American Sportswear vs. French Couture

0:28Hello and welcome to Fashion People. going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email three times a week called Line Sheet. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. It's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries. Line Sheet is scoopy, analytical, and above all, fun. Along with me, a subscription to Puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment, media, sports, politics, finance, the art world, and much more. If you're interested, listeners of Fashion People get a discount.

1:05Just go to puck.news slash fashion people to join Puck or start a free trial. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone, happy Friday. I hope you're enjoying the last dregs of summer. I'm officially back from my vacation send tips people uh but my my break was really nice i'm a big proponent of doing vacations in places you've been many times before and that's what we did and i had a great time uh online sheet on thursday i have a conversation with kate young who sort of was helping out all week first on fashion people then online she would talk about sort of the state of fashion and it in some ways relates to this interview i did with nancy who wrote this book about the history of American fashion.

1:51And I think if you read that and then listen to our conversation or listen to Nancy and my conversation and read my conversation with Kate, they go hand in hand. I have also been keeping a close eye on the Democratic National Convention, which is over now, because this is officially Friday when you'll be hearing this, Friday or later. I am recording this on Thursday morning. So I don't know if Kate Young's Taylor Swift prediction turned out right, but we'll see. Here's hoping it did for everyone involved. Next week, I'll have some updates online on the situation at SACS. It sounds like FTC is going to approve the deal and SACS also apologize for late payments.

2:42I will have a little more on that when I get back to to things and also maybe a little more on Kamala Harris's fashion choices and how she is making them. That's all I'm going to say for now. I'm really excited to share this interview with Nancy. this book is great I suggest you read it we really think of the US as this place that fashion started as a shop and copy situation where they would go to Europe, they would go to couture shows buy a couture look, come back, copy it and put on the label TK brand for Neiman Marcus or Schiaparelli for Bergdorf Goodman or what have you and that did happen for a really long time, I think up and up and through the 70s.

3:33But there were also people here making great clothes. Claire McArdle is the biggest name from from the early days, like 30s, 40s, 50s of American fashion. But there were others. And Nancy wrote about them. She also wrote a lot about the sort of influence of fashion media during that time. And I think a lot of you I know work in magazines or worked in magazines, I think you'll find that interesting as well. And we also talk about the state of American fashion today. So I hope you enjoy it. Nancy McDonnell, welcome to Fashion People. Oh, thank you so much, Lauren. It's such an honor to be here. So happy to have you.

4:13So first off, what'd you have for breakfast? I knew this was coming. Okay. This morning I had toast. It was a cranberry pecan bread, I believe. And I had it with butter. I'm particular about my butter. I don't like sweet butter. I prefer paltered butter. And I had some tea. Yorkshire Gold. That sounds delicious. It was good. That's a first for our guests. Yes, I like it. The tea, I like the toasted bread, the cranberry sounds really delicious. So Nancy, to start, tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got to this point in life. Okay, well, as you know, I'm a fashion journalist and I'm also a fashion historian.

5:08I started out in magazines back when dinosaurs roamed the earth in the 90s. And I've always enjoyed writing about fashion more like a cultural anthropologist than just about skirt should be this long or whatever it is. So although I continue to do fashion journalism, I'm also a fashion historian. And I actually got a graduate degree in that. So those two things really came together in writing this book, I would say. When did you go back to school to be like, how far in your career did you decide to get the graduate degree? Pretty far. I actually already had a graduate degree, which I got in my 20s when most people do that.

5:53And then when I was in my 30s, it just seemed like, you know, magazines were cratering fashion journalism. you know it just didn't have the same opportunities that it did back in the 90s when I thought I'd work in magazines forever and that by now I'd be you know a managing editor or something like that. What magazines did you work for? The one I had the longest association with was Nylon. I loved working at Nylon. I remember your name on that masthead. Uh-huh that was really fun that was in the early 2000s. Yeah I was there for about three years and then I left Ireland because I met my husband he's Scottish we were living in London so we lived in London for a few years where I was freelancing and then when we came back to New York I worked for style.com and I was in that style.com until until my daughter was born which was 2008 then being a freelancer ever since.

