The Birth of the Modern
At the turn of the century a growing middle class, composed primarily of men and women in management and service jobs, was gaining prominence in American life. With the rise of bigger, moreefficient businesses, the triumph of the automobile, and the growth of national magazines, the broad characteristics of twentieth-century America fell into place. Americans grew more prosperous, more mobile, and more alike in their tastes and habits—all of which seemed like progress. One reason for their growing similarity was the national magazine. Although there was a vast array of magazines in nineteenth-century America, none of them commanded a particularly large audience of readers. In the 1910s, however, thanks to a combination of innovations in printing, mailing, and advertising, some magazines began to approach circulations of one million or more. The most successful of these magazines was the Ladies' Home Journal (1883-), edited by Edward Bok, Bok's magazine and rivals such as Vogue (1892—) and Harper's Bazar (1867-; became Harper's Bazaar in 1929) exerted a strong influence in the areas of women's fashion, interior decorating, homemakmg, and architecture.
Working Women
Although men headed most women's magazines, women editors, writers, artists, and fashion buyers dominated their staffs. Working women, particularly in cities, were a prominent part of the consumer culture fostered by women's magazines and those who advertised in them. This growing female workforce hoped to use their earnings to create lives for themselves that resembled those they read about in magazines and books. In the nineteenth century there was a marked difference between the dress of working-class women and that of women in the upper classes. By the 1910s, how-ever, the key difference between the clothing of the welloff and that of the working class was quality, not design. Mass-produced versions of the latest styles in clothing and dress were increasingly available and affordable. Where a middle-class woman could wear a fancy dress made of white linen with lace inserts, a working-class woman could afford a simpler cotton version that, to the casual observer, looked much the same.
Ready-to-Wear
In years past women had either made clothes for themselves and their families or, if they could afford it, had their clothes made for them by tailors. The elaborate women's wear of the nineteenth century, which included complicated undergarments, skirts and over-skirts, high lace necklines, lace-up shoes, and elaborate hats, were time consuming to create, to put on, and to care for. With the turn of the century clothing and its construction became simpler. A key component in the move toward simplicity was the emergence of clothing manufacturers who turned out streamlined, ready-to-wear garments. A woman could buy a ready-to-wear suit, inaccurately called a "tailor-made," for ten to twenty dollars, while a custom-made suit could cost hundreds of dollars. Most of the ready-to-wear manufacturing operations—overcrowded, dimly lit, and generally dangerous sweatshops—were located on the Lower East Side of New York City, where eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish, were desperate for ways to make a living.
IRENE CASTLE, TRENDSETTER
Irene Castle was one of the first entertainers to influence American fashion nationwide. As half of the popular ballroom-dancing team Vernon and Irene Castle, she was as well known for her clothing and hairstyles as for her steps on the dance floor. She bought dresses that left her legs free for dancing and favored simple flowing lines. Early in the 1910s her influence led to the popularity of a shorter, slightly bell-shaped skirt made of light-weight chiffon or tulle. She is also credited with getting women to give up their corsets and petticoats for slips and bloomers. Yet her most important fashion statement came in 1914, when she cut her hair to the nape of her neck for practical reasons just before she underwent an appendectomy. After the surgery she appeared in public wearing a seed pearl necklace on her head to keep her bobbed locks in place. As magazines clamored to spotlight her new hairstyle, the look that would define the flapper of the 1920s was born. In her autobiography Castle claimed that 250 women copied her during the week after her first public appearance and that 2,500 followed suit the following week.
Sources:
Irene Castle, as told to Bob and Wanda Duncan, Castles in tòt Air (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958);
Caroline Rennolds Milbank, New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style (New York: Abrams, 1989).
