Elizabeth Hawes
Encyclopedia
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. In addition to her work in the fashion industry as a sketcher, copyist, stylist, and journalist, as well as a designer, she was also an author, union organizer, champion of gender equality
, and political activist. She was married twice, first to Ralph Jester in 1930 (divorced 1934) and secondly to the film director Joseph Losey
in 1937 (divorced 1944), the father of her son Gavrik Losey
. Along with Losey, she was blacklisted in the 1940s.
, 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 Black community. The family lived an average middle-class existence in a shingle house in a commuter town
about twenty-five miles from New York
.
Hawes' mother was an early advocate of Montessori education, and taught her children various handicrafts, such as raffia basket-weaving and beadwork
. Hawes also made clothes and hats for her dolls, before beginning to sew her own clothes aged 10. Aged 12 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.
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.
On July 8, 1925, Elizabeth Hawes and a friend, Evelyn Johnson (whose mother had married a French perfume
importer), sailed for France on the RMS Berengaria, student third-class.
dresses by the leading couturiers were manufactured and sold. This was a thriving illegal occupation in Paris at the time.
The copy house was located on the Faubourg St Honoré, near the House of Lanvin
. It boasted that it never copied a couture dress without actually having had the original in hand. Hawes' role was to sell clothing to non-French speaking Americans and to attempt to secure new customers. Each year, the house closed during July and August to enable legitimate couturiers such as Chanel
and Vionnet to produce their collections. Hawes was sometimes expected to pose as a legitimate customer and go to one of the couture salons to purchase a dress to be copied. The copy house bought fabrics from the same suppliers as the legitimate couture houses, and had contacts in the couture embroidery firms to provide access to embroidery samples. Sometimes legitimate couture clients would bring in new dresses they had just purchased so that they could fill in their wardrobe with accurate copies at a substantially lower price. Sometimes the copy house would intercept parcels of couture dresses being sent to overseas buyers, copy the dresses accurately, and then re-package the parcels to send them on their legitimate route. Patterns would also be stolen by workers in the couture houses, and sold to copy houses. By September 1, the copy house would offer 50 or 60 dresses made in the exact materials, colour and style as the originals. Hawes related how, at the Ritz
, she could see their clients in counterfeit Chanel dresses identical to genuine Chanels worn at adjacent tables.
In January 1926 Hawes left the copy house to become a sketcher for a New York manufacturer of mass-produced clothing. As sketching was not permitted at the shows, she memorized the dresses pointed out to her and then made sketches afterwards. During her third season in the summer of 1926, Hawes began to feel guilty about what she was doing, and decided to stop stealing designs. After this, she became a full-time fashion correspondent for the Cosmos Syndicate, contributing to a regular article that was sent to the New York Post
, the Detroit Free Press
, the Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers of equal standing. The success of this column led to her gaining a regular column for The New Yorker
under the nom de plume "Parasite", 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
, the editor of Paris Vogue
, offered her a job on his magazine.
When Hawes met Bocher, she explained that she wanted to be a clothing designer, and he secured her a job with Nicole Groult, the sister of Paul Poiret
. Hawes was permitted to design and develop her own designs as well as work alongside Groult and her assistant designer. It was whilst with Groult that Hawes developed her method of designing, based upon Vionnet's technique of draping on a wooden mannequin. She was visited whilst at Groult by Amos Parrish, a promoter who had seen her work in the New Yorker and asked her to come back to America and become a designer.
, who designed and made gowns to order.
In October 1928, Hawes joined up with Rosemary Harden, the cousin of a friend. The Hawes-Harden shop was opened on the fourth floor of 8 West 56th Street, New York. They presented their first collection on 16 December 1928, Hawes' 25th birthday. Hawes' design approach was that Hawes-Harden would design everything it sold, and make clothes to order using only good materials, well-sewn and well-fitted.
