1930's Fashion | Hawes, Elizabeth 1903-1971

DESIGNER AND CRITIC

Selling Dresses and Opinions.

Throughout the 1930s Elizabeth Hawes built a reputation in dress design and fashion commentary. Her best-known book, Fashion Is Spinach (1938), debunked the endless search for newness driving the fashion industry. Style is functional, she claimed in her best-seller. But fashion, that "deformed thief/' was based purely on the whims of designers and manufacturers, she claimed. Her battle cry throughout the 1930s was that a good dress could last for more than one season.

Early Life.

Hawes began making clothes as a child in Ridgewood, New Jersey. By age nine she sewed her own clothes, and at twelve she made clothes for her mother's friends' children. She wanted to go to art school, but her mother insisted she attend Vassar College. During summer break of her sophomore year she attended Parson's School of Fine and Applied Arts in New York. The next summer,...