Octave Uzanne predicted that fashion would reflect the modern woman’s new interest in mobility and practicality.

The 1900s seem to have been a good decade for predicting. We’ve already reported on two Post authors, Otis Mason and John Elfreth Watkins, who had better-than-average forecasting skills. This week, we introduce another: Octave Uzanne, who showed remarkable foresight in his 1901 Post article “What Women Will Wear in the Twentieth Century.”

In this fashion forecast, Uzanne anticipated the fundamental change in women’s wardrobes that would reflect a changing status. When the young girls of 1901 reached adulthood, he said, they would live quite differently from their mothers. In general, they would be less frivolous. Unlike their mothers, they would be less willing to spend long hours dressing themselves in ornate, impractical clothing: “hours which might be filled with work or pleasure more interesting and no doubt more healthful.”

Even though women wouldn’t be able to vote for another 19 years, Uzanne could see women already taking a more active role in their world.

One artist's idea of how fashions, and an automobile, would look in the future.

And fashion would reflect the modern woman’s new interest in mobility and practicality, and give her a sense “of her force, of her rights, of the less subordinate part which might fall to her in the future.”

Her wardrobe would be built around an active life. Unlike the stay-at-home women of the 1900s, the future woman would be a “traveler and student, a lover of sport, of bicycling, and of motor-driving, in mind more independent than ever.” It would be hard to see in the modern woman the sickly and capricious child she had been in previous generations.

Men, he predicted, would first judge her new, comfortable clothing to be immodest, but they eventually would have to accept it because women were through with the floor-length skirt, the veil, and the corset. “No more tight-laced busts and swelling necks; no more whalebone compression and misshapen chests—instead, free bodies.” In making these predictions, he was not simply stating the obvious. Corsets remained in general use for the next two decades, and girdles until the 1960s.

Dressed for lounging on the moon in 1964 Post article "Designs On Your Future."

To appreciate Uzanne’s predictive skills, you need to move forward 63 years, when decorator Evelyn Jablow tried her hand at forecasting in “Designs On Your Future.” Having just visited the Milan Triennale exhibit of 1964, she gave her predictions of women’s fashions in the 21st century.

Future women, as she imagined then, would wear just one outfit: a one-size-fits-all top made of stretch material and tights. The entire wardrobe, just “three or four pieces of clothing,” would fit into a cylinder the size of a golf bag. Also, women would wear only boots and slippers, and no earrings or bracelets.

Evelyn Jablow wasn't the only one predicting one-piece moon suits. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera showcased similar fashion predictions in The Jetsons.

As for men, they would “abandon tie, shirt, and trousers” to wear a “one-piece stretch moon suit” when traveling (presumably through outer space) and, at home, “long tights and a short toga, reminiscent of the free-swinging styles of the Roman charioteer.”

It must have seemed reasonable in 1964, because William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had pretty much the same idea of fashion in 1962 when they created The Jetsons.

Predicting How Women of the Future Would, and Would Not, Dress The Saturday Evening Post

In case you hadn’t noticed, fashionable clothing for men has barely changed over the past 200 years.

The coat-tie-trousers-hat ensemble was established in the 1820s. The only significant change has been the abandonment of the hat, once the most personal and most expressive item in a man’s wardrobe.

While the basic elements have remained constant, men’s clothing has seen countless variations over the past two centuries. Each year, it seems, brings new coat lengths, tie widths, and lapel cuts. But as this 1930 advertisement shows, there is a strong resemblance between the suit of today and of 70 years ago.

In the ’30s, a Post article posed the question that has occurred to most men who’ve wandered the aisles of a clothing store and shaken their head at the strange, new fashions: “Where do they come up with this stuff?” Based on his experience as a buyer, Arthur van Vlissingen declared that new styles weren’t dictated by either clothing retailers or manufacturers; neither could afford to gamble on an upcoming trend.

New styles become popular only when men see other men wearing them. “Men, unlike women, seldom discard a garment simply because the style has meanwhile changed. The average man who buys one of our suits wears it until, from his standpoint, it is worn out. … But men are none the less sensitive to style. They will [only] buy clothing which is … the fashion in their social circles, whatever these circles may be. They are determined to start even with their fellows every time they get new outfits,” Vlissingen wrote.

But this only explains how styles grew, not how they were born. He explains that, ultimately, new fashions were started by men who had their clothes made for them. These men included the successful executive, who needed to prove his ability to sense a new trend and his willingness to invest in it. Also included was the salesman, who had to demonstrate to his customers that he was aware of the latest developments, both in his own business and in fashion.