While many smart American women didn't appreciate her work, Hawes-Harden gradually attracted a clientele that appreciated "original without being eccentric" designs. One of their 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 left the company, selling her share to Hawes, who became the sole owner. Hawes used advertising and publicity and was very cautious with expenses to enable her business to survive the Great Depression
. On July 4, 1931, she presented her collection in Paris. It was the first time that a collection from a non-French design house had been shown 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 and Taylor's. The three women were credited with working towards creating an American style. A second show featured Hawes alongside two other designers, Clare Potter
and Muriel King
. These innovative promotions led to a flood of newspaper and magazine articles on American fashion designers.
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. Although this was commercially successful, Hawes had high principles, and when she found that her designs were being made in inferior materials, she severed the business connection.
One of Hawes' most successful designs was a glove design called "Guardsman". It was a coloured suede
glove first designed in 1931 that buttoned on the back of the wrist. In April 1935, a red suede version of the glove was featured in a Lucky Strike
advertisement. While Hawes Inc. sold the suede "Guardsman" gloves for $12.50 a handmade pair, it was decided to manufacture ready-to-wear versions of the glove for retail once the couture glove was no longer manufactured. The ready-to-wear cotton suede "Lucky Strike glove" was a success, bringing in significant royalties
between May and November 1935.
In 1938, Hawes published Fashion Is Spinach, the first of her books. This was an autobiographical critique and exposé of the fashion industry. The title of the book came from a Carl Rose
cartoon published in the New Yorker on December 8, 1928.
Her mother's wedding trousseau
came from Paris, and her grandmother annually travelled to Paris, bringing dresses back for her grandchildren. When Hawes began designing and making her own clothes, she referred to Vogue
and Harper's Bazaar
. The prevalence of Paris and French fashion in these magazines reinforced the impression that only French fashion was worthy of attention. Hawes set out to challenge this, and to dispel the concept that American design was only for leisure-wear and sportswear
.
Hawes urged men and women to speak up for clothing that suited their lifestyles. For example, in 1938 she used men's suspenders
to illustrate how the fashion industry forced substandard-quality but "fashionable" merchandise upon consumers. Hawes interviewed normal men and found they universally preferred wide elastic suspenders with button fastenings, but could only buy narrow suspenders that cut into their shoulders, with metal grips that tore their trousers. Hawes used this to illustrate her point that the fashion system worked against the customer, offering poorly-made clothing not intended to last beyond a single season.
Hawes was an outspoken champion of dress reform. She encouraged women to wear trousers, and felt that men should feel free to wear robes, coloured clothing, and soft garments if they so wished. She preferred the concept of style to that of fashion, stating that style evolved naturally, whereas fashion was faddish and artificial. Hawes felt everyone had a right to good quality clothing in their personally favoured colours, styles and fabrics, rather than having to choose from the limited range of styles and colours offered by the fashion industry that season. While she made clothes to order, she believed that ready-to-wear was the only way ahead, and thought clothing retailers should each cater to one specific type of customer instead of all stocking the same styles. For her, the only useful purpose of fashion was to entertain, i.e., "to give a little additional gaiety to life".
, a populist
newspaper. The staff included Communist sympathizers (such as Leo Huberman
, the Labor News editor) working alongside anti-Communist liberals. Hawes' involvement with PM led to her and other contributors being placed under surveillance
by the FBI. Hawes also worked as a union organizer focusing on race relations for the UAW
in Detroit.
In 1942 Hawes designed a uniform for American Red Cross
volunteers. The same year, she applied for a night job at an airplane factory
to personally experience the life of women machine operators. She used her experiences as the basis for a 1943 book exposing the plight of American female labourers called Why Women Cry.
era due to her involvement with PM, her union activities, and her outspoken criticism of Government policy. When Hawes relaunched her fashion house in New York in 1948, she discovered that the FBI had contacted all her professional connections about her political activities, and as a result, she was shunned. Following the failure of her 1948-49 venture, Hawes worked as a freelance designer and continued writing. Despite her harsh words about the fashion industry, she was forced to support herself by working for Priscilla of Boston, an American bridal wear designer. For the rest of her life, in addition to her freelance work, she continued designing clothing for herself and her friends, specializing in hand-knitted separates.
