x Introduction

American history. My first book was a biography of a justice on the

United States Supreme Court. I may be the only historian to lecture
at the Supreme Court in a suit that won a blue ribbon at a county fair.
Clothes for You inspired me to find out more about the art of dress.
My hunt took me from the basements of bookstores to the archives of
INTRODUCTION universities. I discovered that hundreds of books and pamphlets were
written to teach the American woman how to dress for the twentieth
century. Millions of girls read them in home economics classes and
in 4-H clothing clubs.
The books were written by a remarkable group of women who
worked as teachers, writers, retailers, and designers. They offered advice
Wandering through a used bookstore years ago, I spotted a in classrooms, on radio broadcasts, at women’s clubs, and in magazines.
thick volume called Clothes for You. I’ve always been interested in fash- They even enlisted the federal government in their efforts through the
ion, so I pulled it off the shelf. It turned out to be a college textbook Bureau of Home Economics. I call these women the “Dress Doctors”
from 1954, but it was like no textbook I had ever seen before. after a story told by Mary Brooks Picken, the first among them.
The book’s five hundred pages taught the art and science of dress, Born on a farm in Kansas in 1886, Picken was a prodigy who
explaining that beauty in dress can only be achieved by applying the could spin, weave, and sew by the age of five. At eleven, she made the
principles of art to clothing. These principles hold true no matter layette of clothes and bedding for her newest baby brother. Widowed
the season, the year, or the century. A woman can use them to choose young, she supported herself by teaching dress design and sewing to
the beautiful from whatever current fashions have on offer, and it won’t everyone from the respectable young women at the YWCA to the
cost a fortune so long as she follows some basic rules of economics. If female convicts doing time at Leavenworth Penitentiary.
necessary, any girl can learn how to sew and create whatever she needs. A skilled woman physician turned to Picken for help, she recalled
The book’s message was artistic, logical, and democratic: knowledge, in 1918. The good doctor realized that people thought her less in-
not money, is the key to beauty in dress. telligent than she really was because she dressed so badly, but she had
The book aroused my curiosity on two counts. First, I’m a dress- no idea what to do about it because clothes mystified her. So she
maker from a long line of sewing women. One of my grandmothers asked Picken to “diagnose” her case. Picken examined the doctor and
could make anything her daughter pointed out to her in a shop win- prescribed a professional wardrobe. When the doctor donned her new
dow; the other left me her Singer Slant-O-Matic sewing machine, clothes, she noticed a marked difference in the way people viewed her.
the very latest in high tech from 1952. My mother sewed and knit Her fellow doctors treated her with more respect. So did the hospital
clothes for my sister and me when we were little. Sewing came in nurses who worked under her. People who had never before bothered
especially handy when I had to live on a low budget while earning to consult her professionally now made a point of doing so. She had
my doctorate from Stanford University. Second, I’m a professor of been cured.

ix
 Introduction xi xii Introduction

in the twentieth century, an era they viewed as one of unprecedented

opportunity for their sex. They considered art a spiritual force that
encouraged an appreciation of the beauty of all God’s creation. They
taught their students to study the Five Art Principles of harmony,
rhythm, balance, proportion, and emphasis, and to observe them at
work in famous paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Sup-
per. They explained that these same principles should be used in the
design of clothing. Their aim was the creation of what they called
“artistic repose,” the moment when the discerning eye takes in a de-
sign as a whole and finds it perfectly satisfying in color, line, and form.
The Dress Doctors followed the lead of the Arts and Crafts move-
ment, which first blurred the distinction between what was beautiful
and what was useful in the late nineteenth century. Any everyday
object could be beautiful if it was suited to its purpose and designed
Fig. 1: Mary Brooks Picken at the time that according to the principles of art. Clothing fit the bill. By teaching
she cured a physician of a bad wardrobe in dressmaking, the Dress Doctors made women into creators, not just
1918. Picken, THE SECRETS OF DISTINCTIVE
DRESS, 1918 shoppers. “Beautiful clothes should be part of contemporary art,”
declared one Dress Doctor in 1925, “not beautiful clothes for the few,
“Do we not express ourselves through the clothes we wear as but beautiful clothes for everybody, and at a cost that all can afford.”2
much as through what we say and what we do?” asked Picken.1 The Dress Doctors were eager to prepare women for new roles in
The makeover is a story as old as Cinderella, but the Dress Doc- American life. World War I had called upon women to replace men
tors reinvented it for the modern age. Picken’s doctor wasn’t trying to in factories, while housewives learned to conserve food and clothing.
land a prince. She was struggling to succeed in a profession in which Women gained new civic duties when the Nineteenth Amendment
women were few and far between. guaranteed them the right to vote in 1920.
Picken eventually moved east and made herself into the most Against this backdrop, the Dress Doctors identified Six Occa-
important authority on dress in America. She wrote dozens of books, sions for Dress—school, business, housework, sport, afternoons, and
including the first dictionary penned by a woman, The Language of evenings—and explained which designs and fabrics were best suited
Fashion. She helped found the Costume Institute, which is now part for each. The girl at school wore tailored dresses that allowed her to
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and became the first woman focus on her studies. Sober colors and restrained lines were good for
to serve as a trustee of the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1951. women working in business, while cheerful and washable housedresses
Picken and the other Dress Doctors took traditional ideas about suited women looking after their children and their homes. Outfits for
beauty and art and used them to help American women to flourish sport allowed the athlete—another new, modern role for women—to
 Introduction xiii xiv Introduction

