Elizabeth Hawes (1903-1971) was an American clothing designer, outspoken critic of the fashion industry, and champion of ready to wear and people's right to have the clothes they desired, rather than the clothes dictated to be fashionable. In addition to her work in the fashion industry as a sketcher, copyist, stylist, and journalist, as well as a designer, she was also an author, union organizer, champion of gender equality, and political activist. She was married twice, first to Ralph Jester in 1930 (divorced 1934) and secondly to the film director Joseph Losey in 1937 (divorced 1944), the father of her son Gavrik Losey. Along with Losey, she was blacklisted in the 1940s.
Elizabeth Hawes was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the second child of four. Her father was an assistant manager for the Southern Pacific Company, and her mother worked on the Board of Education and was actively involved in local politics, especially the rights of the local Black community. The family lived an average middle-class existence in a shingle house in a commuter town about twenty-five miles from New York.
Hawes' mother was an early advocate of Montessori education, and taught her children various handicrafts, such as raffia basket-weaving and beadwork. Hawes also made clothes and hats for her dolls, before beginning to sew her own clothes aged 10. Aged 12 she began dressmaking professionally by making clothes for the young children of her mother's friends. She also sold a few children's dresses to a shop called The Greenaway Shop in Haverford, Pennsylvania. This brief, precocious career ceased when she went to high school and while she continued making her own clothes, she ceased to make them for others.
Hawes followed in her mother's and elder sister Charlotte's footsteps by going to Vassar. She was very intelligent and a good student, passing her comprehensives without difficulty. During her freshman year she assisted the costume designer for the annual outdoor play. She found she was good at the compulsory courses, such as mathematics and chemistry, getting A grades, but was bored by the literature and art courses she chose to take, only earning B's. She chose to focus on economics, eventually working up to advanced Economic Theory. Her thesis, based upon the words of Ramsay MacDonald, gained her an A.
In her free time, Hawes focused on clothing. In 1923, at the end of her sophomore year, she went on a six-week course at Parson's School of Fine and Applied Arts, where she decided no art school could teach her how to design clothes. While the students did life drawing, Hawes was exasperated that nobody mentioned anatomy to her, which she felt was necessary if she wanted to dress "living human beings who had bones and muscles". She decided she needed more useful experience, so during the 1924 summer break she secured an unpaid apprenticeship in the Bergdorf Goodman workrooms, to learn how expensive clothes were made to order. Before she left to return to college, the French imports came into the store, and she decided she wanted to travel to France to find out what fashion was all about.
Hawes only had $25 a month for all her expenses, including clothing, so raising the funds for her proposed trip posed a problem. First, she tried to graduate six months early in the year of 1924-25 as she had enough credits. However, as the Dean of the college had decided that no diplomas could be given out before the end of four full years, Hawes was unable to leave early. Eventually, she resumed dressmaking, designing clothes for her classmates, and selling her designs through a dress shop on the edge of the campus. She earned a few hundred dollars through commissions from the shop. She also advertised her services in the Vassar paper.
Despite a brief crisis where Hawes wondered if she should be devoting her life to humanitarian work, she was advised by her economics teacher to take advantage of her clothing-focused gifts and desires. She graduated in the spring of 1925, and prepared to set sail for Paris that July. As her mother was a prominent local citizen, the Newark News decided to interview Elizabeth before she left. This interview, when published, led to a woman from the advertising department for a department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, offering Hawes $15 a month to report back fashion news from Paris for their advertising copy. Inspired by this, Hawes asked her local newspaper if they wanted a regular report from Paris. They accepted this offer, and offered her $10 a month to do so.
On July 8 1925, Elizabeth Hawes and a friend, Evelyn Johnson (whose mother had married a French perfume importer), sailed for France on the RMS Berengaria, student third-class.
Hawes and Johnson arrived at Cherbourg on July 14 1925, moving into a pension in Paris. Johnson's mother arranged for Hawes to work at her dressmaker's, which turned out to be a high end copy house, where copies of haute couture dresses by the leading couturiers were manufactured and sold. This was a thriving illegal occupation in Paris at the time.