The Shirtwaist
The key item in the success of ready-to-wear clothing was the shirtwaist blouse. Created in America at the end of the nineteenth century, the shirt-waist blouse was a simple, inexpensive alternative to elaborate dresses and stiff, high-collared blouses. Worn tucked in, it created a businesslike, clean look for women. Worn pulled out of the skirt, as became the fashion in 1914, it made movement even easier and prepared the way for the dropped-waist look associated with the flapper of the 1920s. Although French fashion authorities—who had called the shots in American style and would largely continue to do so—sniffed in disdain at the shirtwaist, it launched a fashion revolution in the United States. Shirtwaists with ever-simpler necklines were available from mail-order catalogues and in stores, some for less than a dollar.
Success Brings Tragedy
By 1910 the shirtwaist was an empire unto itself, generating $60 million in revenues for ready-to-wear manufacturers. Unfortunately, as this boom increased the demand for the product, more and more women were working under dangerous conditions in sweatshops. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan went up in flames. The fire killed 146 female workers, who were trapped in the cramped building that housed the business. Although the tragedy led to improvements in labor laws and building codes, oppressive sweatshops continued to play a key role in the economics of the ready-to-wear industry.
Active Wear for Active Women
The bicycle craze of the late nineteenth century captivated both sexes, and women donned bloomers to participate in the new sport. In 1903 the Wright brothers' successful airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, captured the imagination of a nation obsessed with innovation and invigoration—and by the 1910s outfits had been designed for women who wanted to fly airplanes. Skating, golfing, swimming, automobile driving, and dancing required new feminine attire. American ready-to-wear manufacturers such as Max Meyer and Peter Thompson and catalogue-sales companies such as Lane Bryant profited by offering attire such as fur-trimmed skating outfits and driving veils.
Simplified Clothing
Newly active women demanded simplified clothes that suited their active daily lives, Time spent lacing corsets, layering petti-coats, and fastening eyelets—all of which was absolutely necessary to achieve the unnatural S-shaped silhouette of earlier decades—seemed like time wasted. Petticoats and corsets were replaced by bloomers and slips, following the style of the nation-ally known dancing sensation Irene Castle. The loud color palette of Victorian fabrics gave way to a much more restrained spectrum, reinforced by Europeans' adoption of black and white as fashion mainstays after the death in 1910 of King Edward VII Women even stopped changing from day dresses into dinner or evening dresses, preferring to add or subtract accessories for formal or informal occasions. Women's Wear Daily, founded in 1910, lampooned this "shocking" tendency, deriding the outfit it called "The Transformable Quadruple Gown." Yet by the time America entered World War I, the all-day dress would become a matter of fashion gospel.
Mass Production
The trend toward simplicity suited mass manufacturers. New dresses could be pulled over the head and fitted with a belt. Flounces and detailing added to production costs and manufacturing problems—and middle-class women of the 1910s were just as happy without them. The long, flowing skirts of earlier times used excesses of fabric that taxed manufacturers' resources—so skirts grew shorter, up to six inches above the ground, and more streamlined, in a way that suited active women. In ten short years American women went from looking like corseted Victorian matrons to bearing a striking resemblance to the flapper of the 1920s.
Hats
Although hats continued to be an essential part of a woman's public wardrobe, they grew simpler as well. The final year of the mammoth, broad-brimmed hat festooned with plumes from exotic birds was 1910. Foot-long hatpins, which had been necessary to keep those creations from falling from women's heads, disappeared as hats took on manageable proportions. A trim, turban-style headpiece or a neatly geometric hat in pale-colored felt replaced the hats of years past. Dramatic feathers were still used on occasion, particularly for evening wear, but they were never again used quite as lavishly.
THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASHIONS
In February 1913 the Ladies' Home Journal reported, "It looks for the first time as if a distinct movement toward American-designed fashions for American women were under way." When American fashion had made the news in the past, the editors reflected, those instances were just "spasmodic waves." Now that Parisian couturiers were changing styles with the seasons instead of creating timeless clothing, they predicted that things would be different. The American woman needed practical fashions: "In other words when a woman buys a hat or a dress she is entitled to get reasonable wear out of it in return for her money. For her suddenly to discover that the hat or dress is "out of style," with the materials still perfectly good, is an injustice." American designers should look to their own heritage and circumstances to find the materials for a truly American style, the editors observed, because "Our architects, our musicians, our artists and our writers have laid a sturdy foundation in their different schools of art adapted to American conditions. Why should American women longer suffer from the ignominious proposition of being told what to wear and how long to wear it by people three thousand miles away?"
Source:
"The Coming of American Fashions," Ladies' Home Journal, 30 (February 1913): 5.
Parisian Couture
Wealthy, status-conscious American women had heeded the dictates of Paris-based couturiers for decades. Influential design houses such as those of Paul Poiret, Mademoiselle Paquin, and the Callot Soeurs used the most sumptuous fabrics and the most elaborate methods of construction to give their rich clients palpably luxurious clothing. But in the 1910s extravagant wardrobes were growing less and less appropriate even for American women in the most self-consciously blue-blooded families. As a result, French couture became increasingly understated to suit the tastes of its patrons.
American Fashion Independence
In the 1910s the American fashion industry began to create its own identity separate from the whims of Parisian tastemakers. In December 1912 the head of the newly formed Society of American Fashions pointed out that many other American designers had been sewing Parisian labels into their American-made clothes to attract buyers, and Thurn, one of the most prominent import and custom-made American clothing houses, admitted that it had done just that. Yet the first hint of American fashion independence had come a few years earlier. After spring 1910, when Parisian designers showed the hobble skirt, cut so narrow at the ankles that it severely restricted a woman's ability to walk, the American Ladies' Tailors Association fought back. In October they introduced a "suffragette suit," which featured a skirt that was divided down the middle, allowing the wearer to take long, bold strides.
American Designs
An even bigger boost to American fashion came in February 1913, when The New York Times announced the winners of its fashion contest. The winning designs in The New York Times contest were self-consciously American, some almost laughably so. The first-prize evening dress, made of putty-colored silk and blue chiffon, was meant to evoke the palette of American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler. The second-prize afternoon dress was based on Quaker costumes, and the winning hats were modeled after the cotton boll and the American Beauty rose. Yet such excesses of patriotism did not dim enthusiasm for the event in the fashion world. Society columns reported that society women were proudly sporting the works of American designers. Retailers began to trade on the Americanness of their merchandise instead of emphasizing their connections to European designers. Bloomingdale's, Bonwit Teller, and others featured emphatically American designs in their advertisements. The Ladies' Home Journal even took out an advertisement claiming credit for being the first to promote American design and promising to publish pictures of President Woodrow Wilson's wife and her daughters wearing American dresses.
The War in Europe
In 1914, as war threatened to close down the all-important Paris shows, Americans were poised to take over fashion. Edna Woolman Chase, an editor at Vogue, arranged the New York Fashion Fete, featuring such American talents as fashion importers and custom-clothing designers Henri Bendel, who had added a ready-to-wear department to his Fifth Avenue clothing store in 1910, and the team of Herman Bergdorf and Edwin Goodman, who opened their own Fifth Avenue store in 1914. But European couture managed to survive the war. Paris designers did not miss a season until World War II. Some observers claimed that World War I seemed to make Parisian fashions more desirable—indeed, when Paul Poiret visited New York in 1916, he found an abundance of counterfeit Poiret clothes. Nevertheless, the most prominent—and extravagant—design houses, such as Poiret, Paquin, and the Callot Soeurs, found their American market much smaller after the war. American tastes ran toward the simpler, sportier designs of Europeans who worked with sensible fabrics such as rayon and wool—young talents including Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, Jean Patou, and Madeleine Vionnet. The designers who kept up with the needs of modern femininity did a brisk business. By the end of the war American women were at last spending as much on their own clothing as they did on their husbands'.
