American designers are some of the biggest names in fashion today: Marc Jacobs and Michael Kors, Tory Burch and The Row’s Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Ralph Lauren made Americana romantic, Thom Browne made shrunken suits masculine, and Halston and Calvin Klein—at different points in their careers—made minimalism chic.
But it wasn’t always that way, according to “Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion,” a fascinating new book by Nancy MacDonell (St. Martin’s Press, Aug. 27).
Before World War II, MacDonell writes, American designers worked in anonymity, looking to Paris for “inspiration.”
Some went to haute couture shows to sketch Chanel or Patou outfits for their bosses to copy at home.
Some sew off-the-shelf versions based on patterns purchased from French couturiers.
Some literally stole from the salons of Paris.
Few had the freedom – or the support – to produce something truly independent.
And while New York’s Seventh Avenue boasted the best manufacturers in the world, producing Chanel of higher quality than Chanel, it mostly churned out slavish copies of the so-called “Paris originals.”
Then the Nazis invaded France in 1940, cutting off the fashion industry from the rest of the world.
Suddenly, the US had to develop its own sense of style, without the French.
And it was done.
In fact, MacDonell writes, “American fashion didn’t just survive the war; flourished.”
MacDonell credits this achievement to a group of female editors, designers, buyers and publicists in New York City.
These women, she argues, helped define the “American look” and made the US a fashion powerhouse: a “billion-dollar industry that employs millions of people around the globe and that shapes the way we dress every day.”
They included the radical designers Elizabeth Hawes and Claire McCardell, whose light, elegant and free-flowing “monastic dress” created a sensation and epitomized American chic; Marjorie Griswold and Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, who turned the store into a temple showcasing the best of American design; Eleanor Lambert, who promoted young American talent at home and abroad; and photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who along with legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, made these American models look so glamorous.
“They all had a common belief: that fashion could be both beautiful and democratic,” writes MacDonell. “Their elasticity changed the way we all think about the clothes we wear.”
American couturiers who created clothes independent of Paris existed before the war, but they were rare.
Some, like Valentina and Jessie Turner Franklin, had some fame, thanks to famous clients like Katharine Hepburn.
But Elizabeth Hawes was the first truly famous American designer and the first to publicly question the “French Legend.”
Hawes was a bright-eyed 22-year-old graduate from New Jersey who hoped to enter the fashion business when she arrived in Paris in 1925.
Her friend’s mother got Hawes her first job, at a design firm that (to Hawes’ horror) illegally produced and sold replica French dresses.
Hawes spent three years in Paris, knocking down French fashion for a variety of businesses.
She posed as a fashion client to get samples to copy, walked into fashion shows so she could sketch the best looks.
She studied smuggled muslin patterns and “borrowed” samples so that a team of patterns and sewers could produce fashion facsimiles for the American market.
In the process, MacDonell writes, “she had discovered that her cherished vision of Paris fashion was a lie.” Hawes returned to the United States in 1928 and opened her own custom fashion label, which catered to “American women”.
She offered smart, modern, distinctive clothes, free of frills, tulle and frippery. (Hawes really hated the fuss; she even married her second husband in blue jeans.)
McCardell also wrote articles and books condemning the “French Legend”—the idea, held since the 16th century, that “Paris equaled fashion” and that “everyone everywhere else” simply followed its dictates.
“It made no sense, Hawes noted, that just because the Marquise de X wore a particular dress to the races at Auteuil, a typist in Brooklyn should wear the same style to Coney Island,” MacDonell writes.
However, American fashion leaders refused to question the French way.
“In the 1930s, as they had done for decades, the couturiers of Paris wore American taste on a silk thread,” MacDonell writes.
It all came crashing down on June 14, 1940, when the Nazis attacked Paris, wrapping the swastika over the Arc de Triomphe..
The news shocked the world. Paris was the ninth European capital to fall to the Germans.
In the US, however, fashion executives and editors panicked for a different reason.
Now that the Germans had occupied Paris, they cut off his fashion from the rest of the world.
How would Americans know what to wear – or create – without France’s guidance?
On July 11, a group of women in the industry called an emergency meeting at Manhattan’s Biltmore Hotel to strategize how to move forward.
Some executives even went to Los Angeles to beg Hollywood clients to create versions of their silver screen models to send to New York producers to copy.
They didn’t have much faith in Seventh Avenue.
Fashion magazines put on a brave face: Vogue, Bazaar and Life prepared for their first September issues featuring all local talent.
They portrayed the purchase of American design as a woman’s patriotic duty. More than that, they made it look sensational. (They were lucky enough to find the ideal model, blonde actress Lauren Bacall, who embodied the calm, wholesome ideal of the “American girl.”)
It helped that the first American collections were actually good: “ornate and thin, with a lack of art that suggested real-life uses,” MacDonell writes.
And they only got better. Youngsters like McCardell – whose innovations included dress pockets, mixed jerseys, playsuits and detachable hoods – soon insisted that her name be put on the label, elevating her status to that of a French designer. . of a peon working for a larger corporation.
By the time the Allies liberated Paris, four years after it fell to the Germans, Seventh Avenue was not just a center of manufacturing, but a center of innovative and exciting design.
The fashion industry had barely survived the war – with many of its remaining designers accused of collaborating with the Nazis. And as Parisian fashion began to roar in 1946, with the arrival of Christian Dior’s nostalgic New Look, New York’s female designers continued to create clothes for independent, working women.
Moreover, they created a template for the production of ready-to-wear and cheap, forward-thinking clothing that could be exported all over the world, including France.
Today, even the strongest fashion houses have ready-to-wear collections that consumers can buy off the rack, from Dior to Chanel.
And American designers from the Olsen twins on The Row to Thom Browne debut their collections in Paris.
MacDonell ends her book not in the 1940s, but in the 1970s, with the famous extravaganza of the Battle of Versailles, in which American designers competed against the French Old Guard in a fashion crash to save the crumbling palace of Louis XIV .
How fitting that a group of badass Americans (including Halston, Stephen Burrows and Anne Klein) would outbid Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin in the opulent house that the Sun King built.
The French legend, at that moment, was finally destroyed.
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