The copy house was located on the Faubourg St Honoré, near the House of Lanvin. It boasted that it never copied a couture dress without actually having had the original in hand. Hawes' role was to sell clothing to non-French speaking Americans and to attempt to secure new customers. Each year, the house closed during July and August to enable legitimate couturiers such as Chanel and Vionnet to produce their collections. Hawes was sometimes expected to pose as a legitimate customer and go to one of the couture salons to purchase a dress to be copied. The copy house bought fabrics from the same suppliers as the legitimate couture houses, and had contacts in the couture embroidery firms to provide access to embroidery samples. Sometimes legitimate couture clients would bring in new dresses they had just purchased so that they could fill in their wardrobe with accurate copies at a substantially lower price. Sometimes the copy house would intercept parcels of couture dresses being sent to overseas buyers, copy the dresses accurately, and then re-package the parcels to send them on their legitimate route. Patterns would also be stolen by workers in the couture houses, and sold to copy houses. By September 1, the copy house would offer 50 or 60 dresses made in the exact materials, colour and style as the originals. Hawes related how, at the Ritz, she could see their clients in counterfeit Chanel dresses identical to genuine Chanels worn at adjacent tables.
In January 1926 Hawes left the copy house to become a sketcher for a New York manufacturer of mass-produced clothing. As sketching was not permitted at the shows, she memorised the dresses pointed out to her and then made sketches afterwards. During her third season in the summer of 1926, Hawes began to feel guilty about what she was doing, and decided to stop stealing designs. After this, she became a full-time fashion correspondent for the Cosmos Syndicate, contributing to a regular article that was sent to the New York Post, the Detroit Free Press, the Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers of equal standing.. The success of this column led to her gaining a regular column for The New Yorker under the nom de plume "Parasite", which ran for three years. She worked as a fashion buyer for Macy's, and then as a stylist in Lord and Taylor's Paris offices. In April 1928, Main Bocher, the editor of Paris Vogue, offered her a job on his magazine.
When Hawes met Bocher, she explained that she wanted to be a clothing designer, and he secured her a job with Nicole Groult, the sister of Paul Poiret. Hawes was permitted to design and develop her own designs as well as work alongside Groult and her assistant designer. It was whilst with Groult that Hawes developed her method of designing, based upon Vionnet's technique of draping on a wooden mannequin. She was visited whilst at Groult by Amos Parrish, a promoter who had seen her work in the New Yorker and asked her to come back to America and become a designer.
Hawes returned to New York in 1928. She recognised a niche in the market for an American couturier, observing that the only clothes available in New York were copies of French fashion, either made to order or ready-to-wear. The only exception was Jessie Franklin Turner, who designed and made gowns to order.
In October 1928, Hawes joined up with Rosemary Harden, the cousin of a friend. The Hawes-Harden shop was opened on the fourth floor of 8 West 56th Street, New York. They presented their first collection on 16 December 1928, Hawes' 25th birthday. Hawes' design approach was that Hawes-Harden would design everything it sold, and make clothes to order using only good materials, well-sewn and well-fitted.
While many smart American women didn't appreciate her work, Hawes-Harden gradually attracted a clientèle that appreciated "original without being eccentric" designs.. One of their first notable clients was Lynn Fontanne, who became a regular customer for Hawes designs, and who wore the first stage costumes that Hawes made.
In 1930, Harden left the company, selling her share to Hawes, who became the sole owner. Hawes used advertising and publicity and was very cautious with expenses to enable her business to survive the Great Depression. On July 4 1931, she presented her collection in Paris. It was the first time that a collection from a non-French design house had been shown during the Paris season, which won Hawes a great deal of media attention.
On April 13 1932, Hawes, along with Annette Simpson and Edith Reuss, was featured in a show of American fashion designers at Lord and Taylor's. The three women were credited with working towards creating an American style. A second show featured Hawes alongside two other designers, Clare Potter and Muriel King. These innovative promotions led to a flood of newspaper and magazine articles on American fashion designers.
In 1933 Hawes hired herself to a dress manufacturer to design ready-made clothes. She aimed to create moderately-priced designs that brought high fashion design to the ready-to-wear customer. Although this was commercially successful, Hawes had high principles, and when she found that her designs were being made in inferior materials, she severed the business connection.
