Elizabeth Hawes
Elizabeth Hawes was an American clothing designer, outspoken critic of the fashion industry, and champion of ready to wear and people's right to have the clothes they desired, rather than the clothes dictated to be fashionable, an idea encapsulated in her book Fashion Is Spinach, published in 1938. She was among the first American apparel designers to establish their reputations outside of Paris haute couture. In addition to her work in the fashion industry as a sketcher, copyist, stylist, and journalist, and designer, she was an author, union organizer, champion of gender equality, and political activist.
Early life
Elizabeth Hawes was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the second child of four. Her father was an assistant manager for the Southern Pacific Company, and her mother worked on the Board of Education and was actively involved in local politics, especially the rights of the local African-American community. She had graduated from Vassar in 1925 and headed the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for Bergen County, New Jersey, from 1932 to 1936. The family lived an average middle-class existence in a shingle house in a commuter town about twenty-five miles from New York City.Hawes' mother was an early advocate of Montessori education, and taught her children various handicrafts, such as raffia basket-weaving and beadwork. At the age of 10, Hawes also made clothes and hats for her dolls, before beginning to sew her own clothes. When she was 12 years old, she began dressmaking professionally by making clothes for the young children of her mother's friends. She also sold a few children's dresses to a shop called The Greenaway Shop in Haverford, Pennsylvania. This brief, precocious career ceased when she went to high school and while she continued making her own clothes, she ceased to make them for others. She attended Ridgewood High School and had originally planned to attend art school.
Education
Like her mother and elder sister Charlotte, she attended Vassar. She was very intelligent and a good student, passing her comprehensives without difficulty. During her freshman year, she assisted the costume designer for the annual outdoor play. She found she was good at the compulsory courses, such as mathematics and chemistry, getting A grades, but was bored by the literature and art courses she chose to take, only earning B's. She chose to focus on economics, eventually working up to advanced Economic Theory. Her thesis, based upon the words of Ramsay MacDonald, gained her an A.In her free time, Hawes focused on clothing. In 1923, at the end of her sophomore year, she went on a six-week course at Parson's School of Fine and Applied Arts, where she decided no art school could teach her how to design clothes. While the students did life drawing, Hawes was exasperated that nobody mentioned anatomy to her, which she felt was necessary if she wanted to dress "living human beings who had bones and muscles". She decided she needed more useful experience, so, during the 1924 summer break, she secured an unpaid apprenticeship in the Bergdorf Goodman workrooms, to learn how expensive clothes were made to order. Before she left to return to college, the French imports came into the store, and she decided she wanted to travel to France to find out what fashion was all about.
Hawes only had $25 a month for all her expenses, including clothing, so raising the funds for her proposed trip posed a problem. First, she tried to graduate six months early in the year of 1924–25 as she had enough credits. However, as the Dean of the college had decided that no diplomas could be given out before the end of four full years, Hawes was unable to leave early. Eventually, she resumed dressmaking, designing clothes for her classmates, and selling her designs through a dress shop on the edge of the campus. She earned a few hundred dollars through commissions from the shop. She also advertised her services in the Vassar paper.
Despite a brief crisis where Hawes wondered if she should be devoting her life to humanitarian work, she was advised by her economics teacher to take advantage of her clothing-focused gifts and desires. She graduated in the spring of 1925, and prepared to set sail for Paris that July. As her mother was a prominent local citizen, the Newark News decided to interview Elizabeth before she left. This interview, when published, led to a woman from the advertising department for a department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, offering Hawes $15 a month to report back fashion news from Paris for their advertising copy. Inspired by this, Hawes asked her local newspaper if they wanted a regular report from Paris. They accepted this offer, and offered her $10 a month to do so.
She graduated from Vassar in 1925.
On July 8, 1925, Elizabeth Hawes and a friend, Evelyn Johnson, sailed for France on the, student third-class.
Fashion career in Paris (1925–1928)
Hawes and Johnson arrived at Cherbourg on July 14, 1925, and moved into a pension in Paris. Johnson's mother arranged for Hawes to work at her dressmaker's on the Faubourg St Honoré, a shop where high quality, illegal copies of haute couture dresses by the leading couturiers were manufactured and sold. It boasted that it never copied a couture dress without actually having had the original in hand. There Hawes sold clothing to non-French-speaking Americans and tried to secure new customers. The house closed every July and August to enable legitimate couturiers such as Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet to produce their collections. Hawes sometimes visited a couture salon as a legitimate customer and purchased a dress to be copied. At the Ritz, Hawes saw her employers' counterfeit Chanel worn alongside the genuine ones.In January 1926, Hawes became a sketcher for a New York manufacturer of mass-produced clothing. She would memorize the dresses during fashion shows and sketch afterwards. By the summer of 1926, Hawes grew too guilty about stealing designs to continue. She became a full-time fashion correspondent for the Cosmos Newspaper Syndicate, contributing to a regular article that appeared in the New York Post, Detroit Free Press, The Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers. This led to a regular column for the New Yorker under the pen name "Parisite", which ran for three years. She worked as a fashion buyer for Macy's, and then as a stylist in Lord and Taylor's Paris offices. In April 1928, Main Bocher, editor of Paris Vogue, offered her a job, but when she explained her ambition was to design he secured her a job with Nicole Groult, the sister of Paul Poiret. In this position, Hawes was permitted to develop her own designs, as well as work alongside Groult and her assistant designer. Working alongside these experienced designers, Hawes developed her method of designing based upon Vionnet's technique of draping on a wooden mannequin.