Younger men followed “styles which take shape at the places where the country’s leisured and socially prominent loaf, such places as Palm Beach and Newport, Aiken and Southampton, White Sulphur and Virginia Hot Springs.”

Another major influence on fashion in the 1930s was college—one university, in particular. “The fashions in clothing worn by our male population, between the ages of 14 and perhaps 25, usually get their start at Princeton,” Vlissingen wrote.

“Harvard is a very large university, in a great city which influences the students’ styles heavily. [But] it holds to a tradition of careless dress—well-made clothes seldom dry-cleaned and never pressed. Yale is more compact and more finicky, but New Haven is also a large city. Princeton is in a smaller town, off by itself where it can incubate a style effectively. Practically every Princeton student is well dressed, whereas only one-third or so of the Yale men can qualify by our standards.”

Whether they were at a resort or on a campus, these young men made up “a selective group of people, to whom adheres social prestige, [which] absents itself from cities all over the country. During their absence these men quite unconsciously decide what sorts of clothing they wish to wear. Then they scatter to their homes and are imitated by their friends, from whom, in turn, the style spreads in ever-widening circles.”

In addition to the fashion example set by the successful executive or the big man on campus, American men’s tastes were strongly influenced by the clothing they saw actors wearing in motion pictures.

Mr. Jinks, the well-known wholesale grocer of a mid-Kansas town, would indignantly and honestly deny that he buys his clothes according to what he sees at the movies. But the chances are that his clothier can recognize in Mr. Jinks’ halting description of the suit he wants, the outfit against which Marlene Dietrich pillowed her comely cheek at the Lyric last night.

No longer can a New York salesman come into Mr. Jinks’ store wearing a shepherd-plaid suit with two-inch checks, a red necktie, with a diamond horseshoe, and a pair of high-yellow shoes—not if he wants Mr. Jinks to think he’s dressed in the latest style.

Mr. Jinks may not be particularly alert about styles, and maybe he has not been in a town of more than 25,000 population for two years. But, like almost everyone else on the North American continent, Mr. Jinks goes to the movies. So does the traveling salesman. Which helps to account for the fact that the old-fashioned traveling man in loud clothes has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Douglas Fairbanks and his well-dressed fellows have done him to death.

Gone are the days when movies introduced men to elegant dinner jackets, stylish sport coats, and raffish neckwear. Today’s movies are more likely to reflect the style du jour: work pants, T-shirt, and baseball cap, which are worn by movie moguls, software tycoons, and every big man on campus. Perhaps the 200-year-old fashion for men will, at last, be replaced.

Why Do Men Dress That Way? 1930s version. The Saturday Evening Post

As one who has enjoyed a lifetime of exploring style and learning about designers and the history of fashion, I found Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible to be a good resource on the basics of fashion history, classic style, current dos and don’ts, and how to assess your closet in order to put yourself in good fashion order.

If you are new to all things related to the fashion industry, designers, or understanding personal style, this book is a good beginner’s guide. It is filled with illustrations, pictures, interesting history and trivia, as well as details that represent many an era, a designer, a trend, and how, as in life, what goes around comes around. Who knew how many times the platform shoe would be considered the latest style!

Mr. Gunn has organized his table of contents by articles of attire and accessories, in the same manner as retailers once organized their stores’ departments. I was amused to find that Gunn’s table of contents is ordered by the way one might get dressed, beginning with underwear, and so on.

Mr. Gunn highlights a moment in the movie The Devil Wears Prada that relates to something I’ve always marveled at: the fact that every garment worn today has history and that history can run back years, centuries, or even longer! For example, there are stone carvings of a woman exercising in what is believed to be the first evidence of a sports bra, no less. What started out as a new design of its time has moved through the channels of high fashion and low fashion, from couture to retail to consignment and retro.

Mr. Gunn has a diverse and interesting background in the world of fashion, and he shares many of his experiences and opinions about what works and what doesn’t. His expertise is very up to the minute, and while this book is a valuable guide for today, it will also reflect well historically on our current styles in decades to come.

From the start, I wondered about “Bible” being used in the title—feeling it might be a bit over the top—but the book is directed to everyone, whether you prefer to spend a month’s salary on an outfit or you look and feel just wonderful in your nice looking daily uniform. Gunn is speaking to everyone.

In the last chapter, Gunn talks about shopping, and how to prepare for it. And when you choose something from the rack, seeing it on the hanger thinking I can’t wear that, Gunn tells you to just try it on and see. After all, that hanger looks nothing like you!