One of Hawes' most successful designs was a glove design called "Guardsman". It was a coloured suede glove first designed in 1931 that buttoned on the back of the wrist. In April 1935, a red suede version of the glove was featured in a Lucky Strike advertisement. While Hawes Inc. sold the suede "Guardsman" gloves for $12.50 a handmade pair, it was decided to manufacture ready-to-wear versions of the glove for retail once the couture glove was no longer manufactured. The ready-to-wear cotton suede "Lucky Strike glove" was a success, bringing in significant royalties between May and November 1935.
In 1938, Hawes published Fashion Is Spinach, the first of her books. This was an autobiographical critique and exposé of the fashion industry. The title of the book came from a Carl Rose cartoon published in the New Yorker on December 8 1928.
From a young age Hawes described herself as having believed in the "French legend": that All beautiful clothes are designed in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want them.
Her mother's wedding trousseau came from Paris, and her grandmother annually travelled to Paris, bringing dresses back for her grandchildren. When Hawes began designing and making her own clothes, she referred to Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. The prevalence of Paris and French fashion in these magazines reinforced the impression that only French fashion was worthy of attention. Hawes set out to challenge this, and to dispel the concept that American design was only for leisure-wear and sportswear.
Hawes urged men and women to speak up for clothing that suited their lifestyles. For example, in 1938 she used men's suspenders to illustrate how the fashion industry forced substandard-quality but "fashionable" merchandise upon consumers. Hawes interviewed normal men and found they universally preferred wide elastic suspenders with button fastenings, but could only buy narrow suspenders that cut into their shoulders, with metal grips that tore their trousers. Hawes used this to illustrate her point that the fashion system worked against the customer, offering poorly-made clothing not intended to last beyond a single season.
Hawes was an outspoken champion of dress reform. She encouraged women to wear trousers, and felt that men should feel free to wear robes, coloured clothing, and soft garments if they so wished. She preferred the concept of style to that of fashion, stating that style evolved naturally, whereas fashion was faddish and artificial. Hawes felt everyone had a right to good quality clothing in their personally favoured colours, styles and fabrics, rather than having to choose from the limited range of styles and colours offered by the fashion industry that season. While she made clothes to order, she believed that ready-to-wear was the only way ahead, and thought clothing retailers should each cater to one specific type of customer instead of all stocking the same styles. For her, the only useful purpose of fashion was to entertain, i.e., "to give a little additional gaiety to life".
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Hawes closed her dress business and wrote columns for PM, a populist newspaper. The staff included Communist sympathisers (such as Leo Huberman, the Labor News editor) working alongside anti-Communist liberals. Hawes' involvement with PM led to her and other contributors being placed under surveillance by the FBI. Hawes also worked as a union organizer focusing on race relations for the UAW in Detroit.
In 1942 Hawes designed a uniform for American Red Cross volunteers. The same year, she applied for a night job at an airplane factory to personally experience the life of women machine operators. She used her experiences as the basis for a 1943 book exposing the plight of American female labourers called Why Women Cry.
Elizabeth Hawes was blacklisted in the McCarthy era due to her involvement with PM, her union activities, and her outspoken criticism of Government policy. When Hawes relaunched her fashion house in New York in 1948, she discovered that the FBI had contacted all her professional connections about her political activities, and as a result, she was shunned. Following the failure of her 1948-49 venture, Hawes worked as a freelance designer and continued writing. Despite her harsh words about the fashion industry, she was forced to support herself by working for Priscilla of Boston, an American bridal wear designer. For the rest of her life, in addition to her freelance work, she continued designing clothing for herself and her friends, specializing in hand-knitted separates.
In 1948 Hawes published Anything But Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behavior from Birth to Death; Given out in Print, on Film, and Over the Air; Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women. This book referenced popular women's magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Glamour, and Ladies' Home Journal to compile a manual of tongue-in-cheek “advice” on how to be a good woman. Hawes aimed to expose the American media's efforts to brainwash the post-war woman back into a traditional feminine role. She accused the American government of using undemocratic policies to lull American people into a passive consumerist world fuelled by the myth of ever-increasing prosperity and conformity, while ostensibly working to protect democracy.
For a period, Hawes lived in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, and wrote a book about her life there. But Say It Politely, published in 1954, referred to racial and cultural issues in the islands.
The stress of being blacklisted and being a victim of "red baiting" during the McCarthy era led to Hawes becoming an alcoholic, which would eventually lead to her death in 1971 of alcohol-related causes.
