Gloucester also houses the Cape Ann Museum, which currently has on view a small exhibition on the Folly Cove Designers, who were based in the area from the late-1930s through the late-1960s. I’ve wanted to see the textiles in person since I interviewed Elena M. Sarni about her book, Trailblazing Women Printmakers: Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios and the Folly Cove Designers, and they also did not disappoint!

From our experiences at Beauport and the Cape Ann Museum, it became clear that my twenty-eight month old was too energetic for a historic house or an art museum (thank you to my husband for handling him!), so we shifted our focus to exclusively transport-focused museums. From Gloucester, we made our way up the coast to Maine, making our first stop at the Seashore Trolley Museum. While I wasn’t able to read as many of the didactics as I would have liked, the historical vehicles were immensely inspiring for their colour palettes, designs, and logos.

While staying in Boothbay Harbor, we drove over to Bath to visit the Maine Maritime Museum. As I wrote on Instagram, it has a large and varied campus with many sites to visit and exhibits to captivate a wild 2-year-old and a historian alike. Among the parts we enjoyed were an exhibit on the illustrator and children’s book author Chris van Dusen, a Victorian shipyard owner’s home, and the cruise on the Kennebac River to see US Navy Destroyers under construction.

From Boothbay Harbor we drove up to Brooklin, stopping for a visit to the Owls Head Transportation Museum on the way. After two nights in Brooklin—and lots of drives and walks around the nearby islands—we headed to New Hampshire. On our way, we did a quick pitstop at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, where the last three remaining Shakers live. A guided tour would have been too much for my toddler, so we toured the free unguided exhibition, walked the grounds, and petted some sheep.

I grew up going to camp on a lake in New Hampshire and so it is forever enshrined in my heart and memories as the most beautiful place ever. Luckily, it still looks much the same as always has. We rented a lovely cabin on a neighbouring lake; kept in the owner’s family for generations, it was very much like stepping back in time, a time capsule.

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

reading

Like most, I have been heavily in mourning for Dolly Parton. I’m still very much unable to get my thoughts together to properly write about her and how much she has always meant to me, but I’ve been enjoying reading everyone else’s thoughts. From reading so many different articles, eulogies, and memories, I’ve started to see a sameness to most people’s thoughts and, how through centering her self-created image and her philanthropy, the true her becomes more remote. Dolly almost feels unknowable—so easily described in tropes (boobs, hair, God) yet so complex that only her music can speak for her. Dolly has to be understood in a multi-sensory manner; it can’t just be visual—the music, voice, and one-liners need to be listened to, not just read as lyrics or quips on the page.

Anyway, I shared the images from this Rolling Stone interview in Substack Notes after her death, but I thought I would share all of the text with you here.

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With this series of interviews I have been seeking out cultural creatives who have not only achieved great success in their careers, but who have intentionally molded their lives around their passions. Each has created their ideal life in much the same way they produce their creative work—through decisive vision and action, through making decisions that allow them to succeed in the facets of life that are important to them.

I believe in celebrating slow culture and the more tactile, intimate parts of life. How is it possible to achieve great career success yet still live an intimate, intentional life? In the fall of 2017 I had the opportunity to sit down with a couple who managed to figure that out—legendary television producer Russell Morash and his wife, Marian Morash. He’s been called the “father of reality television” and the “father of home improvement television” due to his work creating such iconic PBS shows as The Victory Garden, This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop. The couple met at Boston University when he was studying acting and directing, and she was studying theatre design. He began working at WGBH as a production assistant and cameraman as soon as he graduated in 1957. They married the following year while he started his climb through the nascent public television industry. For many years he worked on The Science Reporter before being assigned to produce Julia Child’s first television series, The French Chef, in 1963. During filming he brought home the half-prepared examples along with Julia’s instructions, and from these Marian discovered her great love for cooking. Russell also produced The Advocates, a renowned public affairs show that was filmed in a mock trial format, which ran from 1969 to 1974.

While producing these programs, Russell’s interests outside of work lay with his family and improving their lives together. After purchasing their first home together in 1961, Russell took to modifying and adding to the structure as the size and needs of their family increased. Though his father was a carpenter by trade, Morash had to teach himself as he went along in much the same way he taught himself to garden and grow vegetables in their yard outside. At a time when few people were going to such lengths to improve old homes, Morash’s work drew attention and was featured in the Boston Globe in 1971.

In 1975 both Marian and Russell were able to advance their careers immensely by following their passions. Marian became a cofounder and executive chef of the Straight Wharf Restaurant in Nantucket, where she had an all-women kitchen far before women were recognized on the culinary scene. That same year WGBH asked Russell if he had any ideas for a new series and he requested that the station turn their parking lot into a garden to become the centerpiece of a weekly gardening show. Crockett’s Victory Garden was born, hosted by renowned gardening author James Crockett. An immediate success, millions tuned in across America to watch Crockett demonstrate how to care for a vegetable garden. It ran until his death in 1979, after which it was renamed The Victory Garden until 2010 when it became The Victory Garden's EdibleFeast. Around 1980 the garden moved from the station’s studio to the Morash’s own garden outside Boston. For several years Crockett had read out on air recipes written by Marian that used the vegetables being grown, and when the garden moved to their house she started appearing as “Chef Marian” demonstrating the recipes herself in her own kitchen.

