They are the dramatis personae of American fashion: magazine editors Carmel Snow, Edna Woolman Chase, and Diana Vreeland; designers Elizabeth Hawes and Claire McCardell; retail leaders Dorothy Shaver and Marjorie Griswold; writers Lois Long and Virginia Pope; photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe; and publicist Eleanor Lambert. Not quite a dozen strong, collectively these women instituted a pivot before and after World War II from the dominance of French couturiers and their expensive, made-to-order garments to American designers eager to produce affordable ready-to-wear. It was adieu to all things French. The American Look was born.
The protagonist in this revolution was World War II. By the late 1930s and into the early 1940s, the Germans were advancing across Europe, country by country. But the French upper class, either idealists or simply oblivious, believed their beautiful capital would remain unsullied. Despite nightly blackouts, heating that barely hissed in radiators, and rising costs, the couture houses remained open, determined to impress the American fashion press, especially Snow, the influential editor of Harper’s Bazaar in New York.
But on June 14, 1940, everything stopped. Seamstresses put down their scissors, models were let go, designers lost their clientele, businesses shuttered. The Americans rushed home. The Germans were marching down the Champs-Élysées, taking Paris under their control. It became a siege four years long.
Nancy MacDonell’s Empresses of Seventh Avenue describes the unwitting rise of American fashion into a full-throttled, widely successful enterprise. Just three months after the Germans landed in Paris, the influential September issues of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar took 180-degree course corrections. Instead of lavish pages devoted to French couture, American designs filled the magazines—although, in Harper’s Bazaar, Snow conceded a “debt to France,” adding that Americans had “learned from the greatest masters in the world.” In Vogue, Chase declared that here are “clothes with the definite and recognizable quality of America.”
Before the war, New York designers were copying their French betters, delivering style à la française to American women. It was an open secret that benefited everyone. The most copied garments were those intended to sell in large quantities and known as Fords, so named for the ubiquity of the American car. (Only wealthy Americans visited the salons and ordered costly custom-made wardrobes.) As MacDonell explains, “The only thing stopping [Americans] from designing their own collections was the continued power of the French Legend.” But once France was cut off from America because of the war, haute couture ceased. In that void, a group of women created the American fashion industry.
Just three months after the Germans landed in Paris, the influential September issues of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar took 180-degree course corrections.
Hawes, the dedicated outlier who rejected the role of “sketcher” at the private French showings—code for copying designers such as Chanel and Patou—opened a shop in New York and designed clothes that were both stylish and comfortable. (She wore jeans at her 1937 wedding, to film director Joseph Losey.) Hawes’s designs were advanced for her day, but it was her book Fashion Is Spinach (1938) that burnished her fame, a gimlet-eyed memoir about the foibles of the fashion industry, in the U.S. and abroad.
While Hawes broke a barrier or two, McCardell walked straight to American stardom with her 1938 monastic dress, its bias-cut construction a feat of imagination. McCardell, often described as the “typical American girl,” with her tall, slender look and natural athleticism, was gifted at design. But her greatest coup was also the most obvious: she designed for herself. If mix-and-match separates worked for her lifestyle, she assumed they would appeal to other American women, too. If she needed pockets, so would other women. Clothes, she reasoned, were meant to adapt to the body, not the other way around. It was a concept so sensible it made Paris seem like it was on the other side of the moon.
As France became increasingly closed off, it was up to the fashion editors to steer their readers to what American design could offer. Snow, at Harper’s Bazaar, Chase, at Vogue, and, in time, Vreeland, at both magazines, recalibrated, repositioned, and remade the face of American fashion. Meanwhile, Dahl-Wolfe photographed women with an eye for composition, away from the studio: a young Lauren Bacall for the American Red Cross on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, March 1943, pulls in the viewer, as do images of women in museums, at the beach, beside great works of architecture. The message: American fashion belongs on anyone, anywhere.
Having seeded the idea of the American-made in magazines, retailers had to sell the goods. Shaver and Griswold had the moxie and ingenuity to pull it off, with Lord & Taylor the ne plus ultra department store of its day. Shaver, especially, was ingenuous. She came up with the handwritten L&T logo, the American Beauty–rose branding, and, above all, the defining tagline of the century: the American Look.
What did it mean? It was a girl having a “natural manner … a friendly smile … an unaffected elegance in make-up and dress.” Those two words—“unaffected elegance”—were the linchpin of the American Look.
There were the writer-critics—Long, of The New Yorker, and Pope, of The New York Times—to confer legitimacy on the American Look and transition readers in these wartime years away from thinking whatever is French is best. No book about American fashion is complete without singing the praises of Lambert, that one-woman dynamo who came up with such institutions as the Coty Awards, the International Best-Dressed List, and the Party of the Year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Whatever Lambert championed made headlines. And that was the point.
Empresses of Seventh Avenue reads like a work of fiction, but, remarkably, it’s all true. MacDonell has written a thoroughly fascinating and entertaining book, loaded with keen observations throughout. But lest the delivery belie the message, Empresses of Seventh Avenue is an important book, uncovering for the first time how a handful of smart, courageous, and gifted women defied the odds and succeeded in creating the American Look.
Ruth Peltason is a New York–based editor, writer, and jewelry authority. Her latest book, The Art of David Webb, is out now from Rizzoli