Fashion career in America (1928–1940)
Hawes returned to New York in 1928. She hoped to fill a niche in the American market, where only Jessie Franklin Turner designed and made gowns to order, and the other competition was made to order or ready-to-wear copies of French fashion. In October, Hawes joined up with Rosemary Harden, the cousin of a friend, to open Hawes-Harden, a shop on the fourth floor of 8 West 56th Street, New York. The duo presented their first collection on December 16, 1928, Hawes' 25th birthday. Hawes-Harden sold its own designs only and made clothes to order using quality materials, well-sewn and well-fitted. Hawes-Harden gradually attracted a clientele that appreciated "original without being eccentric" designs. One of the first notable clients was Lynn Fontanne, who became a regular customer for Hawes' designs, and who wore the first stage costumes that Hawes made.In 1930, Harden sold her share of the company to Hawes. Hawes used advertising and publicity and was very cautious with expenses to enable her business to survive the Great Depression. She also sold small decorative works designed for her by Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi, friends from her years in Paris. On July 4, 1931, Hawes presented her collection in Paris. It was the first time that a non-French design house had shown its collection during the Paris season, which won Hawes a great deal of media attention.
On April 13, 1932, Hawes, along with Annette Simpson and Edith Reuss, was featured in a show of American fashion designers at Lord & Taylor. The three women were credited with working towards creating an American style. A second show featured Hawes alongside Clare Potter and Muriel King. These innovative promotions led to a flood of newspaper and magazine articles on American fashion designers. Hawes generated publicity with humorous political names for her collections, including "The Five-Year Plan", "The Yellow Peril", and "Disarmament". The overall style was bold: "wide stripes and large prints were used in simple, comfortable silhouettes", by one account. She advocated trousers for women and followed her own advice.
In 1933, Hawes hired herself to a dress manufacturer to design ready-made clothes. She aimed to create moderately-priced designs that brought high fashion design to the ready-to-wear customer. The venture was commercially successful, but Hawes discovered that her designs were being made from inferior materials, and she severed the business connection.
One of Hawes' most successful designs was a glove design called "Guardsman". It was a colored suede glove first designed in 1931 that buttoned on the back of the wrist. Hawes sold a handmade pair of the suede "Guardsman" gloves for $12.50. In April 1935, after she had discontinued the couture version, a red suede copy of the glove was featured in a Lucky Strike advertisement. This she manufactured and sold successfully in a ready-to-wear version, the "Lucky Strike glove".
In 1935, she showed her designs in Moscow, the first display of haute couture there since the Russian Revolution of 1917. She said that the interest of large crowds of women showed that the country was becoming stable and that people were free to express counter-revolutionary ideas without punishment. She reported seeing permanent waves and painted nails and hats, mostly berets, and dispensed fashion advice:
In 1936, she designed the costumes for two Broadway plays, Roy Hargrave's A Room in Red and White, and Triple-A Plowed Under, part of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project directed by Joseph Losey.
When Hawes had visited the Soviet Union in 1935, she either accompanied or was accompanied by Losey, who was studying the Russian stage. They married on July 24, 1937. They had a son, Gavrik Losey, in 1938.
In 1937, she presented an all-male fashion show of her own brightly colored designs, followed in 1939 by the publication of another fashion manifesto, Men Can Take It.
In 1938, Hawes published Fashion Is Spinach, an autobiographical critique and exposé of the fashion industry. The title came from a Carl Rose cartoon published in The New Yorker on December 8, 1928. At the same time as she attacked the pretense of fashion, she produced popular designs like a simple dress with a full wide skirt—one of her trademarks—worn by Joan Bennett in a Wrigley's chewing gum advertisement. Life magazine reported the commercial relationship by noting that "Elizabeth Hawes has always had, in addition to her talent for designing clothes, an equal talent for publicizing and promoting Elizabeth Hawes." The designer of the chewing gum dress, Life reported, "now sells her very expensive, made-to-order dresses from a gray stone house on East 67th Street, Manhattan."