The blockbuster appeal of this simple (yet technologically difficult) gardening show led WGBH to ask Morash for more ideas. He followed it up with a home improvement show, This Old House, which grew from what was supposed to be a one-time, 13-part series in 1979, into an empire that includes multiple spin-off shows, a magazine, and for-profit web sites. One of the spin-offs was The New Yankee Workshop, a woodworking show filmed in a workshop studio in Morash’s yard. This Old House is seen as the start of home improvement television and the instigator of a huge shift in that industry—from craftsman to DIY—which grew it to $365 billion in sales in 2017. Following home owners as they worked with artisans to remodel their homes over the period of a few episodes was a completely novel idea, and one which laid the seed for reality television.

What’s most intriguing about his career is how Russell Morash used his passions outside of work to direct his path, and through those interests developed a whole new style of programming. Russell’s passion for life and the quiet, meditative actions of cooking, gardening, home improvement and carpentry created and supported whole industries and networks. Remarkably the Morashes were able to seamlessly combine their public and private lives for decades—The Victory Garden was filmed in their yard with Marian cooking vegetable recipes on camera in their kitchen, while The New Yankee Workshop was located at the back of their garden. Though Russell won 14 Daytime Emmy’s, was the recipient of the 2014 Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award and had his programs watched by millions every week for decades, he is still wonderfully grounded, funny and joyful.

At the time of this conversation, they were both in their 80s and they still split their time between their rural home outside Boston and their summer place in Nantucket, where Russell maintained a large vegetable and flower garden. Russell Morash passed away at age 88 in June 2024. I’m very grateful that I was able to capture their memories and can share them with you here. I personally found this conversation incredibly inspiring—at a time when culture celebrates quick achievements and social media likes, it was invigorating being around curious souls who humbly created out of a desire to learn, share and teach. Led by their passions and by the importance they placed on family and a good work/life balance, the couple was able to create a life of intention and beauty that also helped and gave joy to others.

While it is impossible to show even just a tiny sampling of the many programs Russell Morash produced and created, here are a few examples to whet your appetite:

The second episode was a conversation with Norma Kamali. A fashion designer with a career spanning fifty years, she is the perfect example of someone who has molded a life of intention and beauty, which are central tenets of the Sighs & Whispers vision.

Her career in fashion is quite remarkable—in an industry where brands are bought up by conglomerates or completely funded by investors, Kamali is still sole owner of her company. She opened her first store with her then-husband on East 53rd street in Manhattan in 1968, importing clothes from London, but soon began designing and producing her own line. Following her divorce in the mid 70s, she relaunched her company in 1978 under the emblematic “OMO Norma Kamali”, which stands for “on my own.” As a single divorcee going it alone without a business partner or investors to fall back on, Kamali was groundbreaking—a true feminist designer at a time when women were still having difficulty breaking into the workforce, let alone founding the companies themselves.

In a 1978 interview—given to WWD before the opening of her OMO store—she laid out her design ethos: “My clothes are for women who have their own strong identity, which becomes more and more apparent through the things they choose to do, as well as what they wear and how they put it all together. Whatever a woman’s look, it should not consumer her or be influenced by anyone else—or even a season.” Norma is truly a woman’s designer—completely engaged with designing clothes that make women feel beautiful yet that also work with how they live. As an active, busy career woman, her designs evolved as solutions for the missing links in her own wardrobe. By not engaging with trends, Kamali has instead defined them—throughout her career, she has sought to stay ahead of the curve in both fashion and technology. Her forays into activewear, sweatshirting and swimwear in the late 1970s and early 1980s were the precursors of today’s multi-billion dollar athleisure industry, while she established one of the first web stores in the early days of the Internet. It's hard not to be inspired when one takes in the breadth of her career and the surety of her vision. Still designing and producing, visit her website to view and purchase one of her easy-to-wear, comfortable and chic pieces.

We discussed her career, the ups and downs of life in fashion, and her invigorating zest for life in the West 56th Street building that housed her store, showroom, offices, atelier and photo studio. After 40 years at that location, Norma moved downtown to a new 17,000 square foot headquarters in 2022. In addition to being at the forefront of fashion tech online, Norma Kamali was one of the first fashion designers to truly understand the power of video when she began making short fashion films in the mid-1980s. In recent years, she has been experimenting with AI in fashion.

Norma is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. She is completely committed to her health, and in 2021, Norma published I am Invincible, a “handbook for women covering fitness, health, beauty, and style, as well as best practices for aging with power.” Seeing how youthful she looks and is in her 80s (just watch the workouts she streams on Instagram!), it’s hard not to be inspired to want to follow her exact regime!

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Some of my favourite photos from throughout her career:

I was lucky enough to have lunch with Michaele a few times in the early 2010s, and I have long thought that his art and fashion should be more well-known. Just look at these drawings!

Chances are, if you opened up the New York Times on a Sunday morning in 1975 and 1976, you would come across a full-page exquisite fashion illustration by Michaele Vollbracht for Bloomingdale’s. Only black on newsprint, the illustrations are startling in their immediacy and beauty. Often also published in either Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, Bloomingdale’s used these ads to publicize their high-end fashion offerings—think Calvin Klein at his height, Zandra Rhodes, Jean Muir. Though only produced for a brief period, Vollbracht’s illustrations would become the public’s understanding of Bloomingdale’s, then at its zenith of hipness—all louche, glamorous ladies impeccably dressed. What’s remarkable is that such a short-lived campaign could leave such a lasting memory; below is an exploration of ideas and egos that led to their flash of brilliance.