In 1948 Hawes published Anything But Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behavior from Birth to Death; Given out in Print, on Film, and Over the Air; Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women. This book referenced popular women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping
, Glamour
, and Ladies' Home Journal
to compile a manual of tongue-in-cheek “advice” on how to be a good woman. Hawes aimed to expose the American media's efforts to brainwash the post-war woman back into a traditional feminine role. She accused the American government of using undemocratic policies to lull American people into a passive consumerist world fuelled by the myth of ever-increasing prosperity and conformity, while ostensibly working to protect democracy.
For a period, Hawes lived in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
, and wrote a book about her life there. But Say It Politely, published in 1954, referred to racial and cultural issues in the islands.
The stress of being blacklisted and being a victim of "red baiting" during the McCarthy era led to Hawes becoming an alcoholic, which would eventually lead to her death in 1971 of alcohol-related causes.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
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. In addition to her work in the fashion industry as a sketcher, copyist, stylist, and journalist, as well as a designer, she was also an author, union organizer, champion of gender equality
Gender equality
Gender equality is the goal of the equality of the genders, stemming from a belief in the injustice of myriad forms of gender inequality.- Concept :...
, and political activist. She was married twice, first to Ralph Jester in 1930 (divorced 1934) and secondly to the film director Joseph Losey
Joseph Losey
Joseph Walton Losey was an American theater and film director. After studying in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, Losey returned to the United States, eventually making his way to Hollywood...
in 1937 (divorced 1944), the father of her son Gavrik Losey
Gavrik Losey
Gavrik Losey is an American born key participant in various aspects of filmmaking including producer and production manager.Gavrik was born in New York, the son of film director Joseph Losey and fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes. He attended the Little Red SchoolHouse in Manhattan, Poughkeepsie Day...
. Along with Losey, she was blacklisted in the 1940s.
Early life
Elizabeth Hawes was born in Ridgewood, New JerseyRidgewood, New Jersey
Ridgewood is a village in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the village population was 24,958. Ridgewood is an affluent suburban bedroom community of New York City, located approximately northwest of Midtown Manhattan.The Village of Ridgewood was...
, 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 Black community. The family lived an average middle-class existence in a shingle house in a commuter town
Commuter town
A commuter town is an urban community that is primarily residential, from which most of the workforce commutes out to earn their livelihood. Many commuter towns act as suburbs of a nearby metropolis that workers travel to daily, and many suburbs are commuter towns...
about twenty-five miles from New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
.
Hawes' mother was an early advocate of Montessori education, and taught her children various handicrafts, such as raffia basket-weaving and beadwork
Beadwork
Beadwork is the art or craft of attaching beads to one another or to cloth, usually by the use of a needle and thread or soft, flexible wire. Most beadwork takes the form of jewelry or other personal adornment, but beads are also used in wall hangings and sculpture.Beadwork techniques are broadly...
. Hawes also made clothes and hats for her dolls, before beginning to sew her own clothes aged 10. Aged 12 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
Haverford, Pennsylvania
Haverford is an unincorporated community located partially in Haverford Township in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, USA, but primarily in Lower Merion Township in Montgomery County, about west of Philadelphia. It is on the Main Line, which is known historically for its wealth. As of August 2009,...
. This brief, precocious career ceased when she went to high school
High school
High school is a term used in parts of the English speaking world to describe institutions which provide all or part of secondary education. The term is often incorporated into the name of such institutions....
and while she continued making her own clothes, she ceased to make them for others.
Education
Hawes followed in her mother's and elder sister Charlotte's footsteps by going to 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 mathematicsMathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
and chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, 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
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
, eventually working up to advanced Economic Theory. Her thesis, based upon the words of Ramsay MacDonald
Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald, PC, FRS was a British politician who was the first ever Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority government for two terms....
, 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
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant 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
Bergdorf Goodman
Bergdorf Goodman is a luxury goods department store based on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. The company was founded in 1899 by Herman Bergdorf and was later owned and managed by Edwin Goodman, and later his son Andrew 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
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Wilkes-Barre is a city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, the county seat of Luzerne County. It is at the center of the Wyoming Valley area and is one of the principal cities in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area, which had a population of 563,631 as of the 2010 Census...
