Chronicles the life of Elizabeth Hawes, who began her career as a magazine correspondent, became a fashion designer, then moved into union organizing and war work, positions that she used as a platform for her social criticisms

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Seldom heard of today, Hawes was a force majeure during most of her life (1903-1971): an innovative clothes designer; author of the bestselling Fashion Is Spinach , which criticized an industry that told women to "swallow it anyway, even if you don't like it"; worker in a World War II defense plant, (the basis of her book Women at Work, Wenches with Wrenches ) and union organizer. In her youth, she studied design in Paris and was caught copying original creations; she then wrote a column signed "Parisite" for the New Yorker before returning to the U.S. to establish her own line in Manhattan and educate customers to her concept of real style. She was also a pioneer feministbut believed in equal rights for men as well. Although Berch's ( The Endless Day ) biography is often irksomely repetitious, it should revive interest in the eventful life of a singular, multitalented woman. Readers will be saddened to read of Hawes' death from alcoholism, hastened, the author claims, by Cold War "red baiters." Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Berch's biography is an example of the currently trendy "intimate portrait" of 20th-century fashion leaders. It is both chatty and well researched, yet lacks the quality of style that would place it firmly in the realm of fashion scholarship or history. Hawes, the notorious author of Fashion Is Spinach , was herself an anomaly: She scorned fashion as social custom but was forced to support herself by going to work for Priscilla of Boston, the leading bridal-gown designer. Though her ideas were radical in her own time (the 1930s through the 1950s), after several decades they seem both amusing and strangeand, in a way, completely acceptable. Sally Sims, Univ. of Maryland Lib., College Park
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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