6:52And you wrote a book during that time period as well correct? Yeah, I've written a few. The last one I wrote before this was a book about Lily Pulitzer, which was for Asseline. I also wrote the Shoe Book, which is a history of shoes. The first book I wrote was called The Classic Ten, The True Story of the Little Black Dress, and Nine Other Fashion Favorites. So you may be thinking of that one. That's the one I'm thinking of because I remember stow.com really, I feel like they did a lot of promotion around it too. You know, I think that was actually before I was at style.com. They might've done something, but I wasn't working there at the time.

7:32Yeah. Yeah. I just remember the cover very distinctly. So what you're in magazines, you can tell that like, this is going the way people had thought it would go. But why did you decide to do, Like most people in your position went and worked at brands or became CMOs or marketers. Why did you decide to become a fashion historian? Like, what did you think the value in that was? Other than obviously you're a curious person who wants to know about this stuff. Yeah. You know, before I went into journalism, I thought about becoming an academic, which I ultimately didn't do because I didn't want to have to go teach, you know, art history at the University of Saskatchewan or something.

8:18I wanted to have a little bit more control over my life. But I always had that interest in academia, in scholarship, and I don't really have a business brain. So going to work for a brand wasn't the obvious choice for me, although I completely understand why it is for many people. It just wasn't. I didn't feel like that's where I would do my best work. So I decided to dig deeper into what did interest me. And I've always loved fashion, And I've also always been interested in fashions of the past. I am a very annoying person to watch like a costume drama with because I'll, you know, I'll say things like, well, skirts weren't that length in 1929.

9:02You should, you know how you could make some money because I'm always thinking about consulting on some of these shows. I would love to do that. I would love to do that. Everybody in the entertainment community who's a showrunner, Nancy, is available to consult on your, to ensure that your costumes are era appropriate. Absolutely. How did we meet? I can't even remember. Well, before I met you, people kept telling me you've got to meet Lauren because you would get on so well. You guys are alike. You have the same interests. I think we met at a dinner. Were we seated next to each other? maybe and then we would just have coffee we would have coffee talk about the state of the fashion world yeah yes yeah yes well i am i'm so glad that we're reconnecting for this book which i think is so the idea of sportswear in particular has come up a lot for me in my reporting and conversations recently and also willie smith randomly has been coming up a lot um i met the guy who did mark who did the bill cunningham documentary who also did a book about willie smith and so he's just like he's in the ether but anyway that is kind of fast forwarding many years after your your book starts off but let's let's talk about empress empresses of seventh avenue and what was the impetus for this specifically like what were you trying to capture why did you decide to write this book well um i think like most journalists i have a contrarian streak um you can probably relate to that you know if someone tells me that something is like this I think, is it really?

10:58We should look into that. So this idea that is still very strong in fashion, that the French are just better at fashion because they're French, I thought, no, there's something more there. There was nothing preordained about this. It was actually very carefully planned by Louis XIV. So going back to the 17th century and his first minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who really turned France into the world's first global luxury brand. And so your book sort of explains what happened when the Americans got involved. And I think like the biggest misnomer in fashion in the industry is that ready-to-wear sort of came to be in the 70s.

11:50like Saint Laurent created ready to wear. But the reality is ready to wear has existed long before then. You focused on American fashion and specifically American fashion almost coming of age in the 30s and 40s. What drove you to write about that era? And what did you learn about France versus America, etc. American fashion existed before the 30s and 40s, but American designers had no name recognition. They were backroom employees. Their names were not on the label. And even the manufacturers that they worked for, their names weren't on the label. A department store would buy a dress and they would put their own label in it.

12:38So if you shopped at Bestin Company or Lord & Taylor, you didn't know who designed your dress. It just had their label in it. And the other thing that was holding American designers back was that they were expected to copy Paris designers, which everyone did. Paris was the world global capital of fashion and there was not another city. New York was a manufacturing center. So there was a very elaborate system in place whereby American editors, American buyers, American designers would travel to Paris about four times a year. They would buy models, which they would take back and they would copy.

13:16But the key difference in French fashion and American fashion is that the couturiers were making haute couture. It's not like today where you go into a store and you buy a Balenciaga or a Gucci or whatever it is, and you walk out with it 20 minutes later. This was made to order clothing. If an American department store, let's say Bergdorf Goodman, bought a Chanel dress, they would bring it back. If you wanted to buy that dress, it was made for you in the Bergdorf Goodman workrooms. You would go in, you would have a minimum of four fittings, three fittings, excuse me, and it would take a few weeks for it to get to you.