, 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.
On July 8, 1925, Elizabeth Hawes and a friend, Evelyn Johnson (whose mother had married a French perfume
Perfume
Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils and/or aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents used to give the human body, animals, objects, and living spaces "a pleasant scent"...
importer), sailed for France on the RMS Berengaria, student third-class.
Fashion career in Paris (1925-1928)
Hawes and Johnson arrived at Cherbourg on July 14, 1925, moving into a pension in Paris. Johnson's mother arranged for Hawes to work at her dressmaker's, which turned out to be a high end copy house, where copies of haute coutureHaute couture
Haute couture refers to the creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is made to order for a specific customer, and it is usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable seamstresses,...
dresses by the leading couturiers were manufactured and sold. This was a thriving illegal occupation in Paris at the time.
The copy house was located on the Faubourg St Honoré, near the House of Lanvin
Lanvin (clothing)
Lanvin is a high fashion house founded by Jeanne Lanvin.-History:Lanvin made such beautiful clothes for her daughter that they began to attract the attention of a number of wealthy people who requested copies for their own children...
. It boasted that it never copied a couture dress without actually having had the original in hand. Hawes' role was to sell clothing to non-French speaking Americans and to attempt to secure new customers. Each year, the house closed during July and August to enable legitimate couturiers such as Chanel
Chanel
Chanel S.A. is a French fashion house founded by the couturier Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, well established in haute couture, specializing in luxury goods . She gained the name "Coco" while maintaining a career as a singer at a café in France...
and Vionnet to produce their collections. Hawes was sometimes expected to pose as a legitimate customer and go to one of the couture salons to purchase a dress to be copied. The copy house bought fabrics from the same suppliers as the legitimate couture houses, and had contacts in the couture embroidery firms to provide access to embroidery samples. Sometimes legitimate couture clients would bring in new dresses they had just purchased so that they could fill in their wardrobe with accurate copies at a substantially lower price. Sometimes the copy house would intercept parcels of couture dresses being sent to overseas buyers, copy the dresses accurately, and then re-package the parcels to send them on their legitimate route. Patterns would also be stolen by workers in the couture houses, and sold to copy houses. By September 1, the copy house would offer 50 or 60 dresses made in the exact materials, colour and style as the originals. Hawes related how, at the Ritz
Hôtel Ritz Paris
The Hôtel Ritz is a grand palatial hotel in the heart of Paris, the 1st arrondissement. It overlooks the octagonal border of the Place Vendôme at number 15...
, she could see their clients in counterfeit Chanel dresses identical to genuine Chanels worn at adjacent tables.
In January 1926 Hawes left the copy house to become a sketcher for a New York manufacturer of mass-produced clothing. As sketching was not permitted at the shows, she memorized the dresses pointed out to her and then made sketches afterwards. During her third season in the summer of 1926, Hawes began to feel guilty about what she was doing, and decided to stop stealing designs. After this, she became a full-time fashion correspondent for the Cosmos Syndicate, contributing to a regular article that was sent to the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
, the Detroit Free Press
Detroit Free Press
The Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, USA. The Sunday edition is entitled the Sunday Free Press. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "Freep"...
, the Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers of equal standing. The success of this column led to her gaining a regular column for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
under the nom de plume "Parasite", which ran for three years. She worked as a fashion buyer for Macy's, and then as a stylist
Wardrobe stylist
A wardrobe stylist is the job title of someone who selects the clothing for published editorial features, print or television advertising campaigns, music videos, concert performances, and any public appearances made by celebrities, models or other public figures...
in Lord and Taylor's Paris offices. In April 1928, Main Bocher
Mainbocher
Mainbocher is a fashion label founded by the American couturier Main Rousseau Bocher , also known as Mainbocher. Established in 1929, the house of Mainbocher successfully operated in Paris and then in New York...
, the editor of Paris Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
, offered her a job on his magazine.
