THE 1920s: FASHION: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

M-G-M costume designer Adrian (born Adrian Adolph Greenburg), who had worked with Irving Berlin on Broadway and Rudolph Valentino in Hollywood, began a revolution in millinery by costuming Greta Garbo in a slouch hat in the 1928 movie A Woman of Affairs, a tepid version of Michael Allen's 1924 novel The Green Hat. The slouch hat, a soft-crowned felt with a flexible brim pulled down over one eye, replaced the cloche in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the most popular women's hat style.

Famous hairdresser Antoine de Paris (born Antek Cierplikowski in Sieradz, Poland) opened the first of his American salons at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1925. Monsieur Antoine claimed to have invented the shingle bob in 1917.

In 1925 Walter W. Birge established the Industrial Rayon Corporation, a holding company for his Industrial Fibre Corporation, the fourth largest rayon producer in the United States; Birge had been a member of the five-man committee that adopted the word rayon when U.S. government officials requested that manufacturers stop calling their product "artificial silk."

Chicago-born Main Rousseau Bocher left Paris Vogue—where he had served successively as illustrator, fashion editor, and editor in chief—to found his own Paris fashion house in 1929 under the name Mainbocher. He was the first American to run a successful salon in Paris, and his establishments there and, later, in New York flourished until his retirement in 1971.

In 1928 Duesenberg's young factory stylist Gordon Buehrig, who would become one of America's great automotive designers, created several body types for the legendary Duesenberg Model J.

In 1928 John Cavanagh established on Park Avenue a men's hat shop that became one of the most prestigious in the United States. In the 1930s he would create the Hat Corporation of America and the Cavanagh Research Corporation, both of which promoted hat development and trade.

Toward a New Architecture, the English translation of Vers une architecture (1923), was published in New York in 1927. This collection of essays by Swiss architect Le Corbusier defines his design principles and prints several statements—including "A house is a machine for living in"—that influenced the development of modernist architecture in America.

Paul Philippe Cret, a French-born Philadelphia architect best remembered for public buildings in modern classical style, began construction of his masterpiece, the Folger Shakespeare Library, in 1928; the Washington, D.C., building, near the Library of Congress, was completed in 1932.

The twenty-year-old Lilly Daché immigrated to the United States from France in 1924. After one week's work as a millinery salesgirl at Macy's, she set up her own New York City shop, which she operated for forty-five years; she became the best-known women's hat designer in America.

In 1927 Donald Deskey founded Deskey-Vollmer, an interior-design firm that executed modernistic apartment renovations for such well-known New Yorkers as cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein, literary critic Gilbert Seldes, and Saks Fifth Avenue president Adam Gimbel. In 1932 Deskey designed the interiors for Radio City Music Hall.

Decorator Elsie de Wolfe, who had earlier made her fortune by introducing "New American money to Old French furniture," was one of the popularizers of modernist white-on-white rooms in 1929.

A design for a Dymaxion House—a hexagonal, glass-covered, steel and aluminum structure hung from a central column and powered by sunlight—was introduced in 1928 by R. Buckminster Fuller, later celebrated for his geodesic domes.

In 1928 architect Cass Gilbert began work on the U.S. Supreme Court Building; the most important of the three structures Gilbert designed for the national capital, the Supreme Court Building was completed in 1935.

Ruzzie Green, art director at the Stehli Silk Corporation, in 1928 introduced a dress fabric printed with the word It; the design capitalized on the sex appeal of movie star Clara Bow, the "It Girl."

In 1928 German-born Walter Gropius resigned as director of the revolutionary Bauhaus school of design, which he had founded in his native country in 1919. Gropius fled Nazi Germany in 1934 and four years later became chairman of the Harvard University Architecture Department, where he was a vigorous campaigner for modern, socially relevant design.

French designer Madame Jeanne Lanvin in 1926 opened the world's first boutique for men. Located across the street from her couturire house on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré in Paris, this men's shop was managed by Madame Lanvin's nephew, Maurice Lanvin.

In the fall of 1925 Lois Long, under the pseudonym "Lipstick," began writing a shopping column for The New Yorker. Eventually titled "On and Off the Avenue," the column often treated fashion designers or retail-clothing establishments.

In 25 April 1925 Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia) photographed couturier fashions on display in the Pavillon de l'Elégance, a section of the Art Deco Exposition in Paris, which would officially open in July. His pictures of designer-dressed wood-and-wax mannequins were regarded both as effective advertisements for fashion and as expressions of Surrealist art.