Bloomingdale’s launched their new look in advertisements on Sunday, April 27, 1975. For the few years previous, their main ads had exclusively been a full-page, single photograph—a style that their competitors had begun aping. As their merchandising philosophy was predicated on being different, the advertising and communications team decided to do something different—a sketch with emphatic copy at the top. Vice-president of advertising and public relations Cathy Spellman—newly poached from Revlon—told the Daily News’ gossip column, “I’ve been here three months… and naturally I wanted to make an impact.” As creative director of the fragrance division at Revlon, Spellman had contributed to the incredibly successful promotion for Charlie—helping it become the best-selling fragrance in America at the time. Spellman had no store experience before joining Bloomingdale’s (her CV being JWT, Celanese, Fieldcrest Mills, J.P. Stevens, and Revlon), but Marvin Traub felt that this was beneficial for the job: “By going outside retailing, we are trying to bring an infusion of new ideas and approaches to retail advertising.”

The switch to illustration transcended fashion—while Vollbracht was chosen for designer fashion and cosmetics, a stable of other illustrators were also contracted: Glen Tunstall for ready-to-wear; Pedro Barrios for sportswear; Joyce McDonald, childrenswear; and Betty Fraser and Helen Vuckovic, home furnishings. In the first week of this new approach, they ran twenty-two different ads in the New York Times—a barrage of sketches designed to reinforce their newest vision.

According to Spellman, “We feel very strongly that copy has to be enticing and interesting. Particularly in these economic times, people want to know what you have, and have a little fun doing it.” With a first-person quote headlining the page, the copy endeavored to be witty and fun. The type was opened-up, larger and more graphic than before. Spellman said they chose quotes as they provided the feeling of talking directly to the reader, though the quotes themselves came from several different sources—famous people, customers, designers, or even Bloomingdale’s founder Lyman Bloomingdale. Eventually, they often simply stated the name of the designer. Another benefit to illustrations was that they cut down on lead time. Instead of having to wait for a sample to arrive to photograph it (with a late sample meaning a pushed-back publication date), the illustrator could work from the designer’s sketch or a photo, and have the ad ready by the time the merchandise arrived.

Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, Michael Vollbracht moved to New York City after high school in 1965 to study illustration at Parsons. His skills in both illustration and fashion design were immediately evident. Following graduation, Geoffrey Beene made him a member of his design team; two years later, in 1971, he started designing for Donald Brooks Boutique. Vollbracht came to Bloomingdale’s by way of Henri Bendel, where he was the house illustrator from 1973 till April ’75. Bloomie’s paid him $500 a sketch ($2,671.97 today), an astronomical fee at the time—and one that truly cemented his status as the top fashion illustrator in the business. Somewhere in this period, he added a second “e” to his name, thinking it made him more distinctive, though he later dropped it in the 1990s.

Even more so than the ads, the shopping bags that Vollbracht drew for Bloomingdale’s were to become truly legendary. His obituary in the New York Times in 2018, following a battle with esophageal cancer, starts: “If you had designs on acquiring status in late-1970s New York City, you would have likely been spotted around town toting a Bloomingdale’s shopping bag identifiable only by the splashy artwork on its side. A partial profile of a woman with towering cheekbones rendered in red, black and gray, the illustration was the brainchild of Michael Vollbracht, an artist, illustrator and fashion designer whose work came to encapsulate that heady time.” A companion to that one was a man in the same style, while the most famous of all featured the disembodied features of a femme-fatale-esque beauty—all flashing blue eyes, spidery brows, teeny nose and ruby red lips—known commonly as the “Face bag.” If you were anyone in New York, you were seen carrying one of those shopping bags. A signifier of status and good taste, they were the kind of viral advertising that is priceless for a brand.

Spellman abruptly resigned in January 1976 to become president of a small advertising agency. In a 1978 interview, she spoke of how within department stores advertising executives were often treated poorly in comparison to merchants. “Stores are run by merchants,” Spellman revealed, “and they believe that the world is divided into two classes: merchants and non merchants. If you are not one of them, you are not part of the club… Merchants look down on the advertising and public relations departments and this attitude is revealed in their treatment of the pros who work there, including the vice president. You get a lot of cold shoulders and piles of nasty memos…Bloomingdale’s merchant group is a very capable and talented bunch, to be sure, but what they dish out is a lot to take from anyone.” Regardless of her reasons for leaving, Cathy left on good enough terms that in 1979 Bloomingdale’s hired her to launch their new fragrance, Bloomie’s (she also launched YSL’s Opium the year before).

Her advertising vision continued through much of 1976; the latest Vollbracht I could find was published in September of that year. Photography had already reappeared in most home furnishings ads; by 1977, it was Bloomingdale’s “new mood” for fashion advertisements. Spellman’s successor, Doris Shaw, told WWD: “The time is right for merchandise to be presented with clarity. I think people want to know what they’re going to get frothier money, with well-defined explanations.” The illustrative “ambiance” so celebrated had lasted less than twenty months.

Vollbracht left Bloomingdale’s in late 1976 or early 1977, after less than two years. Alongside interior designer Philip Haight and former advertising-account executive Joe Callaghan, he founded Design Lab, a firm to design “anything from paper plates to penthouses.” A Philadelphia Inquirer story from September 1977 said the Lab was currently working on “a line of Orient-inspired paper plates for a large paper goods company, designer Geoffrey Beene’s East Side duplex, tropical-patterned beach towels for Wamsutta and an exhibition of portraits in varied media of bout 50 famous folks (i.e. Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Joe DiMaggio) whom Vollbracht had dubbed ‘Birds of Paradise.’” He told the paper, “The only thing that keeps me going is diversification. I don’t want to be pegged as a fashion illustrator and spend the rest of my life doing shopping bags and layouts.” Then only 29-years-old, Vollbracht already left the pressure to excel beyond the limits of what an illustration career could offer. Within a year Michaele had left Design Lab and started his own fashion line—and that is a story I will follow up with another newsletter soon (though the dream is to write a book on his whole career).

