A new fashion-focused exhibit is opening at the Cincinnati Art Museum this Friday.
Titled “Elizabeth Hawes: Radical American Fashion,” it’s the first-ever showcase of the woman who shocked the world of American fashion in such a drastic way that our society is still feeling the reverberations today.
More than 50 garments from the 1920s to the 1960s, several of which were created by Hawes, are featured—alongside sketches, illustrations and the first publication devoted entirely to Hawes’s career.
Her designs emphasized ease for both women and men, reflecting her belief that fashion should serve the wearer rather than restrict them. Hawes made clothing for many of the era’s biggest names, like the Hollywood icon Lauren Bacall.
In her book “Fashion is Spinach,” Hawes foresaw developments like gender-neutral clothing and methods for quality mass manufacturing, ideas that would not enter the mainstream until the 1960s and after.
“Though today not many people know her by name, we’re all familiar with conventions that Hawes introduced to our way of dressing,” said Megan Nauer, the museum’s acting curator of fashion arts and textiles. “When you read her sharp-tongued words, you recognize things we still wrestle with, both in dressing ourselves and in the functioning of the fashion industry.”
Hawes was born in 1903 in New Jersey, and began sewing at an early age. By the time she was 12, she was selling her own clothing in Pennsylvania. After stints at design school in New York and Paris, she returned to the States with a desire to make American clothes for the average American, and railed against the world’s obsession with French fashion in her books.
While she is best known for “Fashion is Spinach,” which gets its name from a popular New Yorker cartoon, she was also renowned for the self-explanatory “Men Can Take It: A Frontal Attack on Barbaric Male Attire and Barbaric Females Who Perpetuate It” and “Why Women Cry, or Wenches with Wrenches,” a book outlining the difficulties she faced finding childcare while working full time in factories.
After closing her couture house in 1940, Hawes lived several different lives outside of the fashion realm. She worked in an airplane factory during World War II, became an editor at the left-leaning PM Magazine and covered social issues like rent control and education reform, and became a union organizer for the United Auto Workers. Her tendency to use her large platform to spread her political views eventually led to the FBI blacklisting her.
Nauer took on the museum’s investigation project into Hawes’ work from Cynthia Amneus, the museum’s former fashion curator. Nauer was the research assistant on the project four years prior, and when Amneus retired from her role at the museum, Nauer opted to continue working on what would become “Elizabeth Hawes: Radical American Fashion.”
Much of the collection was a donation to the museum from Dorette Kruse Fleischmann, a Cincinnati native who was one of Hawes’ most frequent customers, often hiring her to make gowns and dresses for major events.
“Hawes really wanted to democratize and broaden access to quality apparel that was made here in the United States, and in the global system of fast fashion that we live under today, those are still things that we’re in pursuit of, right?” Nauer said. “She had a lot of thoughts about how the fast fashion system operated that are still really, really relevant today.”
Nauer’s favorite piece of the collection is the 1940 dress titled “Geographic,” from Hawes’ final runway collection. Like much of her work, her last collection nodded to socio-political issues. Realizing that a custom dress-making business would not survive with World War II on the way—and not wanting to design clothing for the highly privileged in the face of global struggle—the collection was her most explosive yet.
But none of the pieces were as bombastic as “Geographic,” a dress draped in giant flags of the Allies that Hawes wore on the runway herself. On the derriere, she placed extremely tiny flags of the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan), ensuring every time she sat that she’d be sitting on the Axis flags.
Nauer hopes that museum guests can realize just how forward-thinking Hawes was with her work.
“I do hope that guests can identify, from some of some of the quotes and some of the writing and the designs that we’ve presented from Hawes, that she was thinking about things we still need to solve or think about today,” Nauer said. “Fashion is an art form is best experienced up close. So visitors to the museum can get pretty close to these garments and … see the really amazing color palettes that she utilized, and see them as they were intended to be seen.”