The book’s appendix contains worksheets to help you explore and understand your closet and wardrobe. It will help you organize, cull, and plan for that next shopping trip, by determining what to love and preserve, and what to leave behind.

Tim Gunn is an American fashion consultant and television personality. He was on the faculty of Parsons The New School for Design from 1982 to 2007 and chair of fashion design at the school from 2000 to 2007, after which he joined Liz Claiborne as its chief creative officer. He is well known on-air for the reality television program Project Runway and his spin-off show, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style. Mr. Gunn has authored three books in addition to this one—A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style, Abrams, 2007, Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work, Gallery, 2010, and Shaken, Not Stirred, Gunn/ADSI 2011/Kindle.

Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible: The Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Book Review: Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible The Saturday Evening Post

We were naturally interested to see what Vogue will offer. The Post is in the middle of a multi-year project to digitize our archives so readers can view our 190 years of issues online. It also prompted us to look back over our own fashion reporting, which covered the art and business of haute couture.

In 1953, for example, a Post article reported how Christian Dior was driving up both hemlines and gown prices. The house of Dior had grossed $7 Million in 1952 by selling his creations for $300 to $2400 apiece:

Will the ladies obey M. Dior?

From Dior's 1953 show

Christian Dior, tyrant of the hemlines, decrees short skirts for American women. This foxy French designer grosses $7,000,000 a year selling $300-$2400 gowns [$2400 to $20,000 today], and says, “Aren’t people crazy to spend so much on a dress!”

[His] hand-sewn, petticoated, boned, and padded product takes an average of 110 hours to complete, and three fittings are compulsory.

Who can afford it?…Dior, who sells some 6500 originals a year—nearly half of them to Americans—has reason to believe that there are just about 2500 women in the world who have the time, the money and the inclination to dress regularly at his house, rated among the three most expensive.

The fabulous fashion queen reigned in the ‘Twenties as a daring autocrat of feminine style. Three decades later she has returned to rule again…

Coco's 'understated elegance.'

When she retired, in 1938, Chanel already was a legend. And then, in 1954, she suddenly emerges from fifteen years’ oblivion, acting as if she had merely been out to lunch, and presently reoccupies the throne of fashion!

If such a comeback would be something to write home about in any business, it is unique in the rough little world of dress designing, where lives and memories are short.

Custom-made to the client’s measurements, the average Chanel costs roughly $500* —a price slightly below the Paris top.

What with virtually all the stitching done by hand and with each garment representing about 150 working hours, the output of “originals” is limited—no more than about 1800 a year. *[$3,700 today]

For reasons no one can explain logically, styles come and go in cycles that last seven to ten years. Skeptics regard the process as a racket to stimulate sales but a strong motivation is behind it.

Oleg Cassini and clients

That’s great for me as a designer and a manufacturer, but I can’t help deploring the aesthetic damage to fashion.

Women seem to need the emotional lift a new fashion outlook gives them. Sure, overhauling wardrobes periodically runs into money, but I submit it is more desirable than the drab uniformity of clothes in countries where individuality is suppressed.

Women who adhere to the old maxim that elegance is the art of omission, seem to be vanishing. The great majority have a tendency to overload themselves with gewgaws and to fuss over superficialities. Proportionately more money is spent on clothes than ever before, and it is thrown around with an abandon that suggests women are latching onto new styles as an escape from reality.

Fashion layouts… began to appear last fall illustrating new styles variously known as “the Plunge, “the V,” “the U,” “the Split,” “the Slash” and “the Scoop” which women would start wearing in February.

"Cleavage crisis extends into the office"

Well, February is here, and obviously we are all in for a nervous winter and spring. Any way you look at it—and almost any way is possible right now—the bosom is back on the national landscape.

Obviously, the new dresses have been plunged, slashed and scooped for [men’s] benefit…it follows that [men] are supposed to gaze at the semiexposed bosom with some sort of favorable attitude: admiration or reverence or plain old friendly respect. Anyhow, we are supposed to notice. In so doing, we are playing our proper role of cavalier.

But we cannot notice too much, or too long. If we do, we play our other traditional role of boor or lecher. Unluckily, the line separating the two is so thin as to be invisible.

Swimsuits with vinyl boots and visors

The clothes [at Rudi Gernreich’s new show] satisfied everybody’s longing for the weird, the dramatic, the uncompromising. There were leather suits and loudly striped stockings, reversible jumpers, aviator suits, helmet-hats and ostrich feathers. The colors, equally bizarre, as vivid as barber poles or billboard advertisements, modulate from purple to lavender to hot pink to murky eggplant.