At the turn of the century a growing middle class, composed primarily of men and women in management and service jobs, was gaining prominence in American life. With the rise of bigger, moreefficient businesses, the triumph of the automobile, and the growth of national magazines, the broad characteristics of twentieth-century America fell into place. Americans grew more prosperous, more mobile, and more alike in their tastes and habits—all of which seemed like progress. One reason for their growing similarity was the national magazine. Although there was a vast array of magazines in nineteenth-century America, none of them commanded a particularly large audience of readers. In the 1910s, however, thanks to a combination of innovations in printing, mailing, and advertising, some magazines began to approach circulations of one million or more. The most successful of these magazines was the Ladies' Home Journal (1883-), edited by Edward Bok, Bok's magazine and rivals such as Vogue (1892—) and Harper's Bazar (1867-; became Harper's Bazaar in 1929) exerted a strong influence in the areas of women's fashion, interior decorating, homemakmg, and architecture.
Working Women
Although men headed most women's magazines, women editors, writers, artists, and fashion buyers dominated their staffs. Working women, particularly in cities, were a prominent part of the consumer culture fostered by women's magazines and those who advertised in them. This growing female workforce hoped to use their earnings to create lives for themselves that resembled those they read about in magazines and books. In the nineteenth century there was a marked difference between the dress of working-class women and that of women in the upper classes. By the 1910s, how-ever, the key difference between the clothing of the welloff and that of the working class was quality, not design. Mass-produced versions of the latest styles in clothing and dress were increasingly available and affordable. Where a middle-class woman could wear a fancy dress made of white linen with lace inserts, a working-class woman could afford a simpler cotton version that, to the casual observer, looked much the same.
Ready-to-Wear
In years past women had either made clothes for themselves and their families or, if they could afford it, had their clothes made for them by tailors. The elaborate women's wear of the nineteenth century, which included complicated undergarments, skirts and over-skirts, high lace necklines, lace-up shoes, and elaborate hats, were time consuming to create, to put on, and to care for. With the turn of the century clothing and its construction became simpler. A key component in the move toward simplicity was the emergence of clothing manufacturers who turned out streamlined, ready-to-wear garments. A woman could buy a ready-to-wear suit, inaccurately called a "tailor-made," for ten to twenty dollars, while a custom-made suit could cost hundreds of dollars. Most of the ready-to-wear manufacturing operations—overcrowded, dimly lit, and generally dangerous sweatshops—were located on the Lower East Side of New York City, where eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish, were desperate for ways to make a living.
IRENE CASTLE, TRENDSETTER
Irene Castle was one of the first entertainers to influence American fashion nationwide. As half of the popular ballroom-dancing team Vernon and Irene Castle, she was as well known for her clothing and hairstyles as for her steps on the dance floor. She bought dresses that left her legs free for dancing and favored simple flowing lines. Early in the 1910s her influence led to the popularity of a shorter, slightly bell-shaped skirt made of light-weight chiffon or tulle. She is also credited with getting women to give up their corsets and petticoats for slips and bloomers. Yet her most important fashion statement came in 1914, when she cut her hair to the nape of her neck for practical reasons just before she underwent an appendectomy. After the surgery she appeared in public wearing a seed pearl necklace on her head to keep her bobbed locks in place. As magazines clamored to spotlight her new hairstyle, the look that would define the flapper of the 1920s was born. In her autobiography Castle claimed that 250 women copied her during the week after her first public appearance and that 2,500 followed suit the following week.
Sources:
Irene Castle, as told to Bob and Wanda Duncan, Castles in tòt Air (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958);
Caroline Rennolds Milbank, New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style (New York: Abrams, 1989).