move with strength and grace everywhere from the tennis court to the The businesswoman and the housewife required very different ward-
skating rink. Afternoons and evenings let a woman indulge herself robes, so no list of fashion “must haves” would suit them both. Instead
in fragile fabrics and rich colors, whether she was a social butterfly of advising on trends that would soon be obsolete, the Dress Doctors
headed out for the evening or a quiet homebody curled up with a taught the rules of good design. Armed with these truths, a woman
good book. Gently but firmly, the Dress Doctors urged all American in any era could determine for herself what was beautiful, while the
women to wear clothes that let them work efficiently and that brought lessons on budgeting from the same advisers kept her out of debt.
the elevating power of beauty into their lives. The art and science of dress was once a standard part of a girl’s
And such a wardrobe would not break the bank, because it need education, but even historians have overlooked the Dress Doctors’
only be made up of a small number of beautiful garments. During work. How were they forgotten so completely?3
the Great Depression, the Dress Doctors showed farmwomen how The cultural rebellion of the 1960s undermined the Dress Doctors
to recycle flour sacks into dresses. When World War II redirected the from all sides. The home economists among them had claimed a place
American economy to provide for the troops, the Dress Doctors ex- at the vanguard of professional women in the 1920s, but now they
plained how to cut down a man’s suit to make a woman’s suit. When seemed hopelessly old-fashioned as women demanded the right to
the 1950s brought prosperity, the Dress Doctors explained how best work in all fields. When radical feminist Robin Morgan spoke at the
to choose a dress from the multitude offered in department stores. annual meeting of the American Home Economics Association in
And through it all, the Dress Doctors reminded the American woman 1972, she told the women in her audience, many of them teachers,
that a few perfect outfits, assembled according to the art principles, that the best thing they could do for young women was quit their
and suited to the occasions of her life, were all that she needed. jobs. By the mid-1970s, funding for home economics programs in
The Dress Doctors also advised what suited a woman at different public schools were being slashed on the grounds that their classes
ages. The schoolgirl’s clothing, whether day wear or evening wear, encouraged sexual stereotypes. Ambitious young women turned to
remained simple in cut so that she could move her energetic body freely. other professions.
The bright and playful colors she wore reflected her youthful energy The art principles also came under attack during the “Youthquake”
and simplicity. Aging meant gains in worldliness. The Dress Doctors movement of the 1960s. The Baby Boomers opted for shocking color
reserved for the woman over thirty the most complex dress designs schemes that created anything but the artistic repose espoused by
and the subtlest color schemes. They explained how a woman can age the Dress Doctors. The sophisticated fashion models of the 1950s
with grace and dignity by using the right hues and fabrics. sometimes worked into their forties, but now the fashion world cel-
The Dress Doctors offered solutions to perennial problems of ebrated youth and youth alone. Clothing manufacturers abandoned
style. They reminded their students that fad stands for “For a Day,” what they called “Sophisticated Styling” in favor of “Young Styling”
because that’s about how long it will last. Instead, they counseled and “Youthful Styling,” because grandmothers and granddaughters
avoiding the spectacular and the weird in favor of the beautiful. The were wearing the same dresses.
Dress Doctors knew women must deploy the erotic power of clothing The results were not pretty. Jessica Daves, former editor of Vogue
sparingly if they wanted to be taken seriously in other arenas of life. magazine, was herself a grande dame born in 1898. Taking in the state
 Introduction xv

