INTRODUCTION
Before World War II, the American fashion industry was built on the conviction that the French were the only possible arbiters of style, with centuries of savoir faire to back up their claim. The clothes that were produced by American manufacturers, sold in American stores, promoted by American tastemakers, and covered in the American press were rarely the work of American designers, who spent most of their professional lives imitating or simply copying the output of their Parisian colleagues. When they ventured to express original ideas, these were all too often deemed unworthy, uninteresting, and unwanted. The result was that American designers were relegated to second-class status. And because the name of the manufacturer or the store, not the designer, appeared on the label, they often toiled in anonymity.
Elizabeth Hawes was different. Though she was Paris-trained, the American designer refused to follow Parisian dictates at her successful fashion house in New York. By the 1930s, she was a household name, and American fashion's first real star. She detailed her dim view of the practice of copying French design in a best-selling book, Fashion Is Spinach, in 1938. The American fashion industry, in Hawes's view, was continually trying to sell women what they didn't want or need—i.e., spinach—while brightly pretending it was something else. The culprit was their obsession with Paris, or what she termed "the French Legend": the widespread belief that all beautiful clothes were made by French couturiers and all women wanted those clothes. Hawes, like a handful of other American designers, had her own made-to-order business; she was, in essence, a couturier herself. Her unusual fame and success emboldened her to state publicly that it was time to put a stake through the French Legend's heart.
It made no sense, Hawes pointed out, that just because the Marquise de X wore a particular dress to the races at Auteuil that a typist in Brooklyn should wear the same style to Coney Island; women who ordered their wardrobes from haute couture houses led completely different lives, with completely different needs, from women who shopped for ready-to-wear on a budget. But American fashion executives of the era insisted on conflating these two groups of women. In the 1930s, just as they had for decades, the couturiers of Paris held American taste in a silken vise grip.
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Then the Nazis invaded Paris, and everything changed.
Fashion is not a natural codicil to war. But World War II, and specifically the fall of Paris, had a profound effect on the American fashion industry. When the Nazis marched into the French capital, the flow of ideas that had for so long been considered vital to American fashion stopped as abruptly as if a spigot had been turned. American designers were suddenly faced with the necessity of completing their fall collections without any input from Paris, a situation they had never encountered before. The manufacturers and retailers who employed them quaked at gambling on designs that lacked the preapproval of one of the great Paris couturiers. In Manhattan's Garment District, people asked themselves if American women, who had been trained to think of Paris as fashion's version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, would buy anything at all come September.
Despite its status as a powerhouse of garment production, New York City had nothing approaching the cachet of Paris when it came to determining style. To some, Hawes included, the war was an opportunity to rectify what they perceived as a wrong—New York, they argued, was just as qualified to be a fashion capital as Paris. Others felt that without Paris, New York was just a manufacturing hub, all factory and no flair. The summer of 1940 forced the issue to a head.
Those who saw American designers as flunkies best suited to adapting the work of their French betters were forced to comply with their more optimistic peers. But the more interesting story is that American fashion did not just survive the war; it thrived beyond even Elizabeth Hawes's considerable imagination. By 1945, there was genuine debate over which city, Paris or New York, would be the future capital of fashion. In four years, New York had gained the artistry and confidence to challenge the city that had dominated style since the seventeenth century.
This incredible shift, in both capability and perception, was made possible due to the efforts of a group of remarkable women.
