23 Facts About Pola Stout

Josefine Pola Stout was an American designer best known for creating fine woolen fabrics.

Wolfgang and Pola Hoffmann became a prominent interior design team that contributed to the development of American modernism in the early 20th century.

Pola Stout was an influential textile designer after her second marriage.

Pola Stout was executor of Rex Stout's literary estate after her husband's death in 1975.

Pola Stout was born Josefine Pola Weinbach, daughter of Schulem and Betty Eliasiewicz Weinbach, on January 8,1902.

Pola Stout was born in Stryj, a city that was then part of Austria-Hungary and was later part of Poland.

Pola Stout was unable to persuade her parents to let her pursue a career in art; instead, she was sent to the University of Lemberg to study philosophy.

Pola Stout then lived in Paris, working at a fabric house that supplied haute couture, and then moved to Berlin.

Less known today than some of their industrial design colleagues who were more adept at self-promotion, Wolfgang and Pola Stout Hoffmann were among the immigrants who made significant contributions to the development of American modernism and the American Modern design aesthetic in the early 20th century.

Pola Hoffmann and Rex Stout were married on December 21,1932, in a civil ceremony at his home, High Meadow.

Pola Stout became a naturalized citizen of the US in 1936.

Pola Stout's large, light-filled workroom was in the east wing of the second floor of High Meadow.

Pola Stout had two daughters and a harmonious, productive household with Rex Stout.

In 1948, Pola Stout Inc employed a staff of 17 weavers and produced 2,000 yards of fine fabric per week.

Pola Stout designed correlated woolens in three different weights, with colors and patterns that matched or pleasantly contrasted.

Pola Stout fabrics were sold by the yard in fine stores including B Altman and Company, which in 1942 created a new department devoted exclusively to Stout's line of Botany Perennials.

In that collection and its successor, Botany Annuals, Pola Stout applied the scientific discipline of the Ostwald color system to her own similar system.

Pola Stout often worked with Adrian, in a famous collaboration that began in the 1940s.

That autumn and on later occasions, Pola Stout sent the former First Lady a collection of fabrics she designed and wove especially for her, with suggestions for her dressmaker.

Pola Stout was executor of Rex Pola Stout's literary estate after her husband's death in October 1975.

Pola Stout died October 12,1984, aged 82, following a heart attack.

Pola Stout is regarded as the prototype for several women of integrity and purpose in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe corpus.

Direct references to Pola Stout Inc appear in the 1949 novel, The Second Confession, in which Madeline Sperling wears "a soft but smooth wool dress of browns and blacks that looked like a PSI fabric", and in the 1969 novel Death of a Dude in which Archie Goodwin "rinsed off and changed to a PSI shirt and brown woolen slacks".