Elizabeth Hawes

At 67 years old, Elizabeth Hawes physical status not available right now. We will update Elizabeth Hawes's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Hawes and Johnson arrived at Cherbourg on July 14, 1925, and moved into a pension in Paris. Johnson's mother arranged for Hawes to work at her dressmaker's on the Faubourg St Honoré, a shop where high quality, illegal copies of haute couture dresses by the leading couturiers were manufactured and sold. It boasted that it never copied a couture dress without actually having had the original in hand. There Hawes sold clothing to non-French-speaking Americans and tried to secure new customers. The house closed every July and August to enable legitimate couturiers such as Chanel and Vionnet to produce their collections. Hawes sometimes visited a couture salon as a legitimate customer and purchased a dress to be copied. At the Ritz, Hawes saw her employers' counterfeit Chanel worn alongside the genuine ones.

In January 1926, Hawes became a sketcher for a New York manufacturer of mass-produced clothing. She would memorize the dresses during fashion shows and sketch afterwards. By the summer of 1926, Hawes grew too guilty about stealing designs to continue. She became a full-time fashion correspondent for the Cosmos Newspaper Syndicate, contributing to a regular article that appeared in the New York Post, Detroit Free Press, The Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers. This led to a regular column for the New Yorker under the pen name "Parisite", 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, editor of Paris Vogue, offered her a job, but when she explained her ambition was to design he secured her a job with Nicole Groult, the sister of Paul Poiret. In this position, Hawes was permitted to develop her own designs, as well as work alongside Groult and her assistant designer. Working alongside these experienced designers, Hawes developed her method of designing based upon Vionnet's technique of draping on a wooden mannequin.

Fashion career in America (1928–1940)

Hawes returned to New York in 1928. She hoped to fill a niche in the American market, where only Jessie Franklin Turner designed and made gowns to order, and the other competition was made to order or ready-to-wear copies of French fashion. In October, Hawes joined up with Rosemary Harden, the cousin of a friend, to open Hawes-Harden, a shop on the fourth floor of 8 West 56th Street, New York. The duo presented their first collection on December 16, 1928, Hawes' 25th birthday. Hawes-Harden sold its own designs only and made clothes to order using quality materials, well-sewn and well-fitted. Hawes-Harden gradually attracted a clientele that appreciated "original without being eccentric" designs. One of the 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 sold her share of the company to Hawes. Hawes used advertising and publicity and was very cautious with expenses to enable her business to survive the Great Depression. She also sold small decorative works designed for her by Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi, friends from her years in Paris. On July 4, 1931, Hawes presented her collection in Paris. It was the first time that a non-French design house had shown its collection 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 & Taylor. The three women were credited with working towards creating an American style. A second show featured Hawes alongside Clare Potter and Muriel King. These innovative promotions led to a flood of newspaper and magazine articles on American fashion designers. Hawes generated publicity with humorous political names for her collections, including "The Five-Year Plan" (a cotton nightgown and bed jacket), "The Yellow Peril" (a silk afternoon dress), and "Disarmament" (an embroidered evening dress). The overall style was bold: "wide stripes and large prints were used in simple, comfortable silhouettes", by one account. She advocated trousers for women and followed her own advice.

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. The venture was commercially successful, but Hawes discovered that her designs were being made from inferior materials, and she severed the business connection.

One of Hawes' most successful designs was a glove design called "Guardsman". It was a colored suede glove first designed in 1931 that buttoned on the back of the wrist. Hawes sold a handmade pair of the suede "Guardsman" gloves for $12.50. In April 1935, after she had discontinued the couture version, a red suede copy of the glove was featured in a Lucky Strike advertisement. This she manufactured and sold successfully in a ready-to-wear version, the "Lucky Strike glove".

In 1935, she showed her designs in Moscow, the first display of haute couture there since the Russian Revolution of 1917. She said that the interest of large crowds of women showed that the country was becoming stable and that people were free to express counter-revolutionary ideas without punishment. She reported seeing permanent waves and painted nails and hats, mostly berets, and dispensed fashion advice:

In 1936, she designed the costumes for two Broadway plays, Roy Hargrave's A Room in Red and White, and Triple-A Plowed Under, part of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project directed by Joseph Losey.

When Hawes had visited the Soviet Union in 1935, she either accompanied or was accompanied by Losey, who was studying the Russian stage. They married on July 24, 1937. They had a son, Gavrik Losey, in 1938.

In 1937, she presented an all-male fashion show of her own brightly colored designs, followed in 1939 by the publication of another fashion manifesto, Men Can Take It.

In 1938, Hawes published Fashion Is Spinach, an autobiographical critique and exposé of the fashion industry. The title came from a Carl Rose cartoon published in The New Yorker on December 8, 1928. At the same time as she attacked the pretense of fashion, she produced popular designs like a simple dress with a full wide skirt—one of her trademarks—worn by Joan Bennett in a Wrigley's chewing gum advertisement. Life magazine reported the commercial relationship by noting that "Elizabeth Hawes has always had, in addition to her talent for designing clothes, an equal talent for publicizing and promoting Elizabeth Hawes." The designer of the chewing gum dress, Life reported, "now sells her very expensive, made-to-order dresses from a gray stone house on East 67th Street, Manhattan."

Source