The Shirtwaist
The key item in the success of ready-to-wear clothing was the shirtwaist blouse. Created in America at the end of the nineteenth century, the shirt-waist blouse was a simple, inexpensive alternative to elaborate dresses and stiff, high-collared blouses. Worn tucked in, it created a businesslike, clean look for women. Worn pulled out of the skirt, as became the fashion in 1914, it made movement even easier and prepared the way for the dropped-waist look associated with the flapper of the 1920s. Although French fashion authorities—who had called the shots in American style and would largely continue to do so—sniffed in disdain at the shirtwaist, it launched a fashion revolution in the United States. Shirtwaists with ever-simpler necklines were available from mail-order catalogues and in stores, some for less than a dollar.
Success Brings Tragedy
By 1910 the shirtwaist was an empire unto itself, generating $60 million in revenues for ready-to-wear manufacturers. Unfortunately, as this boom increased the demand for the product, more and more women were working under dangerous conditions in sweatshops. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan went up in flames. The fire killed 146 female workers, who were trapped in the cramped building that housed the business. Although the tragedy led to improvements in labor laws and building codes, oppressive sweatshops continued to play a key role in the economics of the ready-to-wear industry.
Active Wear for Active Women
The bicycle craze of the late nineteenth century captivated both sexes, and women donned bloomers to participate in the new sport. In 1903 the Wright brothers' successful airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, captured the imagination of a nation obsessed with innovation and invigoration—and by the 1910s outfits had been designed for women who wanted to fly airplanes. Skating, golfing, swimming, automobile driving, and dancing required new feminine attire. American ready-to-wear manufacturers such as Max Meyer and Peter Thompson and catalogue-sales companies such as Lane Bryant profited by offering attire such as fur-trimmed skating outfits and driving veils.
Simplified Clothing
Newly active women demanded simplified clothes that suited their active daily lives, Time spent lacing corsets, layering petti-coats, and fastening eyelets—all of which was absolutely necessary to achieve the unnatural S-shaped silhouette of earlier decades—seemed like time wasted. Petticoats and corsets were replaced by bloomers and slips, following the style of the nation-ally known dancing sensation Irene Castle. The loud color palette of Victorian fabrics gave way to a much more restrained spectrum, reinforced by Europeans' adoption of black and white as fashion mainstays after the death in 1910 of King Edward VII Women even stopped changing from day dresses into dinner or evening dresses, preferring to add or subtract accessories for formal or informal occasions. Women's Wear Daily, founded in 1910, lampooned this "shocking" tendency, deriding the outfit it called "The Transformable Quadruple Gown." Yet by the time America entered World War I, the all-day dress would become a matter of fashion gospel.
Mass Production
The trend toward simplicity suited mass manufacturers. New dresses could be pulled over the head and fitted with a belt. Flounces and detailing added to production costs and manufacturing problems—and middle-class women of the 1910s were just as happy without them. The long, flowing skirts of earlier times used excesses of fabric that taxed manufacturers' resources—so skirts grew shorter, up to six inches above the ground, and more streamlined, in a way that suited active women. In ten short years American women went from looking like corseted Victorian matrons to bearing a striking resemblance to the flapper of the 1920s.
Hats
Although hats continued to be an essential part of a woman's public wardrobe, they grew simpler as well. The final year of the mammoth, broad-brimmed hat festooned with plumes from exotic birds was 1910. Foot-long hatpins, which had been necessary to keep those creations from falling from women's heads, disappeared as hats took on manageable proportions. A trim, turban-style headpiece or a neatly geometric hat in pale-colored felt replaced the hats of years past. Dramatic feathers were still used on occasion, particularly for evening wear, but they were never again used quite as lavishly.
