Elizabeth Hawes (Radical American Fashion)

This brand-new publication explores the life and career of one of America’s most experimental and forward-looking twentieth-century fashion designers, Elizabeth Hawes.

"The World, showing what American designers could do, . . . has enabled me to help decide what you will wear today—and tomorrow!"—Elizabeth Hawes

Elizabeth Hawes opened her couture salon in New York City in 1928. Working through the 1930s she not only created elegant clothing but wrote several books including her best seller Fashion is Spinach in 1938. She was a marketing trailblazer, a union activist during WWII, and anticipated fashion trends that would not become a reality until the 1960s and beyond.

This new publication, and accompanying exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, highlights Hawes’s work, her influences, and her role in promoting a new generation of female designers like Claire McCardell, Bonnie Cashin, and Vera Maxwell. The authors look variously at Hawes’ importance and influence on future female designers, her life, the women she dressed, her menswear and ready-to-wear lines, her work in the context of other American designers, her choice of colors, fabrics and construction techniques, and her politics, illustrated throughout with color plates of pieces, ensembles and accoutrements, plus additional archival materials, including working sketches, information on her politics and prolific writing output.

The Cincinnati Art Museum’s fashion collection includes over thirty examples of her work, most of which were worn by one of her most devoted clients, Cincinnati socialite Dorette Kruse Fleischmann.