When Hawes met Bocher, she explained that she wanted to be a clothing designer, and he secured her a job with Nicole Groult, the sister of Paul Poiret
Paul Poiret
Paul Poiret was a French fashion designer. His contributions to twentieth-century fashion have been likened to Picasso's contributions to twentieth-century art.-Early life and career:...
. Hawes was permitted to design and develop her own designs as well as work alongside Groult and her assistant designer. It was whilst with Groult that Hawes developed her method of designing, based upon Vionnet's technique of draping on a wooden mannequin. She was visited whilst at Groult by Amos Parrish, a promoter who had seen her work in the New Yorker and asked her to come back to America and become a designer.
Fashion career in America (1928-1940)
Hawes returned to New York in 1928. She recognised a niche in the market for an American couturier, observing that the only clothes available in New York were copies of French fashion, either made to order or ready-to-wear. The only exception was Jessie Franklin TurnerJessie Franklin Turner
Jessie Franklin Turner was an American fashion designer based in New York in the early 20th century. She was notable for being one of the first American designers to create unique designs, rather than imitating or copying Paris fashions....
, who designed and made gowns to order.
In October 1928, Hawes joined up with Rosemary Harden, the cousin of a friend. The Hawes-Harden shop was opened on the fourth floor of 8 West 56th Street, New York. They presented their first collection on 16 December 1928, Hawes' 25th birthday. Hawes' design approach was that Hawes-Harden would design everything it sold, and make clothes to order using only good materials, well-sewn and well-fitted.
While many smart American women didn't appreciate her work, Hawes-Harden gradually attracted a clientele that appreciated "original without being eccentric" designs. One of their first notable clients was Lynn Fontanne
Lynn Fontanne
Lynn Fontanne was a British actress and major stage star in the United States for over 40 years. She teamed with her husband Alfred Lunt.She lived in the United States for more than 60 years but never relinquished her British citizenship. Lunt and Fontanne shared a special Tony Award in 1970...
, who became a regular customer for Hawes designs, and who wore the first stage costumes that Hawes made.
In 1930, Harden left the company, selling her share to Hawes, who became the sole owner. Hawes used advertising and publicity and was very cautious with expenses to enable her business to survive the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. On July 4, 1931, she presented her collection in Paris. It was the first time that a collection from a non-French design house had been shown 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
Edith Reuss
Edith Marie Reuss was an American clothing designer of the early 20th century. She was among the first Americans to make an impact in international markets, helping to make New York a center of fashion. She was a contemporary of Adele Simpson and Elizabeth Hawes In the early 1930s Reuss was known...
, was featured in a show of American fashion designers at Lord and Taylor's. The three women were credited with working towards creating an American style. A second show featured Hawes alongside two other designers, Clare Potter
Clare Potter
Clare Potter was a fashion designer who was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1903. In the 1930s she was one of the first American fashion designers to be promoted as an individual design talent. She has been credited as one of the inventors of American sportswear. Based in Manhattan, she...
and Muriel King
Muriel King
Muriel King was an American fashion designer based in New York. She was one of the first American fashion designers along with Elizabeth Hawes and Clare Potter to achieve name recognition. She also designed costumes for several major films in the 1930s and 1940s.-Early life:Muriel King was born 27...
. These innovative promotions led to a flood of newspaper and magazine articles on American fashion designers.
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. Although this was commercially successful, Hawes had high principles, and when she found that her designs were being made in inferior materials, she severed the business connection.
One of Hawes' most successful designs was a glove design called "Guardsman". It was a coloured suede
Suede
Suede is a type of leather with a napped finish, commonly used for jackets, shoes, shirts, purses, furniture and other items. The term comes from the French "gants de Suède", which literally means "gloves of Sweden"....
glove first designed in 1931 that buttoned on the back of the wrist. In April 1935, a red suede version of the glove was featured in a Lucky Strike
Lucky Strike
Lucky Strike is a brand of cigarette owned by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and British American Tobacco groups. Often referred to as "Luckies", Lucky Strike was the top selling cigarette in the United States during the 1930s.- History :...
advertisement. While Hawes Inc. sold the suede "Guardsman" gloves for $12.50 a handmade pair, it was decided to manufacture ready-to-wear versions of the glove for retail once the couture glove was no longer manufactured. The ready-to-wear cotton suede "Lucky Strike glove" was a success, bringing in significant royalties
Royalties
Royalties are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property...
between May and November 1935.
