Why is a Dress? Who, When, What, Where?

Hawes, Elizabeth

Published by Viking Press, New York, 1942

About this Item

Strikingly bound in yellow and grey vertical bands of color on the front boards and solid yellow on the year boards. With some light staining, foxing and uniform soiling to the front and rear boards. With some glue discoloration along the front and rear inside hinges and along the edges of the front and rear paste-down sheets. Printed on heavy stock; clean and tight thoughtout. Highly readable. Slight spine slant. Name and date in ink at the top of the front endpaper. (Marion S. King, March, 1942). In the scarce pictorial dust jacket missing some small pieces at two corners and at the top of the spine ends; as well as a pinky fingernail-sized piece at the top right-hand corner of the rear panel at the spine edge. With the original price of $2.00 at the top of the inside front flap. Uncommonly scarce in the original dust jacket. Elizabeth Hawes(1903 1971) was anAmericanclothing designer, outspoken critic of thefashion industry, and champion ofready to wearand people's right to have the clothes they desired, rather than the clothes dictated to be fashionable, an idea encapsulated in her bookFashion Is Spinach, published in 1938.[1]She was among the first Americans to establish their reputations outside of Parishaute couture. In addition to her work in the fashion industry as a sketcher, copyist, stylist, and journalist, and designer, she was an author, union organizer, champion ofgender equality, and political activist. "Miss Hawes surveys her sex: You cannot be a successful designer unless you are something of a psychologist, sociologist, and economist. Nobody has yet found out exactly what kind of dress pleases what kind of boss. It will be a great day for the working girl when someone puts out a dress that won t stick to a chair in summer. Don t ever fool yourself about the mad genius of any successful designer. Genius, yes. Mad, no. Women what to wear what they do because of what goes on in their heads. Their size and shape have practically nothing to do with dressing them. The idea that you can keep a tight rein on your passions by wearing some sort of tight garment is not dead yet. Go into the wholesale, will you? And fight so that all American women can have beautiful clothes. Let them be fat. Let them be thin. Let their legs be short or long, their chests flat or curved but, oh, heaven, let the day come fast when the women of America will stand up straight!" First Edition with the title page date of 1942 and "Published in January 1942" on the copyright page.

Seller Inventory # 1008

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Why is a Dress? Who, When, What, Where?
• Publisher: Viking Press, New York
• Publication Date: 1942
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fashion