A side note but one I find fascinating: While running her advertising/marketing agency, Cathy Cash Spellman began writing in the mornings before work. She told her husband that if her first novel made it to the New York Times Best Seller list she would quit the advertising agency and start writing full time. It did, and she has gone on to write numerous best-selling books. One was even made into a movie with Kim Basinger.

When Vivienne Westwood, Jean Muir, Zandra Rhodes, and Laura Ashley were interviewed for this profile on British fashion, they were all at the top of their careers: leading their own houses, creating well-received collections that sold, designing what they wanted for customers that dearly loved their work. The fashion business is never easy, but they were not beholden to billionaires or shareholders—just to the buyers, stores, and customers who supported them. The four stuck to their personal visions, creating their own aesthetic worlds. Of the four, Laura Ashley was the most mass-market with the greatest influence—her clothes, home furnishings, and whole aesthetic crossed the globe, swept through malls and small towns, and refashioned homes and wardrobes far beyond her Welsh headquarters. Jean Muir had the most industry influence in her day but has the least name recognition today, while Zandra Rhodes and Vivienne Westwood used their physical appearance to make themselves icons, raising the notoriety of their names and designs from then to today. Not only were their designs all completely unique and distinct from each other, but they each had a very different perspective on the fashion business, which makes for fascinating reading.

Following the four interviews is a companion editorial featuring some of the less established designers on the London scene: Benny Ong, Sheridan Barnett (who won the 1983 Dress of the Year Award), Margaret Howell, Maxfield Parrish, Jasper Conran, and interior designer David Hicks, newly expanding into women’s fashion.

Harpers & Queen, April 1983

All interviews conducted by Amanda Grieve. All illustrations by Natacha Ledwidge.

Vivienne Westwood triumphed in London, stunned the French and has been massively supported by the Italians, Japanese and Americans. She takes success quietly, so quietly in fact that she seems positively innocent of the commercial weight her name carries and of the tidal effect of her collections. Of course she recognises the megastore spin-offs and the ripoffs that span the catwalks but then she also sees their poverty. ‘I don’t care about people copying me... I’m not even aware of it going on. Doesn’t plagiarism mean diminishing some-thing? Their clothes never look as grand or important as mine. They look too poverty-stricken - there’s no feeling in them. I didn’t mind Zandra copying the punk rock thing because she did it in her own way.’

She is a small, spry Elizabethan-looking woman with pale skin, penetrating eyes, and alert, bird-like gestures. Wearing full skirts, medallions catching her thin plaits, her gentle, rapid explanations are punctuated by a note of weariness, the sigh of someone who is forever trying to explain herself. Her soft, full voice with its slanted vowels of the north is accompanied by brisk gestures and brief inward laughter. She believes passionately in what she and her partner, co-designer, boyfriend and seer Malcolm McClaren are doing. Her vigorous designs have a grandeur that penetrates beyond their misshapenness. Her clothes fit very well but in a different way. They don’t fit in the way we expect, or in the way we have been led to believe should frame the body, which is really only relevant to those who do not want to be changed or who want to fit in with someone else’s idea of what shape they are. The cloth takes its shape from the action beneath. Tension down the back, say. releases itself into the dynamism of a flap or skirt.

‘I have a very special way of cutting things. I’m a very good cutter. I’m very anarchical and perverse about what I do with clothes but what drive at is simplicity - I want to make something as simple as possible. The giant thing about my clothes - the way they make you feel grand and strong - is to do with the sexy way they emphasise your body and make you aware of it.’ This has a lot to do with posture, with the way you move, but the spirit and the way you feel comes first. The medieval hobo girl is as smart as Jack the Lad when she dances down the street. She has her credibility because she knows what she’s doing. She feels good. This is where the cult movement has been so important to Vivienne and Malcolm. ‘My clothes look tribal and therefore they communicate signs themselves.’

Gangs of teds, rockers, bikers and punks were signs of life for their designs. ‘When we finished punk rock we started looking at other cultures - up till then we’d only been concerned with emotionally charged rebellious English youth movements. There is a logic in emotional qualities like that which people can respond to even without understanding what it is they are responding to. We looked at all the cults that we felt had this power - comic book Apache Indians, pirates, even Louis XIV, who had the same sort of style. The hobo thing is a progression of this search - you just end up becoming one once you start grabbing the essentials from world cultures. Nostalgia Of Mud, their archaeological site in St Christopher’s Place, arose out of their search for ‘something primeval in old dirt.’ Her Blade Runner printed skirts are distressed, to look as though they are 200 years old. It’s a question of keeping something modern while establishing a symbolic connection with the past. ‘Through my clothes I hope to connect people to whats essential and enduring-to make them feel space age but in touch with something as old as when the Sahara was a green place. I don’t think people want to go to the moon yet - they want to understand what it is they’ve got here.’

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All I knew was that it was a Manhattan textile library and fabric design company, founded by a Harvey Rosenberg, which used its large bank of pattern swatches to develop retro prints for designers like Betsey Johnson at Alley Cat and Willie Smith at Digits, and that designers and manufacturers could also buy the swatches directly. With my love for nostalgic 70s-does-30s and 70s-does-40s fashions, I was intrigued by how this little-known company might have played a part in my wardrobe. Last summer, when the name swirled back through my consciousness, I attempted to uncover more. “Harvey Rosenberg” was quite a common name in the New York area in the second half of the twentieth century, so my first duty was digging through newspaper clippings, slowly matching different Harvey Rosenbergs together. What I uncovered, with help from an ex-wife and a former employee, was a truly eccentric individual who brought a unique vision to everything he did, from textiles to dolls, from audio to motorcycles.

