If the fashion industry has become a favorite mise-en-scène for television lately (consider Apple TV+’s The New Look and La Maison, or Hulu’s Becoming Lagerfeld), the trend has extended over to our bookshelves, too: Three new books out this month are dedicated to the stylish machinations of the fashion world. Yet they go where we have yet to see a show seriously go this year: the American fashion industry.
Deemed the late bloomer of the four fashion capitals, New York’s garment district business is the subject of this trio of books, each one focused on a different slice of the American fashion pie. A look at these new releases, below.
In American Fashion by Natalie Nudell
Timing is everything—especially in fashion. “The clothes we wear could be ‘passé,’ ‘current,’ or even ‘avant-garde,’” Natalie Nudell writes. “In popular culture, ‘fashion week’ is known as a time when the next season’s offerings, the future of fashion, is revealed.”
In American Fashion by Natalie Nudell (Bloomsbury) continues Nudell’s research on Ruth Finely’s Fashion Calendar, which began with a documentary (2020’s Calendar Girl) on the loveable Finely, who “took the minutes” of the fashion industry by documenting all of its happenings in a little pink booklet, the Fashion Calendar, starting in 1941. To riffle through the calendar’s listings is to journey through the many eras of American fashion: a certain label’s ubiquitousness reveals its towering relevance; the many locations of fashion weeks past are traceable; and allegiances within the industry can be clocked. In her research, Nudell reads between the lines of the Fashion Calendar’s many grids and helps to assemble a fuller picture of the American fashion industry’s history. In America takes things a step further, exploring the results of a massive digitization process that brings the trove of information published in every issue of Fashion Calendar to the web, and to the public, for free.
Empresses of Seventh Avenue by Nancy McDonald
Long before Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri stamped “The Future Is Female” on T-shirts, the fashion industry’s female players were pushing the same agenda. In Empresses of Seventh Avenue (St. Martin’s Publishing Group), author Nancy McDonald spotlights the industry’s earliest movers and shakers: those women who helped make the industry what it is, and the visionaries who preferred to champion real people instead of mannequins. Among the featured are Edna Woolman Chase, Carmel Snow, Elizabeth Hawes, Clare McCardel, Marjorie Griswold, Dorothy Shaver, Lois Long, Virginia Pope, Eleanor Lambert, Diana Vreeland, and Louis-Dahl Wolfe. Through her storytelling, McDonald traces how the baton of American fashion was passed from one to the next in the race toward modernity, practicality, and a singular, stylish vision—or, in other words, the American Look.
“These women deserve credit for building the billion-dollar industry that employs millions of people around the globe,” McDonald writes in her introduction. “It’s time to tell their stories.”
Henri Bendel and the Worlds He Fashioned by Tim Allis
At a moment when the retail landscape finds itself at a crossroads, Tim Allis’s superbly illustrated book takes us back to its heyday, chronicling how Henry Bendel—who was born into a Jewish family in Lafayette, Louisiana—frenchified his name to “Henri Bendel” and branded a storefront in Manhattan with it. Not long after, it became a full-fledged fashion emporium, servicing a bevvy of loyal patrons who seldom left the International Best Dressed List. Allis’s book explores the beginnings of Mr. Bendel’s flagship, which was focused on millinery, and tracks the growth of the store under president Geraldine Stutz. By the 1960s, the brown and white-striped awning off 57th Street had become an HQ for young design talent, especially after the store started giving floor space to designers sourced through an open call.
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