By 1927 Marion Morehouse, whom photographer Edward Steichen called "the best fashion model I ever worked with," had become the most recognizable photographic model in America. In 1933 she left modeling to marry poet E. E. Cummings; their union survived until his death in 1962.

Julia Morgan, the first woman to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was architect for William Randolph Hearst's castle complex at San Simeon in central California. She worked on the project from 1919 to 1939, and Hearst first occupied the main castle, "La Casa Grande," in December 1925.

American cultural historian Lewis Mumford published the first of his several important architectural studies, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization, in 1924. From 1931 to 1963 Mumford wrote the "Sky Line" column as architectural critic for The New Yorker.

In 1928 Charles Nessler, inventor of the permanent wave in 1905 and purported inventor of false eyelashes some time later, published The Story of Hair: Its Purposes and Its Preservation. In his book Nessler attempts to define "the relationship between the fundamental nature of the individual and the covering of his scalp" and predicts the eradication of male baldness before the end of the twentieth century. Known to his customers as Father Nestle, he operated a hair salon on East Forty-sixth Street in New York City.

Vienna-born architect Richard Neutra, who later would become a master of the International Style, in 1929 completed the first private house to be framed entirely in steel; the Los Angeles home of Dr. Phillip Lovell featured dramatic balconies poised over a ravine.

In 1928 Norman Norell, later one of America's best-known fashion designers, began a twelve-year apprenticeship with Hattie Carnegie, who honed his taste for precision tailoring and conservative elegance.

Frank Alvah Parsons, who in 1905 had become president of the New York School of Fine and Applied Art and who taught interior design as a system of principles, established his Paris Ateliers, or workshops, for American and European students in 1921. The New York School was renamed he Parsons School in 1941.

In 1927 French couturier Paul Poiret prophesied in Forum that within thirty years women would routinely wear pants in public; his remarks sparked considerable disagreement from readers.

Gilbert Rohde, who had spent two years in Europe, where he admired German and French applied arts, in 1929 began creating chromium-plated metal and Bakelite tables in his New York City studio. During the 1930s he became well known for designing wooden, tubular-metal, and wicker furniture.

In 1926 architect Eliel Saarinen became director of the art academy at Cranbrook, the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, estate of publisher and art patron George Gough Booth; Saarinen assembled at Cranbrook a stable of artists and craftsmen that included furniture designers Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames, and Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen's son.

In 1927 Elsa Schiaparelli introduced her trompe l'oeil (optical illusion) sweater, featuring a white collar and bow pattern knitted into a black background; an enormous success in Paris and the United States, the sweater was the first of Schiaparelli's experiments with Surrealist effects.

The 1924 publication of Spanish Farm Houses and Minor Public Buildings by Winsor Soule provided plans for simple one-story homes with patios or porches; the book stimulated interest in ranch-style homes and villas, especially in California.

In 1923 artist and designer Ethel Traphagen founded the Traphagen School of Fashion at 1680 Broadway in New York City. Both the Traphagen School and the Fashion Academy, founded at 4 East Fifty-third Street by Emil Alvin Hartman in 1917, were major American schools of fashion design during the 1920s.

Joseph Urban, a Vienna-born architect who during his career created sets for sixteen Ziegfeld Follies, fifty-four Metropolitan Opera productions, and thirty movies, designed the spectacular Ziegfeld Theatre on Sixth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street in New York City. Completed in 1927 and razed in 1966, the structure featured a revolutionary egg-shaped auditorium; it was the first modern theater created exclusively for musicals.

Valentina (Nicholaevna Sanina Schlee), a ballerina refugee from the Russian Revolution, opened a New York City dressmaking shop in 1928. Her dramatic style, which included long, draped gowns, turbans, and veils, made her a major fashion voice until her retirement in 1957.

In 1921 Carmel White was hired as an assistant fashion editor by American Vogue. Under her married name, Carmel Snow, she became one of the most influential voices in fashion until her death in 1961. In line to succeed Edna Woolman Chase as editor in chief of Vogue, Snow defected to archrival Harper's Bazaar in 1932.

Bertram G. Work, president of B. F. Goodrich Company, allegedly gave the zipper its name (to capture its "zip") when Goodrich introduced the zippered rubber boot in 1923; the company registered the name as a trademark in 1925, but gradually zipper became the generic name for all hookless or slide fasteners.

Out of architectural fashion during the 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright supported himself primarily through commissions for private homes in the Midwest and southern California. Several of these homes, including the Millard House built in Pasadena in 1923, employed Mayan Cubistic designs in patterned concrete blocks and threads of steel