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Though the biography Harvey published on his website in the 1990s proclaimed that he was born in India to elephant tamers who abandoned him in the jungle, where he was raised by a wolf pack, in fact, he was born in Brooklyn in 1941. His family was somehow involved with the running of Dubrow’s, a chain of cafeteria-style restaurants in the New York area. At 14, his family moved from Brooklyn to the ‘Five Towns,’ which he called “the wild suburbs of Long Island, where, during high school, I was initiated into the way of the sacred male totem and learned all about cars, tube electronics, hunting and fishing.” After studying at the Wharton School of Business, Rosenberg returned to New York, and by the mid-1960s, he was working with textile manufacturer Celanese, where he was involved in the promotion of its acetate, or artificial silk, fabrics. It appears that Harvey was always open to bringing wild ideas into reality: when Chippy Irvine, a young designer for Glen of Michigan, started noticing the subtle beginnings of the 1940s revival in fashion in 1968, she thought it might be fun to put on a 1940s-style musical. She approached Rosenberg, who committed Celanese to fully fund the production and supply all the fabrics for what became a 3-night extravaganza, “P.X., I Love You,” put on by 75 designers, illustrators, and other fashion-related people, all to raise money for the FIT Scholarship Fund. Among the designers performing and designing costumes were Willi Smith and Betsey Johnson, both of whom ran with the 1940s influence on their designs over the next decade. Directed by Chippy’s husband, interior decorator Keith Irvine, “P.X., I Love You” was held January 8-10, 1969, at the FIT auditorium.

Around 1970, Rosenberg left Celanese and became a consultant to the textile and fashion industries. Somehow, through his work, he came across an already collected textile library and purchased it, establishing Economy Cream Separator sometime in the fall of 1970 in a large loft on West 21^st Street. “We’ve got boxes and boxes of old fabrics, jacquards and prints. Our oldest swatch is mummy cloth dating back to 1494 B.C.,” Rosenberg later boasted. According to his later wife and business partner, “It was the biggest collection of swatches in New York, and perhaps, in the United States. We had all of these swatches, fabrics, from silks and cottons, and every pattern you could possibly imagine. We had it alphabetized.” Harvey brought in two textile specialists to help him with the library. Through his friend Don Rafelson (brother of Bob Rafelson, producer of movies like Five Easy Pieces), who was a textile converter, he met Winnie Uricola, who had studied textiles at FIT and had been working as a color coordinator for Rafelson. He also hired Basia Poindexter, a Polish textile designer. From his years in the textile industry, Harvey was always switched on and looking for fabrics; he later told Women’s Wear Daily, “We find design ideas everywhere. We’re not afraid of getting into the garbage cans, getting dirty for our fabric ideas. I found these really great furniture movers’ pads in the garbage—just look at the fabulous print we saw when we got the fabric all cleaned up!”

When I spoke with Uricola, she remembered Economy Cream Separator as “a very avant-garde kind of atmosphere. They did a lot of drugs. It was just very freewheeling.” Having recently gotten married to a film producer who was always traveling (Robert Uricola, who worked closely with childhood friend Martin Scorsese), Winnie enjoyed the looseness and lack of structure: “I could come and go if I had appointments. I would just meet somebody there. It wasn’t a strict nine-to-five job. I was in between what I wanted to do… It just freed me up from a nine-to-five job. It was fun.”

When a designer wanted to come in, they would make an appointment and specify what kinds of things they wanted to see. Winnie or Basia would pull a selection, the designer would look through it, and then purchase whichever swatches they wanted. Winnie Uricola recalled, “We had a lot of people that were textile designers that came to view the collection, and designers like Willi Smith and Betsy Johnson and Ralph Lauren. He used to come because at that time, he was only doing menswear. He would come for this silk jacquard collection that Harvey had for ties, patterns for ties… Then we had the designers like Betsey Johnson. She was always known for her great print ideas and color combinations. She would make an appointment, and she would want to see printed textiles for the most part, or great ideas for florals or geometrics.” For the first few years, Economy Cream Separator was not involved in the design process of swatch-to-textile design; “They would take it, purchase it, and go elsewhere to execute it.”

With fashion taking an increasingly revivalist spin in the early 1970s, Economy Cream Separator became the place to go for retro print ideas, particularly for designers creating for the youth market: Betsey Johnson of Alley Cat, Willi Smith of Digits, Carol Horn of Benson & Partners, Jon Haggins, and Pinky and Dianne of Flo Toronto all combed the boxes for the coolest ‘30s and ‘40s prints. Jon Haggins told WWD in 1972, “I think Economy Cream is one of the most exciting studios around,” while Carol Horn said, “Economy Cream is a place to get your mind refreshed—no matter what you want when you go there, it’s like taking a trip to somewhere else.” Johnson found it an inspiring place to work: “I really enjoy all the groovy music—I can really work and think with all those good sounds around me. It’s a great place to go to get authentic prints for specific periods or years. Too many of the manufacturers never get down to the real thing when they’re doing specific eras.”

It wasn’t solely fashion designers who found Economy Cream Separator a site of inspiration. Designers from textile converters—companies who developed fabrics for such diverse products as towels, sheets, home goods, or mass-produced garment textiles—would also come looking for ideas. For Rosenberg, “We just help establish a point of view for the converters and help them find a style.”