13:54So this was fashion for the few. American designers created ready-to-wear fashion for everybody. No fittings, you go in and buy it. It has a much more democratic nature to it. and it really didn't make any sense to copy haute couture clothes for the ready-to-wear market because they're two very different things. So I wanted to show that American fashion actually has a very rich history of its own. It's completely entwined with French fashion. They're interdependent, but it's different. It's worthy of study, and people in the industry should know where our industry came from and appreciate it. So when did ready-to-wear actually start to proliferate in America?

14:41Because even in, you think of the early 1900s or the late 1800s, and you think of someone going to a dressmaker or a general store or whatever, buying a bolt of fabric and having a dressmaker made the dress. When did it kind of switch over to having ready-made stuff in the stores? Well, we see ready-made things already by the end of the 19th century, certainly in the United States. So you could go in and buy a jacket and skirt, which became when women started really entering the workforce in the 1890s. You could buy a shirtwaist, which was the name for a blouse. You could buy a jacket, you could buy a skirt, and this was ready-to-wear fashion.

15:28So the American industry became quite robust early on. By contrast, in other countries like in France or in England, the ready-to-wear industry was not nearly as good. So there were a lot more dressmakers. It's not that there wasn't ready-to-wear, it's just that the ready-to-wear industry in the United States was really good, And it was established early on and it became excellent at turning out clothes that good clothes, nice clothes, beautiful clothes that all women could have access to. So this was like by the 1920s when the garment district is founded in New York. It's a well-oiled machine, the American ready to wear industry.

16:15Hi, this is Jill Schlesinger, CBS News Business Analyst, Certified Financial Planner, and the host of the Jill on Money podcast. With the new year upon us, there's no better time to take control of your financial life. And the Jill on Money podcast is here to help. It's your questions that make it possible for me to provide unconventional and I hope entertaining insights on your money, more importantly, on your life. Follow and listen to Jill on Money wherever you get your podcasts.

16:50So I would say that the sort of idea in the fashion industry is that well into the 40s and 50s, what you are describing of the editors and buyers go to the couture shows in Paris. They buy one sample, one sample of a few items or they sketch it out themselves. They go back and they do these ready made pieces that say Chanel for Bergdorf Goodman or Carl. I have a jacket that says Carl Lagerfeld for Neiman Marcus or something like that. That is the sort of perception of what everybody was buying. But that's not the case. There was tons of sort of off-the-rack availability, and there were real designers designing these clothes.

17:44What flipped the switch when you start to get into the Claire McArdle, the real names of people? Again, if you think of general fashion industry myth, you think of American fashion starting with Oscar de la Renta and Willie Smith and all those designs, Calvin and Halston in the 60s and 70s. Whereas there was Claire McArdle, there was Bonnie Tashin, there were designers that were, you know, Elizabeth Hawes, who I think is also very well known at this point in fashion circles as a fashion journalist. but when did it sort of you mentioned haze and micardo pretty early in the book what happened to flip the switch that they became like known quantities and how known were they to consumers the movement really started i mean there had been an american fashion for american women movement uh almost as long as there's been american fashion it there was a whole campaign that It was done by the Ladies Home Journal in the early 20th century, which tried to suggest that French designers didn't really know how to dress American designers.

19:03American women should be patriotic and buy American fashion. But this really, really took off, I'd say, in the 1930s. Elizabeth Hawes, who you mentioned, was an amazing designer, a very, very interesting person. she went to Paris in the 1920s because she believed in what she called the French legend. The French legend is that all beautiful clothes are made in the atelier of French designers and all women want them. So she wanted to be a couturier, so she went to Paris to learn to become one. And while she was there, she became completely disillusioned with the whole system. she thought that French couturiers were only interested in dressing a very small number of women who devoted their entire lives to being chic in a way that we just can't appreciate today these were women who had they didn't work they had unlimited funds they had ladies maids really their whole lives were directed towards going to fittings wearing the right clothes in the right places with the right people.

20:11She thought this was really boring. She had no interest in that. She wanted to dress American women. So she came back to the United States. She opened a couture salon. And I want to stress, she was making couture. She was not making ready to wear. But she became America's first star designer. She was a well-known name. She appeared in ads. She was interviewed a lot. People knew her name. But then she closed down her couture house when World War II started. And she really sank into oblivion, partly because as well as being a fashion designer, she became a labor organizer and she got blacklisted by the FBI.

