Elizabeth Hawes (1903–1971) was a midcentury American fashion designer who pushed back against her own field. A fashion critic as well, she was called “the Dorothy Parker of fashion criticism.” In her most famous book, Fashion Is Spinach (1940), Hawes wrote that “fashions change because the industry must meet payrolls, magazines must be published, and a myth must be perpetuated.” She instead championed common-sense personal style. Born in New Jersey, working first as a sketcher in New York City in her 20s, Hawes cut her teeth in Paris as a designer with Nicole Groult, the sister of Paul Poiret, and developed a technique based on draping. Back in New York, she designed through the 1930s and then transitioned into writing; her politics were leftist. Hawes was influential and foward-seeing. This Cincinnati exhibition of more than 50 garments, plus sketches and illustrations, has the distinction of being the first major museum exhibition focused on Hawes’s body of work. —Laura Jacobs