Rosenberg was known for his great sense of humor and joie de vivre. Uricola recalled, “He was very, very funny, very funny. You just never knew what he was going to come up with next. He would just come in and be all excited about an idea that he had the night before. One day, he came in and he said, ‘You know what? I have a great idea for a product. It’s going to be a chocolate-covered prune called Dump.’ He would just say that. It would come from nowhere, and it would be like, oh, my God. His mind was always working. He was very creative and funny.” He continued consulting outside of Economy Cream Separator. In 1974, Leber Katz Partners advertising agency brought him in to consult when they were pitching the Celanese account. The senior art director, Gayle Gleckler, recalled the first time he came in:

During the months they worked on that project, he charmed her. She later wrote:

In November 1974, Gayle and Harvey married at the UN Chapel, “handholding friends circling around us as we said our vows to be true while simultaneously letting each other be free spirits. An inspirational conundrum.” This was followed by a black-tie reception at his family’s Dubrow’s Cafeteria in the Garment Center: “The great deco room was filled with minks, diamonds, amazing music, and my creative centerpieces made of carrots, celery and parsley. His grandma told me later she took a few home. They were delicious and made a great soup. Advertising, fashion folks from Manhattan, his mom, Helen, his dad, Henry, Phyliss, Paul, family from Brooklyn and the five towns went through the cafeteria line for seconds and thirds of blintzes, pastrami, rice pudding.”

Around the time of their marriage, both Winnie Uricola and Basia Poindexter moved on to other jobs. Harvey had convinced Leber Katz to give Gayle Gleckler a leave of absence for their travels, but now she left her career in advertising to work with Harvey at Economy Cream Separator. When I spoke with Gayle, she remembered establishing the business with him, though WWD articles and my interview with Uricola support an earlier launch. One aspect of the business that does appear to have changed once she joined is that ECS started to become involved in the design translation process—designers were no longer simply buying swatches and taking them elsewhere to create new prints/weaves, but Harvey and Gayle were aiding in that creation.

Gayle reminisced:

Harvey and Gayle worked together at Economy Cream Separator for the next year and a half before she returned to advertising in early 1976. He likely sold the swatch collection at that time, closing the library to focus on other endeavors. The first of these, directly built upon the swatch color changing techniques he developed at ECS: Dinetics Color Systems, was a shortly extant company that used new Xerox color copiers to “make possible ‘almost instantaneous’ reproductions of fabric swatches, paintings, design sketches, even color slides, in unlimited numbers and vivid colors—all at very reasonable cost of less than 20 cents a print. Using the copier, it is now possible, for example, to complete a fabric collection of 200 designs at the end of the day and have the entire collection reproduced in a 200-page color catalog and in the hands of buyers by 9 the next morning.” Rosenberg had an exclusive license to rent out Xerox color copiers for this use, and he presented its application at Texpo, the American fashion fabric exposition, in 1976, but I have been unable to find any further mentions of the company.

As Winnie Uricola mentioned earlier, Harvey Rosenberg was an endless fount of ideas, many of them funny concepts for gag gifts—as Gayle told me, “He just would never stop coming up with ideas.” In 1978, he established Gizmo Development to start making these ideas a reality. The first was “Balls,” a can of ordinary sourballs stamped with the tagline, “BALLS: Candy to Give you COURAGE.” He believed that these novelty candies were targeting an underrepresented market: “Candy is all so fucking serious, but the industry won’t wake up to who’s eating their product and why… the old men who make this stuff put Bavarian scenes on their wrappers like they did in World War II. They don’t realize kids are getting stoned and getting the munchies and eating candy.”

The gimmick paid off, giving him the courage to create “Gay Bob,” the first homosexual doll with a blond crewcut, a single blue earring, a flannel western shirt, jeans, and an anatomically correct body. The box was designed to look like a slat-front closet, emblazoned with “Come out of the Closet with Gay Bob,” with the inner box illustrated with the stereotypical wardrobe of a gay clone. Rosenberg fully funded the development, production, and marketing of the dolls, which he primarily sold through mail-order ads. Unsurprisingly, the doll was a hit with the media; Rosenberg was interviewed on talk shows and by newspapers, with descriptions of the dolls featured in syndicated columns across the country. According to Rosenberg, he sold 10,000 dolls within the first few months solely from ads. He told The Advocate, “Everybody wants it but they’re afraid of it... The more macho a guy is, the more he’s attracted to the doll. It seems to be an outlet for something inside him.” He originally saw Gay Bob as the first in a suite of character dolls—which were to include Fat Pat and Heavy Harry, who were to come in a refrigerator with a diet book, and Liberated Libby, “the Cosmo girl,” is in her bedroom with a vibrator—but these appear never to have come to fruition.

Around this time, Gayle and Harvey divorced. She recalled: “We fought a lot, because he was just mercurial. He was always on edge in a way, because he was the way he was… He was extremely funny, by the way. Funny and nice, but he could also be very volatile. Not in a physical way… He was very intimidating, because he was extremely smart… He was very fast, and very unusual, quirky.” The quirkiness and intensity that was so attractive in the beginning—the whirlwind romance of it all—was not comfortable for marriage. When he appeared on TV to promote Gay Bob, her parents thought this meant he was gay. His interest in creating a homosexual doll appears to have been more to do with exploiting an untapped market than with any latent leanings, though Gleckler remembers him as “liberated. He believed men and women had an equality of a balance of desires, pain and misunderstandings. A strong follower of Carl Jung, Harvey was dedicated to promoting the development of the ‘Anima and Animus’ in all he loved”—he helped her get in touch with her male side, which she found invaluable when she went on to found her own advertising company, Gleckler & Partners. After their divorce, Rosenberg settled into a “fabulous apartment on Central Park West” where a friend recalled “he would have these fabulous free flowing parties.”