The violence of the colors and the design bludgeoned the onlooker into sudden attention. Some of the costumers, causing the same kind of confusion as certain abstract paintings, looked as if they could be work backwards with the same effect. “My dear,” said a lady in ruffles, “it’s pop art.”

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “a young girl was supposed to look sweet and innocent. But that ideal no longer applies. Before they’re seventeen they cultivate a wild, conscious, sexy look, which is very unnerving…The generation feels defeated; nothing seems to make any difference. The look in clothes expresses an anti-attitude, the result of being bored…If you’re bored, you go for the outrageous gesture. Everything else seems to have lost any meaning.”

Articles of Fashion The Saturday Evening Post

Woman in Huge Hat – Kimball – 2/8/1908

Woman in Huge Hat
by Alonzo Kimball
February 8, 1908

This pretty lady was quite a standout in 1908, with a hat large enough to serve as shade for three. This one must have required several hatpins to secure.

Woman in Plumed Hat, Chin in Hand – Harrison Fisher – 1/18/08

Woman in Plumed Hat, Chin in Hand
by Harrison Fisher
January 18, 1908

Harrison Fisher was an artist who graced many Post covers with lovely ladies. This hat requires a profile view for best effect. One wonders what poor bird(s) suffered for this work of art. Well, they say beauty has its price.

Woman in Paisley Turban – Harrison Fisher – 5/21/10

Woman in Paisley Turban
by Harrison Fisher
5/21/10

There are dozens of Post “hat ladies” to choose form, but we couldn’t resist this gorgeous paisley turban. This was also painted by artist Harrison Fisher. We love the color reproduction for 1910.

Women and Dog in Auto – Harrison Fisher – 11/25/11

Women and Dog in Auto
by Harrison Fisher
November 25, 1911

Let’s home that fancy motor car doesn’t get up too much speed! Somewhere between glamorous and…well, crazy, these hats make a fashion statement…of some kind. Luckily there was still room in the car for the dog.

Coffee and Conversation – Harrison Fisher – 1/20/12

Coffee and Conversation
by Harrison Fisher
January 20, 1912

Artist Harrison Fisher must have done some serious hat shopping. In “Coffee and Conversation” from 1912, this lady’s headgear is bound to turn some heads. We kind of see Lady Gaga going for this one.

Lady in Wide Brim Hat Holding Tea Cup – Penrhyn Stanlaws – 3/24/28

Lady in Wide Brim Hat Holding Tea Cup
by Penrhyn Stanlaws
March 24, 1928

Thank goodness for Derby Ladies! Where else can we drool over these beautiful hats these days? Such as this simply elegant cover from 1928. We found her at the Curtis Publishing website under the appropriate category of “Glamour”. Reprints of Saturday Evening Post covers are available are available at Curtis Publishing, and these stunning covers would be stylish indeed!

Looking for a Saturday Evening Post cover? Questions about Post covers can be directed to info@curtispublishing.com or d.denny@saturdayeveningpost.com.

Classic Covers: Kentucky Derby Fashion Tips The Saturday Evening Post

Once, the sidewalks of our cities were bobbing oceans of headgear: bowlers, boaters, bonnets, bretons, panamas, pork pies, and pill boxes. Then, mysteriously, hats were left in the back of coat closets, eventually making their way to attic trunks, then… oblivion.

But in the young century, hats were everywhere. Consider the below photograph from 1900. It shows New York’s Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday morning, and not a single bare head.

Of course, this was the Easter Parade: the one day of the year set aside to display your best hat.

The parade had grown out of the custom of wealthy New Yorkers to stroll the sidewalks after church, there to mingle with their peers and display their family, clothing, and carriages. By 1883, the event had become an annual event where men and women would display their Easter best, particularly their crowning glory: tall, lustrous opera hats for men and elaborate, be-ribboned bonnets for women.

Naturally the event attracted crowds of citizens who weren’t among New York’s social elite. At first, they enjoyed simply watching the parade of fashion, but they soon were mingling with the fashionable set both in church and on Fifth Avenue. You can imagine the reaction of New York’s elite, as noted by a Post author in 1955:

“As early as the mid-1890s, the New York Time complained dismally about ‘visitors from the East Side, shop girls, clerks, and all sorts of “metropolitan outsiders” who had thrust themselves into the parade’ where they had no business. By 1897 so many ‘outsiders’ were invading the Avenue on Easter that churches began issuing admission tickets to their memberships. At St. Patrick’s, a group of eager females tried to beat some ticket holders out of their seats. They had got in via a ladder that some workmen had left near a window… After a brief but spirited fisticuffs, police came to the rescue of the ticket holders.”

