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HAWES, ELIZABETH 1903-1971

DESIGNER AND CRITIC

Selling Dresses and Opinions

Throughout the 1930s Elizabeth Hawes built a reputation in dress design and fashion commentary. Her best-known book, Fashion Is Spinach (1938), debunked the endless search for newness driving the fashion industry. Style is functional, she claimed in her best-seller. But fashion, that "deformed thief/' was based purely on the whims of designers and manufacturers, she claimed. Her battle cry throughout the 1930s was that a good dress could last for more than one season.

Early Life

Hawes began making clothes as a child in Ridgewood, New Jersey. By age nine she sewed her own clothes, and at twelve she made clothes for her mother's friends' children. She wanted to go to art school, but her mother insisted she attend Vassar College. During summer break of her sophomore year she attended Parson's School of Fine and Applied Arts in New York. The next summer, in 1924, she went to work as an unpaid apprentice at Bergdorf Goodman, convinced that art school would not teach her what she needed to know.

Living in Paris

After graduating in 1925, Hawes was determined to go to work in Paris to learn the fashion business firsthand. She found a job at a Paris copy house that followed famous French designers. In 1928 she quit to make sketches for American buyers and manufacturers in Paris. This work consisted of accompanying buyers to the important fashion openings and sketching those dresses they wanted to copy but did not wish to buy. Combining writing with drawing, she also worked as the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker and an American fashion syndicate.

Opening Her Own Shop

In 1928 Hawes returned to New York, determined to design and make clothes for American women that suited the lives they led. This goal was still radical in the late 1920s, as most Americans copied French design and viewed American designs as purely for leisure and sportswear. On her twenty-fifth birthday she opened her first shop with a debutante, Rosemary Harden. They opened to much fanfare but had difficulty turning a profit. In 1929 Hawes became the sole owner. She struggled to keep her shop alive through the Depression. Ever imaginative, she organized a publicity stunt by showing her American designs in Paris in 1931. It was the first time the world's fashion center had been invaded from overseas, and the stunt won Hawes considerable attention.

Designs for Average Women

Before the Depression Hawes had designed clothes for well-to-do women. In 1933 she hired herself out to a dress manufacturer to design ready-made clothes. Her moderately priced designs appeared in a storm of advertisements and promotion pieces, and she startled the retail trade with her unusual color combinations and designs. Though making a great deal of money, Hawes severed her connections with the manufacturer in 1934 when she discovered that dresses bearing her name were being made from inferior fabrics. Yet the money she earned in ready-made clothing financed the return of her own business, Hawes, Inc. In 1939, one year after the success of Fashion Is Spinach, she published Men Can Take It, an indignant attack on the uncomfortable clothing men wore. She advocated functional clothing without stiff collars, heavy belts, and stiffly buttoned coats.

Writing

In 1940 Hawes retired from fashion designing, returning only to create a uniform for Red Cross volunteers in 1942. She turned her attention to writing, penning a column for an afternoon-evening newspaper called PA and writing more books. To gain insight into the plight of women machine operators, she took a night job at an airplane plant during the war and wrote an expose called Why Women Cry; or, Wenches with Wrenches (1943). In 1948 she reentered the fashion world, opening a shop on fashionable Madison Avenue. When she closed the shop in 1949 it marked the end of her professional involvement with fashion. Up to her death in 1971 she designed for herself and for her friends, specializing in hand-knitted separates.