From childhood, Rosenberg has been interested in sound and audio, and throughout his time in textiles and gimmick gifts, he was always tinkering with audio equipment. Around 1980 he started New York Audio Laboratories, where he, in his own words, “became ‘an audio savant,’ and pioneered manufacturing OTL amplifiers in 1982 (using Julius Futterman’s circuit, the father of OTL amplifiers)…and the first to develop hybrid tube/fet amplifiers in 1984….but don’t forget these achievements were not really mine, but those of an alien intelligence that was using me to elevate earthling’s musical consciousness.” Often dressed in a white doctor’s coat (an affectation he adopted in the 1970s, when as a “wild and crazy bachelor,” he decided to start dressing as a doctor on first dates because he knew “this tribal costume would have a very powerful effect on single women who were looking for a husband”) and calling himself “Dr. Gizmo,” Harvey Rosenberg appears to have been a true eccentric who became something of a legend in the audio field. Apparently, whenever he shipped a NYAL Moscode amplifier, he would include an adult-size diaper, with instructions for the audiophile to put it on before listening, should an accident ensue.

A kind of shaman-jokester, “he advocated ritual baths and ceremonial robes as enhancements for the listening experience, and was the living embodiment of the ancient wisdom that you get only as much from life as you put into it.” In addition to manufacturing amplifiers, he wrote books like Understanding Tube Electronics and The Search for Musical Ecstasy. In 1995, he attempted to make his passion for vintage motorcycles into a career—he bought the Indian Motorcycles name, became CEO, and tried to find funding to restart the brand, long dormant since 1953. Fashioning himself as a philosopher-businessman, he told Cycle World, “Motorcycling is transportation and transformation. It is alchemic: We are ‘lead’ into golden light…” before revealing that he had lived in Zen monasteries and studied yoga, but found motorcycles to provide the greatest spiritual nourishment.

Harvey Rosenberg passed away from a heart attack on July 16, 2001, at age 59. The randomness of his many careers—textiles, gimmick gifts, audio equipment, motorcycles—initially made it difficult for me to ascertain whether these were all the same person, but after speaking with people in his life, it became clear that all were elements of a life lived with humor, passion, and boundless energy. His years in textiles and with Economy Cream Separator were likely the staidest part of his career, though it does seem that he brought some creativity and joy to the textile search process. Gayle Gleckler called him “a visionary,” someone who could envision what trends were going to happen next. He brought that far-seeing insight to everything he did, no matter how out there or eccentric, along with a humor that is remembered decades later. Friends continue to maintain his website, Meta-Gizmo, 25 years after his death, with the proclamation: “The Doctor. . . Has Left The Planet. . . But not our Universe. . . He is The Never-ending Search for Ecstasy. . . Musical or Any Other Form. . . . and The Legend Begins!”

I highly recommend visiting Nova Scotia if you are a fan of rugged landscapes, reinvigorating dips in frigid water, and lobster lunches. We weren’t in Cape Breton but I’ve long been looking for an excuse to share this delightful map illustration by former podcast guest Barry Zaid.

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

reading

The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias

This 2021 article is the starting point for the upcoming book, Handmade Utopia – Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California, looking at the back-to-the-landers who dropped out of society in the late 1960s and 1970s, seeking to build new utopias for themselves. Much of my research has to do with the dress practices of these groups and I’ve always been as fascinated by the handmade buildings that emerged on these communes and deep in the woods, so I can’t wait to see this book.

The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory

An academic article, written from the perspective of the Internet Archive and the Our Future Memory movement, which looks at how “vanishing culture” is a political crisis that hinders people’s ability to educate themselves and freely participate in public life, while also asserting that that memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations) must have “practical options and legal protections to undertake four basic practices with digital materials that they were previously allowed to do with physical ones: (1) collection, (2) preservation, (3) access, and (4) collaboration.” With the news that Anthropic is buying rare books, scanning them, and then destroying them en masse, the threats of vanishing culture are becoming ever clearer.

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Almost fifty years later, we’ve found ourselves in the place that journalist Iain Finlayson thought we were then, at a peak of collecting and value, likely little imagining quite how high everything could go, especially since so much that makes waves at auction and on the red carpet had yet to be designed in 1978. Finlayson interviews specialists and collectors, piecing together the draw of vintage. Of course, it wasn’t called vintage then; he describes them as “period clothes” and the practice as “clothes collecting.” Central to this conversation is Victoria & Albert costume curator, Madeleine Ginsburg, who was instrumental in setting up the Costume Society, “to help to bring collectors and museum people together, to learn about what people were collecting. It is important not to collect rubbish, and to learn how to look after acquisitions. I’m all for conservation, but you have to be intelligent about what you keep otherwise you just end up as a rag collector.” While she championed the museum collecting contemporary ready-to-wear, in addition to the finest of haute couture, others interviewed in the article were less sure about their value; then-Christie’s costume auctioneer Susie Mayer remarked, “Modern things tend to wear out and fall to pieces more readily than traditional haute couture. If you keep the garments in good condition, they will certainly be interesting. I don’t think one can yet talk about investment value.” From our viewpoint half a century later, the appeal and salability of 1970s ready-to-wear is clear; if you invested in some of the labels mentioned in the “Future collector’s items” section in 1978—Bill Gibb, Karl Lagerfeld, Ossie Clark, Thea Porter—you would find those investments well-made.

This article is very much of the period, emphasizing the eccentricity of vintage collectors as “fetishists” in a way that feels disparaging. But for every fetishist and “fashion freak,” there are descriptions of intelligent, stylish collectors, like icon of vintage glamour Tina Chow, as well as tales of abandoned Vuitton trunks filled to the brim with 1930s haute couture that are sure to have any reader’s heart pounding with jealousy.