In 1938, Hawes published Fashion Is Spinach, the first of her books. This was an autobiographical critique and exposé of the fashion industry. The title of the book came from a Carl Rose
Carl Rose
Carl Rose was an American cartoonist whose work appeared in The New Yorker, Popular Science, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. He received the National Cartoonists Society's Advertising and Illustration Award for 1958....
cartoon published in the New Yorker on December 8, 1928.
Fashion criticism
From a young age Hawes described herself as having believed in the "French legend": that All beautiful clothes are designed in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want them.Her mother's wedding trousseau
Trousseau
Trousseau may refer to:*A dowry*The outfit of a bride, including the wedding dress or similar clothing*A name for the Bastardo grape in some regions*A white mutation of the Trousseau grape, known as Trousseau Gris...
came from Paris, and her grandmother annually travelled to Paris, bringing dresses back for her grandchildren. When Hawes began designing and making her own clothes, she referred to Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
and Harper's Bazaar
Harper's Bazaar
Harper’s Bazaar is an American fashion magazine, first published in 1867. Harper’s Bazaar is published by Hearst and, as a magazine, considers itself to be the style resource for “women who are the first to buy the best, from casual to couture.”...
. The prevalence of Paris and French fashion in these magazines reinforced the impression that only French fashion was worthy of attention. Hawes set out to challenge this, and to dispel the concept that American design was only for leisure-wear and sportswear
Sportswear (fashion)
Sportswear has been called America's main contribution to the history of fashion design. The term became popular in the 1920s to describe relaxed, casual wear typically worn for spectator sports...
.
Hawes urged men and women to speak up for clothing that suited their lifestyles. For example, in 1938 she used men's suspenders
Suspenders
Suspenders or braces are fabric or leather straps worn over the shoulders to hold up trousers. Straps may be elasticated, either entirely or only at attachment ends and most straps are of woven cloth forming an X or Y shape at the back. Braces are typically attached to trousers with buttons...
to illustrate how the fashion industry forced substandard-quality but "fashionable" merchandise upon consumers. Hawes interviewed normal men and found they universally preferred wide elastic suspenders with button fastenings, but could only buy narrow suspenders that cut into their shoulders, with metal grips that tore their trousers. Hawes used this to illustrate her point that the fashion system worked against the customer, offering poorly-made clothing not intended to last beyond a single season.
Hawes was an outspoken champion of dress reform. She encouraged women to wear trousers, and felt that men should feel free to wear robes, coloured clothing, and soft garments if they so wished. She preferred the concept of style to that of fashion, stating that style evolved naturally, whereas fashion was faddish and artificial. Hawes felt everyone had a right to good quality clothing in their personally favoured colours, styles and fabrics, rather than having to choose from the limited range of styles and colours offered by the fashion industry that season. While she made clothes to order, she believed that ready-to-wear was the only way ahead, and thought clothing retailers should each cater to one specific type of customer instead of all stocking the same styles. For her, the only useful purpose of fashion was to entertain, i.e., "to give a little additional gaiety to life".
Wartime
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Hawes closed her dress business and wrote columns for PMPM (newspaper)
PM was a leftist New York City daily newspaper published by Ralph Ingersoll from June 1940 to June 1948 and bankrolled by the eccentric Chicago millionaire Marshall Field III....
, a populist
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
newspaper. The staff included Communist sympathizers (such as Leo Huberman
Leo Huberman
Leo Huberman was an American socialist writer. In 1949 he founded and co-edited Monthly Review with Paul Sweezy.-Works:* Cuba: A revolution revisited* Vietnam: The Endless War* Socialism in Cuba...
