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, an idea encapsulated in her book Fashion Is Spinach, published in 1938.
67 Facts About Elizabeth Hawes
2.
Elizabeth Hawes was among the first Americans to establish their reputations outside of Paris haute couture.
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Elizabeth Hawes was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the second child of four.
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Elizabeth Hawes's 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 African-American community.
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Elizabeth Hawes had graduated from Vassar in 1925 and headed the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for Bergen County, New Jersey, from 1932 to 1936.
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At the age of 10, Elizabeth Hawes made clothes and hats for her dolls, before beginning to sew her own clothes.
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Elizabeth Hawes sold a few children's dresses to a shop called The Greenaway Shop in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
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Elizabeth Hawes attended Ridgewood High School and had originally planned to attend art school.
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Elizabeth Hawes was very intelligent and a good student, passing her comprehensives without difficulty.
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Elizabeth Hawes found she was good at the compulsory courses, such as mathematics and chemistry, getting A grades, but was bored by the literature and art courses she chose to take, only earning B's.
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Elizabeth Hawes chose to focus on economics, eventually working up to advanced Economic Theory.
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Elizabeth Hawes 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.
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Elizabeth Hawes only had $25 a month for all her expenses, including clothing, so raising the funds for her proposed trip posed a problem.
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However, as the Dean of the college had decided that no diplomas could be given out before the end of four full years, Elizabeth Hawes was unable to leave early.
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Elizabeth Hawes earned a few hundred dollars through commissions from the shop.
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Elizabeth Hawes graduated in the spring of 1925, and prepared to set sail for Paris that July.
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Elizabeth Hawes sometimes visited a couture salon as a legitimate customer and purchased a dress to be copied.
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At the Ritz, Elizabeth Hawes saw her employers' counterfeit Chanel worn alongside the genuine ones.
19.
In January 1926, Elizabeth Hawes became a sketcher for a New York manufacturer of mass-produced clothing.
20.
Elizabeth Hawes became a full-time fashion correspondent for the Cosmos Newspaper Syndicate, contributing to a regular article that appeared in the New York Post, Detroit Free Press, The Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers.
21.
Elizabeth Hawes worked as a fashion buyer for Macy's, and then as a stylist in Lord and Taylor's Paris offices.
22.
Elizabeth Hawes hoped to fill a niche in the American market, where only Jessie Franklin Turner designed and made gowns to order, and the other competition was made to order or ready-to-wear copies of French fashion.
23.
Elizabeth Hawes-Harden sold its own designs only and made clothes to order using quality materials, well-sewn and well-fitted.
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Elizabeth Hawes-Harden gradually attracted a clientele that appreciated "original without being eccentric" designs.
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Elizabeth Hawes used advertising and publicity and was very cautious with expenses to enable her business to survive the Great Depression.
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Elizabeth Hawes sold small decorative works designed for her by Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi, friends from her years in Paris.
27.
On July 4,1931, Elizabeth Hawes presented her collection in Paris.
28.
Elizabeth Hawes advocated trousers for women and followed her own advice.
29.
In 1933, Elizabeth Hawes hired herself to a dress manufacturer to design ready-made clothes.
30.
Elizabeth Hawes aimed to create moderately-priced designs that brought high fashion design to the ready-to-wear customer.
31.
The venture was commercially successful, but Elizabeth Hawes discovered that her designs were being made from inferior materials, and she severed the business connection.
32.
One of Elizabeth Hawes' most successful designs was a glove design called "Guardsman".
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Elizabeth Hawes sold a handmade pair of the suede "Guardsman" gloves for $12.50.
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Elizabeth Hawes said that the interest of large crowds of women showed that the country was becoming stable and that people were free to express counter-revolutionary ideas without punishment.
35.
Elizabeth Hawes reported seeing permanent waves and painted nails and hats, mostly berets, and dispensed fashion advice:.
36.
When Elizabeth Hawes had visited the Soviet Union in 1935, she either accompanied or was accompanied by Losey, who was studying the Russian stage.
37.
In 1938, Elizabeth Hawes published Fashion Is Spinach, an autobiographical critique and expose of the fashion industry.
38.
When Elizabeth Hawes began designing and making her own clothes, she referred to Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
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Elizabeth Hawes set out to challenge this, and to dispel the concept that American design was only for leisure-wear and sportswear.
40.
Elizabeth Hawes can go shirtless in the hot summer, the straps of his overalls barely covering his hairy chest.
41.
Elizabeth Hawes is not admitted to the best clubs, nor even allowed to ride up in the elevator of the Squibb Building without a coat.
42.
Elizabeth Hawes urged men and women to speak up for clothing that suited their lifestyles.
43.
Elizabeth 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.
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Elizabeth 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.
45.
Elizabeth Hawes encouraged women to wear trousers, and felt that men should feel free to wear robes, coloured clothing, and soft garments if they so wished.
46.
Elizabeth Hawes preferred the concept of style to that of fashion, stating that style evolved naturally, whereas fashion was faddish and artificial.
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Elizabeth 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.
48.
In 1942, Elizabeth Hawes designed a uniform for American Red Cross volunteers.
49.
Elizabeth Hawes used her experiences as the basis for a 1943 book exposing the plight of American female laborers called Why Women Cry.
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Elizabeth Hawes opposed the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment for women, fearing it would remove protective legislation.
51.
Elizabeth Hawes called for a restructuring of home life to acknowledge that women were now expected to work outside the home while continuing their traditional roles as housewives.
52.
In 1945, Elizabeth Hawes published an essay in Antioch Review titled "The Woman Problem".
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Elizabeth Hawes called on American women to become "active citizens".
54.
Elizabeth Hawes described how housework was taken for granted and no longer a matter of pride now that so many products once made in the home are bought in the store, to the point that:.
55.
Elizabeth Hawes called for an education campaign aimed at men, who needed to face competition from the female workforce she wanted to unleash.
56.
Elizabeth Hawes cited group child care during the war as an example of what women could to lighten their own workloads.
57.
Elizabeth Hawes challenged those who thought they were leaders on women's issues:.
58.
Elizabeth Hawes considered working women as well, and their subsidiary role in unions.
59.
Elizabeth Hawes spent much of 1947 in Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands and then relaunched her fashion house in New York in 1948, early in the McCarthy era, opening a shop on Madison Avenue.
60.
Elizabeth Hawes later said that she responded to former clients who needed to replace items they had purchased from her before the war by retrieving the designs from the fashion collection of the Brooklyn Museum and reproducing them.
61.
Elizabeth Hawes turned to work as a freelance designer and continued writing.
62.
In 1948 Elizabeth 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.
63.
Elizabeth Hawes aimed to expose the American media's efforts to brainwash the post-war woman back into her traditional pre-war role.
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Elizabeth Hawes accused the American government of using undemocratic policies to lull the American people into a passive consumerist world based on the false promise of ever-increasing prosperity and conformity.
65.
Elizabeth Hawes tried to relaunch her design work in California in 1954, again without success, though she found there one new designer whose work she enjoyed, Rudi Gernreich.
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Elizabeth Hawes continued to live there until she relocated to New York a few years before her death.
67.
Elizabeth Hawes died on September 6,1971, of cirrhosis of the liver at her home in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City.