlor floors and tracing the outlines of a bodice or a sleeve onto a bolt of fabric, following the helpful directions that companies like E. Butterick & Company made a point of providing. (Sometimes, however, instructions were so complicated that "none but students of higher mathematics could possibly master" them.) Placing the fabric in the sewing machine, the home sewer would effortlessly baste and seam until, with a real show of "yankee ingenuity," a reasonably well-fitting, somewhat stylish garment emerged from her labors--all for under a few dollars.

Even with these latter-day improvements, not all women acquitted themselves well. At first, everything went according to plan, recalled one woman of her initial efforts at using a paper pattern to make a "waist," or blouse. "The directions were easy to follow and I succeeded in saving a great deal of cloth." But when it came time to try on the garment, it "wrinkled here and there in a strange way that puzzled me. I took it off and looked at it, but could discover nothing wrong; again I put it on and took it off in despair, and finally after taking in a seam here and letting out one there, and pulling and smoothing all to no effect, I became disgusted and threw the waist across the room and shed bitter, bitter tears." Some women deafly lacked the requisite skills, or else they found sewing much too tedious. Women wrote to say they didn't know how to sew, an exasperated Emma Hooper noted. They would have to learn, she told them. Other women wrote to say they loved to sew but sewing made them nervous. To them, Hooper suggested "they try to sew when tired and to rest every fifteen or twenty minutes."

Such sage advice, for all its good intentions, frequently fell on deaf ears. Many American women, lacking either the manual or the mental dexterity required to sew, relied instead on their elders or on the kindness of strangers to obtain their clothes. In households across America, clothing led many lives: a pair of pants worn by Johnny one year was invariably handed down to younger brother Jimmy the next, and a dress worn by Margaret was passed on to her baby sister Molly. The practice of hand-me-downs was as regular as the seasons and just as essential. Critical to the household economy, hand-me-downs could either be worn as they had been or taken apart and reassembled to make something new. Writing in Good Housekeeping in 1885, Helen N. Packard urged modern mothers to take the time and trouble to make "little knee pants" for their young sons from the jackets and trousers discarded by the older men of the house: "It certainly requires no more patience or brains than crazy patchwork and is far more useful."

Meanwhile, those favored mortals blessed with affluence and able to outfit themselves as well as their sons and daughters in new rather than renovated clothing were encouraged to donate their discards to charity. The lady of the house should see to it that outworn clothing did not "become food for ... moths," advised the bible of sanitary science. "But rather she will cast her mind around to see on whom she can bestow" these items, "where they will be sure to be utilized." There would be people somewhere who would have their "hearts gladdened and their bodies made warm and neat at slight expense and trouble." Taking such suggestions to heart, church and synagogue sisterhoods as well as women's associations like the New-York Clothing Society for the Relief of the Industrious Poor and the Hebrew Ladies Sewing Society of Alabama made sure to help those in need. Members, "busy in the interest of others," got together several afternoons a week to make clothes for those less fortunate, a task as enjoyable as it was necessary. One devotee was so proud of her group's output that she likened her temple's sewing room to a commercial establishment. When not sewing, women's groups collected items they or their kinfolk had either outgrown or tired of wearing and, through "gift chests," rummage sales, and bazaars, saw to their distribution. In each instance, clothing was the currency of women's philanthropy.

Women's organizations also tried their hand at running thrift shops where, it was hoped, consumers would not feel like second-class citizens for having purchased something secondhand. In an atmosphere redolent of a "little" ladies dress shop, the thrift shop married the principles of merchandising with charity, treating those in need as customers rather than as supplicants. Every item received was carefully inspected, sensibly priced, and attractively displayed. Along the way, the thrift shop succeeded in generating a good deal of income for its charitable sponsors. What better incentive than charity, after all, to get women to rummage through the family attic in search of something to give away? The thrift shop also succeeded in professionalizing women's skills. "After an apprenticeship in thrift-shop merchandising, even a novice becomes as confident as any careerist," declared a representative of the Council of Jewish Women, noting how the Council Shop encouraged women to draw on their "latent flair for advertising." Ultimately, the thrift shop was more than just a morally uplifting form of housekeeping or a big moneymaker, one of its fans explained. "It means dignity and self-respect for many families .... They pay for what they get and they select what they please." Besides, she added, "it's a lot of fun."