, the Labor News editor) working alongside anti-Communist liberals. Hawes' involvement with PM led to her and other contributors being placed under surveillance
Surveillance
Surveillance is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people. It is sometimes done in a surreptitious manner...
by the FBI. Hawes also worked as a union organizer focusing on race relations for the UAW
United Auto Workers
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
in Detroit.
In 1942 Hawes designed a uniform for American Red Cross
American Red Cross
The American Red Cross , also known as the American National Red Cross, is a volunteer-led, humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief and education inside the United States. It is the designated U.S...
volunteers. The same year, she applied for a night job at an airplane factory
Factory
A factory or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where laborers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production...
to personally experience the life of women machine operators. She used her experiences as the basis for a 1943 book exposing the plight of American female labourers called Why Women Cry.
Blacklisting and later life
Elizabeth Hawes was blacklisted in the McCarthyMcCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
era due to her involvement with PM, her union activities, and her outspoken criticism of Government policy. When Hawes relaunched her fashion house in New York in 1948, she discovered that the FBI had contacted all her professional connections about her political activities, and as a result, she was shunned. Following the failure of her 1948-49 venture, Hawes worked as a freelance designer and continued writing. Despite her harsh words about the fashion industry, she was forced to support herself by working for Priscilla of Boston, an American bridal wear designer. For the rest of her life, in addition to her freelance work, she continued designing clothing for herself and her friends, specializing in hand-knitted separates.
In 1948 Hawes published Anything But Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behavior from Birth to Death; Given out in Print, on Film, and Over the Air; Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women. This book referenced popular women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping
Good Housekeeping
Good Housekeeping is a women's magazine owned by the Hearst Corporation, featuring articles about women's interests, product testing by The Good Housekeeping Institute, recipes, diet, health as well as literary articles. It is well known for the "Good Housekeeping Seal," popularly known as the...
, Glamour
Glamour (magazine)
Glamour is a women's magazine published by Condé Nast Publications. Founded in 1939 in the United States, it was originally called Glamour of Hollywood....
, and Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal is an American magazine which first appeared on February 16, 1883, and eventually became one of the leading women's magazines of the 20th century in the United States...
to compile a manual of tongue-in-cheek “advice” on how to be a good woman. Hawes aimed to expose the American media's efforts to brainwash the post-war woman back into a traditional feminine role. She accused the American government of using undemocratic policies to lull American people into a passive consumerist world fuelled by the myth of ever-increasing prosperity and conformity, while ostensibly working to protect democracy.
For a period, Hawes lived in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
Saint Croix is an island in the Caribbean Sea, and a county and constituent district of the United States Virgin Islands , an unincorporated territory of the United States. Formerly the Danish West Indies, they were sold to the United States by Denmark in the Treaty of the Danish West Indies of...
, and wrote a book about her life there. But Say It Politely, published in 1954, referred to racial and cultural issues in the islands.
The stress of being blacklisted and being a victim of "red baiting" during the McCarthy era led to Hawes becoming an alcoholic, which would eventually lead to her death in 1971 of alcohol-related causes.
Exhibitions
- Two Modern Artists of Dress: Elizabeth Hawes and Rudi GernreichRudi GernreichRudi Gernreich was a Austrian-born American fashion designer and gay activist.-Biography:Born in Vienna, Gernreich fled Austria at age 16 due to Nazism, and later migrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles, California...
, Fashion Institute of TechnologyFashion Institute of TechnologyThe Fashion Institute of Technology, generally known as FIT, is a State University of New York college of art, business, design, and technology connected to the fashion industry, with an urban campus located on West 27th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of...
, New York, 1967 - Retrospective at Brooklyn MuseumBrooklyn MuseumThe Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedia art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works....
, 1985
Books
- Fashion Is Spinach (New York, 1938)
- Men Can Take It (New York, 1939)
- Why Is A Dress? (New York, 1942)
- Good Grooming (Boston, 1942)
- Why Women Cry, or Wenches with Wrenches (New York, 1943)
- Hurry Up Please, It's Time (New York, 1946)
- Anything But Love (New York, 1948)
- But Say It Politely (Boston, 1954)
- It's Still Spinach (Boston, 1954)