of fashion in 1967, she wrote, “The absurdity of a busty lady with

a dowager’s hump and substantial legs appearing in the streets in a
sleeveless shift, above the knees, is something horrible to contem-
plate.” The hallmark of Young and Youthful Styling—simplicity—led
to the simple-mindedness of garments like the dish-towel dress in
the 1970s.4
The Dress Doctors may have been forgotten, but they deserve our
attention. How valuable would this advice be today when American
women are mired in credit-card debt, urged to shopping frenzy, and
when the most common yardstick of attractiveness is who’s wearing
the shortest dress? Many voices offer fashion advice today, but, unlike
the Dress Doctors, they say little about overarching principles of style.
In order to distill the teachings of the Dress Doctors of yore, I have
collected and studied more than seven hundred books and magazines
on dress and sewing. I have re-created vintage clothing from every
decade of the twentieth century. I even made that dish-towel dress
(not that I enjoyed it). I also mastered the art of millinery, because
hats were once part of every woman’s wardrobe. This book explains
what I have discovered.
Today, Americans are known for their sloppy dressing, but it was
not always so. An Englishwoman who came to the States after World
War II marveled at “the inherent good taste” of the American woman.
But American women weren’t born with good taste. They learned it
from the Dress Doctors. And we can learn it again.5

Fig. 1: Hats were a necessary daytime accessory until the 1960s. Fashion decreed that
women top their summer outits with enormous hats in 1909. Maybe the idea was to make
the hips look smaller? MCCALL’S MAGAZINE, August 1909
 Fig. 5: Is it a skirt? A dress? No, it’s beach pajamas!
hese were the irst pants that women did not wear
out of practical necessity. VOGUE PATTERN Book,
April-May 1931

Fig. 3: By 1918, the American woman had loosened her corset and lifted her skirts of the
ground. MCCALL’S, April 1918
 Fig. 19: American women learned in
1947 that Christian Dior’s New Look
dictated a tiny waist and a luxurious
skirt. his swirling skirt of brown wool
was topped with a leopard peplum
Fig. 13: A woman could create an entire wardrobe for day or for day into evening using jacket trimmed in skunk. November
only three sewing patterns from Vogue Patterns. VOGUE PATTERN BOOK, June-July 1937 1947 LADIES HOME JOURNAL® MAGAZINE
 Fig. 23: By day, a businesswoman in 1952. By night, oh my! VOGUE PATTERN BOOK, June-
July 1952

Fig. 20: Notice that only the bridesmaids of this 1951 wedding party appeared without the
lace bolero to cover their bare shoulders. Vogue 545, 1951
Fashion / History

A
s a glance down any street in America quickly reveals, American women have forgotten how
to dress. We chase fads, choose inappropriate materials and unattractive cuts, and wear heels
when we should be wearing lats. Quite simply,
we lack the know-how to dress professionally and latteringly. As historian
and expert dressmaker Linda Przybyszewski reveals in The Lost Art of Dress, it wasn’t
always this way—and there is hope for us yet.
In the irst half of the twentieth century, a remarkable group of women—the so-called Dress
Doctors—taught American women how to dress artfully, and spearheaded
a nationwide movement toward beautiful, economical, and egalitarian fashion.
Armed with the Dress Doctors’ simple design principles—harmony, proportion, balance,
rhythm, emphasis, and occasion—modern American women from all social and economic
classes learned to dress in a way that made them conident, engaged members of society. A
captivating and beautifully-illustrated look at the world of
the Dress Doctors, The Lost Art of Dress introduces readers to their timeless
rules about beauty and shows that, with a little help, we can learn them again.

L I N D A P R Z Y B Y S Z E W S K I is an associate professor of history at the University of

Notre Dame. The author or editor of two previous books, as well
as a prize-winning dressmaker, she lives in South Bend, Indiana.

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