Ah, those were the days — when New Yorkers fought crowds to get into church.

Inevitably, the parade of genteel fashion took on a more democratic character, and a carnival atmosphere with no definite purpose except celebrating Spring. As the Post article observes:

“Americans… are perplexed by the Fifth Avenue event because it has no apparent beginning, ending, organization or purpose. Swarms of people just show up from no place in particular, march — perhaps ‘trample’ is a better word — for two or three hours, then go home. The main promenade route is the eighteen short blocks on Fifth Avenue between 42nd Street and Central Park, centering at 50th Street, near St. Patrick’s.”

The 128th Official Easter Parade will be held this year on April 4th. It will look nothing like the photograph above. Fashion — hats, particularly, will be an important feature of the event. Many will be intended to amuse, looking something like parade floats for the head. But there will also be samples of New York’s millinery industry, which still clings to life.

In 1963, Muriel Fischer reported on the millinery market, which at the time was a strong, durable industry.

“Some 40 firms have been in the business for better than 25 years. (Yet few newcomers have entered the field in the past five years.) At least seven establishments loudly proclaim. ‘We’re the largest and the oldest!’”

It was one of the last, great years for hats, and the competition was intense.

“Millinery seasons are short and violent. The peak periods are the 10 weeks prior to Easter and the 10 weeks prior to Fall. Yet there’s never a lull. For if the industry isn’t making hats it’s planning hats, and it’s always busy talking hats.”

“Roughly 60 million units of millinery are sold per year. In the overall accounting, 80 percent are in the below-$10 category, only 3 percent in the over-$35 salon group.”

The article lists several of 1963′s most important hat designers:

“Sally Victor and Mr. John are generally acclaimed the crowned heads of couture’s royal family. Also include are Lilly Dachè, Adolfo, Emme, Chanda, the house of Hattie Carnegie, and a dynamic young newcomer called Mr. Halston.”

Just 30 years-old at the time, Halston was to become famous for his skills in draping the feminine form in solids of classical elegance.

“It was Halston who created the ‘Kennedy pillbox.’ He smiles at the recollection. ‘I made it for her long before the inauguration,’ he relates. ‘Funny thing is when she put it on she dented the top of it—pushed it in, I guess, holding it against the wind. lt was photographed that way, and soon I noticed all the women wearing pillboxes were pushing them in. Halston also made the large rolled brims Jackie wore to India. He estimates that ‘fifty percent of the downtown business was based on that hat that season.’”

In the highly competitive market of that time, hat-makers could only produce a few styles each year. They hoped that one of their styles would take off, but to ensure their profitability they stole designs from each other.

“In his race to prepare a line for the selling season, the 39th Street manufacturer often finds it expedient to steal. ‘How many designers do I have?’ chuckles Harry Samet. ‘Two who work in my place—and one hundred and eighty working for others. So they call us pirates. But we compliment them, don’t we?’

“Lilly Dachè agrees. ‘When they stop copying me, ah, then I am finished.’

“Piracy is encouraged by the Millinery Institute of America, an organization sponsored by the downtown manufacturers, the uptown creators and the Millinery Workers’ Union. ‘Let’s face it,’ expounds Charles Rothenberg, who heads the Millinery Institute of America. ‘It is the ability to copy down, mass-produce and render fashion at the lowest price level that makes the American woman the best-dressed female in the world.’

The institute seeks to encourage women to buy six hats per year. (Current estimates pinpoint the odd fraction of 2.8 hats per woman.)”

So what happened to America’s hats? One reason for their decline is their loss of usefulness. We no longer need to cover our heads in our brief walk between vehicles and buildings.

Some historians claim the hat died when hairstyles became more luxuriant. Others state that President Kennedy set a trend for hatless attire (although he definitely wore a hat on state occasions.)

Not a hatless soul to be found in 1880's 5th Avenue. (Library of Congress)

In fact, both of these factors were part of a larger influence. In the 1960s, American society broke with the tradition of serious attire. The trend-setters among young Americans didn’t want to dress for respectability as their parents had, but for comfort. They also wanted something that reflected their own generation. They wanted to advertise the studied casualness of youth in jeans, shorts, t-shirts, and athletic wear. The suit, the tie, and the hat became historical artifacts.

The hat has made a meager comeback in the form of baseball caps. But caps are nearly indistinguishable, and anonymous. The crown may proclaim a baseball team or a seed company, but they say almost nothing about the wearer.

In contrast, a hat is a prominent display of its wearer’s character and taste — and Americans generally aren’t comfortable making  such a bold statement.

The Fall of the American Hat The Saturday Evening Post