THE RISE OF AMERICAN FASHIONS
In February 1913 the Ladies' Home Journal reported, "It looks for the first time as if a distinct movement toward American-designed fashions for American women were under way." When American fashion had made the news in the past, the editors reflected, those instances were just "spasmodic waves." Now that Parisian couturiers were changing styles with the seasons instead of creating timeless clothing, they predicted that things would be different. The American woman needed practical fashions: "In other words when a woman buys a hat or a dress she is entitled to get reasonable wear out of it in return for her money. For her suddenly to discover that the hat or dress is "out of style," with the materials still perfectly good, is an injustice." American designers should look to their own heritage and circumstances to find the materials for a truly American style, the editors observed, because "Our architects, our musicians, our artists and our writers have laid a sturdy foundation in their different schools of art adapted to American conditions. Why should American women longer suffer from the ignominious proposition of being told what to wear and how long to wear it by people three thousand miles away?"
Source:
"The Coming of American Fashions," Ladies' Home Journal, 30 (February 1913): 5.
Parisian Couture
Wealthy, status-conscious American women had heeded the dictates of Paris-based couturiers for decades. Influential design houses such as those of Paul Poiret, Mademoiselle Paquin, and the Callot Soeurs used the most sumptuous fabrics and the most elaborate methods of construction to give their rich clients palpably luxurious clothing. But in the 1910s extravagant wardrobes were growing less and less appropriate even for American women in the most self-consciously blue-blooded families. As a result, French couture became increasingly understated to suit the tastes of its patrons.
American Fashion Independence
In the 1910s the American fashion industry began to create its own identity separate from the whims of Parisian tastemakers. In December 1912 the head of the newly formed Society of American Fashions pointed out that many other American designers had been sewing Parisian labels into their American-made clothes to attract buyers, and Thurn, one of the most prominent import and custom-made American clothing houses, admitted that it had done just that. Yet the first hint of American fashion independence had come a few years earlier. After spring 1910, when Parisian designers showed the hobble skirt, cut so narrow at the ankles that it severely restricted a woman's ability to walk, the American Ladies' Tailors Association fought back. In October they introduced a "suffragette suit," which featured a skirt that was divided down the middle, allowing the wearer to take long, bold strides.
American Designs
An even bigger boost to American fashion came in February 1913, when The New York Times announced the winners of its fashion contest. The winning designs in The New York Times contest were self-consciously American, some almost laughably so. The first-prize evening dress, made of putty-colored silk and blue chiffon, was meant to evoke the palette of American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler. The second-prize afternoon dress was based on Quaker costumes, and the winning hats were modeled after the cotton boll and the American Beauty rose. Yet such excesses of patriotism did not dim enthusiasm for the event in the fashion world. Society columns reported that society women were proudly sporting the works of American designers. Retailers began to trade on the Americanness of their merchandise instead of emphasizing their connections to European designers. Bloomingdale's, Bonwit Teller, and others featured emphatically American designs in their advertisements. The Ladies' Home Journal even took out an advertisement claiming credit for being the first to promote American design and promising to publish pictures of President Woodrow Wilson's wife and her daughters wearing American dresses.
The War in Europe
In 1914, as war threatened to close down the all-important Paris shows, Americans were poised to take over fashion. Edna Woolman Chase, an editor at Vogue, arranged the New York Fashion Fete, featuring such American talents as fashion importers and custom-clothing designers Henri Bendel, who had added a ready-to-wear department to his Fifth Avenue clothing store in 1910, and the team of Herman Bergdorf and Edwin Goodman, who opened their own Fifth Avenue store in 1914. But European couture managed to survive the war. Paris designers did not miss a season until World War II. Some observers claimed that World War I seemed to make Parisian fashions more desirable—indeed, when Paul Poiret visited New York in 1916, he found an abundance of counterfeit Poiret clothes. Nevertheless, the most prominent—and extravagant—design houses, such as Poiret, Paquin, and the Callot Soeurs, found their American market much smaller after the war. American tastes ran toward the simpler, sportier designs of Europeans who worked with sensible fabrics such as rayon and wool—young talents including Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, Jean Patou, and Madeleine Vionnet. The designers who kept up with the needs of modern femininity did a brisk business. By the end of the war American women were at last spending as much on their own clothing as they did on their husbands'.