The secondhand clothing store went even further than the thrift shop in its commercializing of hand-me-downs and castoffs. An outright business venture, traffic in used clothing flourished in metropolitan America. With the cry "I buy! I cash clothes!" ringing through the streets, the presence of the "ole-clo's man" was familiar to generations of urban American housewives. Carrying brown wrapping paper for his purchases and a tightly folded newspaper ("This is the sign I buy, he says"), the old-clothes peddler canvassed the city for hours on end in search of discarded clothing, purchasing a pair of shoes for a quarter and a suit for a dollar. "I like to walk," said one peddler, explaining why he took up the trade in the first place. "I like the fresh air." By the end of the day, piles of used clothing would find a temporary resting place atop the dusty, cramped shelves of a secondhand retail clothing store. For years, the stock-in-trade of the secondhand store consisted almost entirely of men's furnishings and its clientele of men in straitened circumstances. "Fully 50% of men's clothing finds it way into the secondhand stores or is offered for sale on the streets," observed Harper's Weekly in 1911, devoting a full page to a colorful description of New York's secondhand clothing trade, where "one buys and sells without fear and without reproach." Downtown, at the site of the "greatest secondhand clothing business in the New or in the old World"--or, for that matter, in the other urban immigrant enclaves that clothing dealers called home--male customers could purchase a pair of trousers ("always known as `pants' in that locality") for fifteen cents, an overcoat for twenty. Women's apparel, in contrast, comprised a small fraction of the secondhand clothing store's stock, at least before the advent of ready-to-wear. The gentler sex, it seemed, had a "knack for remaking and remodeling their garments so many times that, when at last ... their days of usefulness have passed, they are then fit only for the bag of the rag-picker."

There were some exceptions: women who sold their things and women who bought them. In the wake of the First World War, it became common practice, especially among society women, to sell their cast-off clothing, explained Aaron Kosofsky, reportedly the largest secondhand dealer in the world, with estimated revenues of $3 million a year. The "rich society leader," having worn an expensive gown two or three times, tired of it and sold it to someone like him, sending "Fifi, the French maid, or James, the butler, to do the bargaining. Usually, the butler and the maid drive better bargains than Madame would drive herself." Customers included shopgirls and stenographers, "business girls," aspiring actresses, teachers, and the wives of underpaid postmen, firemen, and other civil service employees. For $12 or $15 they could purchase a gown or a frock that originally cost anywhere from $125 to $200; typically, it was not only in mint condition but in the very latest style, to boot.

Even so, delight at finding a wonderfully priced and fashionable, if slightly worn, dress or suit went only so far. Often, it carried a steep emotional price. "It is no light achievement, the living up to and into other people's clothes," recalled one man. "Clothes acquire so much personality from their first wearer--they adjust themselves to the swell of the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in the hip joint--that the first wearer always wears them." The first wearer left a permanent imprint in other ways as well, making subsequent wearers feel as if they inhabited someone's else soul or, worse still, had none to call their own. As Fanny Brice poignantly put it in her signature song:

It's no wonder that I feel abused,

I never have a thing that ain't been used.

I'm wearing second hand hats, second hand clothes,

That's why they call me Second Hand Rose.

Enormously popular, the song evoked a world that associated used clothing with deprivation. But that would soon change. Thanks to the growing availability of ready-to-wear, sentiments like those voiced by Second Hand Rose were becoming less and less common and the strategies that gave rise to them less and less necessary. Fewer and fewer people whiled away the hours at the dressmaker's or the tailor's; as a result, such establishments, once ubiquitous, were in decreasing demand. Sewing, too, suffered an irreversible decline in popularity. To be sure, modern American women did not completely forsake the sewing machine for the clothes rack. Some continued to find a "deep sense of satisfaction" and "lasting contentment" in making their own clothes. Others thrilled to the prospect of saving money, of dressing "better for less." When you made your own clothes, related one enthusiast, you had more "dollars in your purse." True enough. Even more undeniable, though, was the marked change in sewing's status: once a necessity, it was fast becoming an optional pursuit. Ready-to-wear had taken its place.

Said to employ more people than the sprawling steel mills of Pittsburgh, the motorcar plants of Detroit, or the slaughterhouses of Chicago, the ready-to-wear industry, headquartered in New York City, altered America's access to and attitude toward dress. For one thing, mass-produced clothing now speedily made its way from one end of the country to the other. An intricate network of manufacturers, jobbers, and buyers, catering to a wide range of consumers, from those able to "indulge a fat purse" to those who "coddled a lean one," ensured that an "Easter parade model" fabricated in New York would easily "fit into the picture of almost any American city." Typically, a dress or a suit would travel from a fancy atelier on Fifth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, where a manufacturer of midpriced garments would produce a copy. A week or so later, a low-priced house on, say, Grand and Canal would come up with an even more inexpensive version, and so on down the chain, until the dress found itself on the racks of five-and-dimes throughout the country. Why, even farm girls, observed the New York Times in 1926, could have pretty clothes.

By that point, a dazzling array of affordable fashions beckoned from coast to coast, from department stores in midtown Manhattan to little ladies' shops in Niles, California, affording Mr. and Mrs. Consumer a great deal of latitude. Stern Brothers bragged of "distinctive new apparel authentically correct for every hour of the day," while its rival, B. Altman & Company, insisted that "clothes for men, clothes for women, for misses and for the younger set"--in fact, "everything that is new and smart in clothes for every occasion"--could be obtained at its Fifth Avenue emporium. In Los Angeles, Bullock's went a step further by classifying its wares in terms not of gender, age, or novelty but of personality, six different versions' worth, including the "romantic" ("rose-wreathed hats"), the "statuesque" ("trailing negligees"), the "artistic" ("eccentric jewelry" and berets), the "picturesque" ("soft, unassertive fabrics"), the "modern" ("boyish and sleek"), and the "conventional" ("economical dress"). As Bullock's made abundantly clear, in the world of ready-mades there was something for everyone: "adorable" bathing suits, "slenderizing fashions for stout women," sexy prom dresses, "blythe apparel for the leisure class," and jaunty chapeaux.