20:54So that really ended her career. On the ready-to-wear side, Claire McArdle is really the first star designer to come out of Seventh Avenue, which was at the time the center of the American fashion industry. She started working in the early 1930s. She worked for a brand called Townley Frock's, and she created this dress called the Monastic Dress. And it solved one of the problems that American fashion had, which was because it was ready to wear. They had fit issues. You know, when you're making a couture, you fit each dress to each client. When you're making ready to wear, you're cutting hundreds or even thousands of dresses at a time.

21:36What she did was cut this dress on the bias, like her idol, Madem d 'Ionne, and then you just wore a belt, and it conformed to the body. It flattered many, many different figures. The dress was so successful that it was knocked off endlessly, and Townley Fox went out of business. But they started up again after the war started. And it was really World War II that put American designers front and center. Because when the Nazis occupied Paris, it was like they put a bell jar over the city. They had total control of any information that came in or went out. So American fashion, which had been completely reliant on getting these French models to copy, suddenly the source was cut off.

22:25They were left to their own devices. To some people in the industry, this was like catastrophic. You know, if you look at WWD from that time, there are people saying things like, you know, I don't know what we're going to do. One man was trying to reassure people saying, well, we've got at least six months worth of French fashion, so we can copy for that amount of time and then we'll figure it out. Claire McArdle was never interested in copying. She wanted to do her own thing. She didn't think that clothes for women should be uncomfortable or impractical. She thought that form and function could exist in the same garment.

23:04And she got really lucky when Townley Frock's reopened. She was hired back as the designer by someone who really trusted her and let her do her own thing. Didn't try to make her copy Paris, didn't try to interfere in the design at all. And women really responded to this. She became the first ready-to-wear star. And has inspired so many designers since most recently, Tori Birch, who blurbed your book. So what was the look, the American look during that period? How would you say it was different from the France couture? Because I mean, we're not even talking about what regular people in France were wearing.

23:46We're talking about what only like really wealthy women were wearing. Now today, like what wealthy people wear and what not wealthy people wear is pretty similar. But at the time, like what was the American look that McArdle and Haas and all these designers, even the lesser known ones, were sort of fashioning? I think before we get into that, we should talk about context as well. The clothes that were coming out of Paris were really pretty formal. This was a time when fashion had a lot of rules. You know, I see people, you know, they're referencing photos of like Slim Keith wearing shorts and little thong sandals and a sleeveless top.

24:27And today we think, great, I'll wear that to the office. That's not where she was wearing it. This was not city clothing. She was wearing it, you know, if she was at the beach or in the suburbs or, you know, you just would not wear that sort of stuff on a city street. Sportswear, which was what American fashion became, was a more casual form of dressing. It's what you would wear if you were like participating in sports, you know, if you're going to go skiing or playing tennis, playing golf, but also what you might wear to be a spectator for these sorts of sports. The revolutionary thing that American designers did was to say, we can wear this stuff during the day.

25:06It doesn't need to be for these particular activities. There's no reason why the clothes that women wear all the time can't be more casual and more comfortable and more suited to American lifestyles. And that is exactly what athleisure is as well. It is. It predicted a lot of this. Like Claire McArdle was making leggings in the 1940s. People didn't understand them. They appeared in life and they had some sort of caption like, strange looking clothes for college students or something. They turned out to be too expensive to manufacture, but you know, she was creating the athleisure of her time.

25:48So while all of this is happening, you also have the fashion media landscape, which is a big part of this book as well. It's not just about the designers. It's also about how important and integral a role the media played. And you have full chapters on certain editors. And what would you say the media's role was at that time, especially compared to what it is now? I think when people think of fashion history, they think of designers and designers creating this look. But designers didn't work in a vacuum, and that look would never have reached people without fashion media helping, magazines, newspapers.

26:34There was no way to go directly to your consumer at the time the way people can do now. They can completely control their message via social media. That didn't exist at the time. Women looked to magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, also to the woman's page of their local newspaper, which covered fashion. So Vogue and Harper's Bazaar were the twin Bibles of American fashion. And their editors-in-chief, the editor-in-chief of Vogue at this time was a woman named Edna Woolman Chase, who had an incredibly long career at Vogue. I think she started there in something like 1894, when she was a teenager working in the mailroom.

27:16She became editor-in-chief in 1914, and then she retired in 1952. She was there for a really long time. Carmel Snow, who was the editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, actually used to work for Vogue. She worked for Edna Woolman Chase. She had been promised or promised between the lines the job of editor-in-chief. She realized that Edna Woolman Chase was never going to leave this job. So she defected and went to Harper's Bazaar, which at the time was a really big deal because they had this kind of Hatfield and McCoy relationship. There was a lot of rivalry between the two magazines. And when Carmel Snow left, the staff at Vogue was instructed to never speak to her again, and they didn't.

27:59But this was where women went for all of their fashion information. and they could really create trends. They could promote designers. They had a very cozy relationship, but they were not really, you can't think of the head of stories we see today. Like, you know, this is what balance out this country house looks like or whatever it is. It was just about the clothes. Designers were not celebrities at the time, but it was where you would go to see this is what's happening for the season. These are the looks that you should, you should invest in and they they really speak in the imperative voice they tell you this is what you have to do they had an incredible amount of authority i was just gonna say the authority thing is very interesting because it really has it is really gone from traditional fashion magazines sometimes you see it see it in the gentle woman they do really fun um items about how to wear something like I feel like I I don't think I wrote this I did like one or two things for them at some point but they did one on like how to wear pearls or something like maybe I did write it I can't remember but you don't really see that anymore in the fashion magazines there's no like you should do this and and all those um Deanna Rieland like here are the her quotes of what I have a book of her quote somewhere.

29:32Why don't you call them? Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't really exist anymore. What do you think happened changing? And that is, I would say, the last I mean, maybe it's the last 30 years. Do you think that that is like really driven by Anna Wintour and her way of being an editor? Like, what do you think shifted in the culture that there is less of that recommendation part of it? I think our relationship to fashion really changed. Fashion has become part of popular culture. It's entertainment now. Back in the era that I'm talking about, fashion was like this closed conversation between a more elite group of people, the designers, and really each other.

30:16I think I quote Diana Rieland in the book when she says, when I was a young woman, very few people even breathed the pantry air of a woman who appeared in vogue. Meaning that even in an era when every middle class person had a servant, very few people even worked for the type of women who appeared in vogue. fashion has become part of popular culture and even though it's much more present and everywhere it's like it's been devalued we don't have the kind of respect we used to have for it we think of fashion now as disposable you know people wear things once and then they sell it there's fast fashion so as fashion became more part of people's lives it it it became so common that people didn't have the respect they used to have for it.

31:06Passion became much more casual. We became much more interested in getting deals. I talk about prices in the book, like a Claire McArdle dress that sold for$30. It's not$30 in today's money. This was like a $630 dress. People bought fewer clothes. They took care of them. They had more respect for them. So as we became more casual, as fashion became more part of popular culture, it just didn't become something that we invested as much time and interest in. I think that has a lot to do with it. How much do you think what transpired here in the 30s, 40s, 50s influenced the rise of Ready to Wear in the 60s and 70s in Europe?

31:54Because it kind of reminds me of, have you ever read the book Amatora? I haven't it's good you you should definitely read it and you would love David he is of your ilk he could talk about this stuff forever and I'm sure if he hasn't read your book yet and has a copy he'll he'll buy one as soon as it comes out he would love it but he's written a lot his name's David Marks and he's written a lot about um his most recent book was called Status and culture and it was just about like what we what we buy to to convey status but his first book was about it's called Amatora and it's about the 1950s in Japan co-opting American preppy style and then America then taking it back so the perfect example are cone denim raw denim jeans it's you know that type of thing so it it kind of it's almost like a boomerang in that way how influenced were the europeans by what was happening in ready-to-wear and sportswear in the u.s at that time because this is also the time when the u.s was i don't want to say at its peak of influence but really came into its influence in terms of global culture absolutely post-war.

33:20I think the Europeans were hugely influenced by American ready-to-wear, especially the Italian fashion industry, which was based on ready-to-wear. The Marshall Plan, which people don't really associate with fashion, but the Marshall Plan, which came after World War II to help reinvigorate the European economy after it had been completely pummeled by the war, it poured money into Italian fashion, which did not really exist in a big way before then. It was like everywhere else. It was small dressmakers copying the couturiers. The Marshall Plan funded Italian fashion, which followed the American model, you know, ready to wear.