Even casual housedresses now hung on the racks of the nation's department stores and lingerie shops, thanks to Nell Donnelly of Kansas City. Unable to find "something bright, colorful and cheerful" to wear while working around the house, Mrs. Donnelly resolved to make her own. In no time at all, her designs won raves. "The gay, becoming house dresses ... were the marvel of the neighborhood," she proudly recalled. Encouraged by her success, Donnelly showed her designs to a local department store buyer, and the rest was history. She and her husband went into business for themselves. Though their company "lacked a Fifth Avenue address," it prospered, soon becoming a leading manufacturer. "The fact that we are able, with all of these prosaic machines, to help make thousands of homes more cheerful and thousands of women prettier at their housework ... is like a fairy tale come true," Donnelly told a reporter. "No housewife in America today need look dowdy and frumpy, unless she wants to be that way."

Appealing to the imagination and the senses, ready-made clothing reflected modern America. Practical, "serviceable clothing for life in the open" like Kamp-it garments allowed nature lovers to enjoy the great outdoors in comfort while Abercrombie & Fitch's "Lenox ulster" spoke to the "automobilist" of both sexes. Cut on "mannish lines," this coat enhanced the pleasures of driving a car, of "annihilating space and of going at full speed--thirty miles an hour--in accordance with one's fancy and caprice." Working women, in turn, looked "very alert [and] business-like" when outfitted in "honest, efficient clothes free from frills and furbelows," even as their male supervisors looked awfully "spruce" in their suits. And for a night on the town, faithful copies of the swank evening clothes worn by Hollywood stars were increasingly available at popular prices at the Style Shop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, or at the Cinema Shop at Macy's, as were numerous versions of the Little Black Dress, an item that "made so many women look impeccable, if somewhat alike."

With mass-produced creations like these, American fashion, increasingly independent of Paris, the citadel of couture and high style, transformed the nation. No matter how chic a middle-aged, middle-income Parisienne might be, she would never know the "purely American pleasure of walking to a shop in one dress and walking out in another," rhapsodized the New Yorker . Immigrants, for their part, delighted in the magic of ready-to-wear: "Cinderella clothes," one Jewish immigrant writer called them. Though much of America--its rhythms, language, and customs--may have eluded these newcomers, the act of putting on a ready-made suit or shirtwaist made them feel more at home, at least initially. On the outside, immigrants looked American even if, on the inside, they weren't, not quite yet. Newcomer Sophie Abrams, for instance, recalled standing before a mirror, outfitted in a new shirtwaist, skirt, and hat ("such a hat I had never seen"), and saying to her new self, "Boy, Sophie, look at you now ... just like an American." Rose Gallup felt much the same way about her store-bought clothes, especially her very first purchase, a navy blue cashmere dress, the "first dress I ever had that was not home-made and too large for me." Rose's new acquisition lifted her spirits. "It cost me a week's wages and many tears," she recalled. "But it was worth it. It was so pretty and gave me a great deal of joy." For Rose, Sophie, and countless immigrant women like them, ready-to-wear was not only a source of personal pleasure; ready-to-wear symbolized America--its abundance and flexibility, its choices and resources. Ready-to-wear, proclaimed Vogue , aptly capturing its essence, was "as American as turning on--and having--hot-water."

The growing popularity of the fashion show in America of the interwar years underscored fashion's expanded appeal. Manufacturers and department stores, women's auxiliaries and church groups, even 4-H clubs, found its artful blend of consumerism and theatricality hard to resist. In the South, the "mock fashion show" or "economy show," as its creators humorously dubbed it, was a staple of the farm circuit; likewise, in Muncie (aka Middletown), Indiana, "style shows" drew just about everyone in town. "Ten-cent store clerks, tired-looking mothers with children, husbands and wives watched rouged clerks promenade languorously along the tops of the show cases, displaying the latest hats, furs, dresses, shoes, parasols, bags and other accessories, while a jazz orchestra kept everybody `feeling good.'" Women's groups like the O. Clay Maxwell Club of Harlem's Mount Olivet Baptist Church and Hadassah, the preeminent Zionist women's organization, also claimed the fashion show as their own. Before long, no annual luncheon or convention was complete without some kind of "eye-filling" fashion parade at which amateur models, dressed to the nines, glided down church aisles or stepped out of papier-mâché gardens. Menswear manufacturers also favored shows. Routinely staged at conventions of tailors and other style makers, these productions tended to represent the well-to-do-man in his "natural" setting: at work, on the links, at the opera, or on the bridle path.

Some fashion shows, especially those staged several times a year by the manufacturers of exclusive fashions, were elaborate affairs, veritable panoramas of damask, gilt, and bright lights. As a trio of chamber musicians played softly in the background, one eyewitness related, a group of lithe models took their places on the

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A Perfect Fit Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America

080505488X

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