I’ve included the numerous sidebars that accompanied the original article. The list of “What to Collect” is an amusing, interesting read, particularly in places of prescience. Charles James had passed away in relative obscurity a mere three months before publication, but Finlayson and the editors wrote of him, “A genius not wholly appreciated in his lifetime—but wait for it. Posthumous fame more than likely.” His Metropolitan Museum of Art/Costume Institute retrospective, “Charles James: Beyond Fashion,” codified his genius in 2014. Other sidebars name the most stylish collectors/wearers of the moment, the best places to buy vintage in 1978, along with where to research vintage fashion, most of which still exist as great offline resources in London and the UK today. To top it all off, there are some wonderful images of collectors in their pieces, with photos by Clive Arrowsmith and fashion illustrations by Angela Landels.

Harpers and Queen, December 1978

“Come up and see my Schiaparellis”: The Clothes Collectors

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In mid-century America, if you wanted this kind of intense guidance (“buy one of these two shirts, don’t buy that”), you had to go in person to a department store or a small specialty store and find a saleswoman (or series of saleswomen at a department store) who could personally walk you through the store’s selection. But what if you wanted something more than that? What if your interest in clothing drew you from your small suburb to America’s fashion capital, New York City? Where and how would you start to find that shopping advice?

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According to an article I found tucked away in journalist Marylin Bender’s papers at Smith College, a fashion-aspirant could hire a tour company to take them on an epic shopping excursion around the city. Written by Bender for the May-June 1965 issue of The Continental Magazine (a bi-monthly published by the Lincoln-Mercury Division of Ford Motor Company), “Private Key to New York’s Fashion World” opens the world of Fashion Tours Ltd., a guided tour company established by two women who had worked as models and in retail before retiring to become housewives. Drawing on their insider knowledge and friendships within the industry, they set up their tours to guide style-hungry tourists on a day trip around “half a dozen shops, custom salons, and (during certain seasons) Seventh Avenue showrooms,” all by chauffeur-driven limousine.

The directors, Joyce McDonald and Mary Farley, would “tailor a tour to suit a group or will offer its own fashion smorgasbords for women who have no requirements but just want a three-hour saturation in luxury,” and they revealed, “that out-of-towners prefer to visit name designers and shops while suburbanites are eager to be led off the beaten track.” Some of the places mentioned in the article and depicted in the wonderful photographs are famous, while others were completely unknown to me, such as the third-floor apartment boutique of Ellen Herbert. Though not named in the article yet shown in a photo, Elizabeth Arden’s red doored Fifth Avenue establishment was likely one of the most desired sites, especially since Fashion Tours Ltd. brought their customers high up—past the boutique and floors of spa—to the custom salon, to be shown “some of the gowns created by the designer of the house, a Dominican who once worked for Balenciaga in Spain and for Castillo in Paris”—i.e. a young Oscar de la Renta.

This is the kind of shopping adventure that has you trying on totally unexpected items, like knee-high, red lace boots (“But where would I wear them in Cleveland?”), and contemplating lavish, floor-length chinchilla opera coats or a striking red rose-patterned suitcase. Now, doesn’t that seem more fun than a list of affiliate links?

The Continental Magazine, May-June 1965

Private Key to New York’s Fashion World

Two ex-models have organized Fashion Tours, Ltd., to give out-of-town ladies an exclusive peek at famous designers and their work

Text by Marylin Bender and photos by Carroll Seghers II

Most women who go to New York as tourists or as tagalongs on their husbands’ business trips look forward to soaking up some of the city’s much-heralded elegance. New York is unquestionably America’s fashion hub. (Hubert de Givenchy, the great Paris couturier, comes here to buy lingerie). But although high fashion is created, sold, and worn in Manhattan, finding it, especially if the visitor doesn’t know the ins and outs, can be frustrating.

Many of the publicized fashion houses whose clients’ wardrobes are regularly described in the press do not encourage inquiries from strangers. Then there are the hideaways, patronized by very fashionable ladies, whose addresses are closely guarded secrets. How is a woman fresh out of Detroit, New Orleans, Butte, or even the Connecticut suburbs to discover and penetrate these formidable portals?

She can do so via Fashion Tours, Ltd., a guided tour conducted by two young housewives who formerly worked in retailing and modeling and who have obtained entrée to the inside of New York fashion that outsiders yearn to see. Their three-hour tour costs $15 and includes transportation by chauffeured limousine to and from half a dozen shops, custom salons, and (during certain seasons) Seventh Avenue showrooms.

A typical tour began one afternoon in spring when the directors, Joyce McDonald and Mary Farley, were chauffeured to the Americana Hotel to pick up Mrs. Helen Kolo, her daughter Elaine, and Mrs. Henrietta Partyka, who had written from Cleveland to make reservations.

The first stop took them through the famous red door of a Fifth Avenue establishment that insists on anonymity (lest unescorted individuals turn up on the doorstep pleading for tours). A willowy woman with an international accent led them through twelve floors of activity. They fingered filmy scarves and fitted travel cases, were sprayed with fragrances, and peeked into pink chambers where women were being shaped into svelteness, having their facial muscles toned up, and their locks cut into new coiffures. In the custom salon they were shown some of the gowns created by the designer of the house, a Dominican who once worked for Balenciaga in Spain and for Castillo in Paris.

Although there is no pressure whatsoever to buy, many women take the tours do find their way back to make purchases later on. The next day, Mrs. Kolo went back through the red door and bought a handbag and cosmetics.

Lafitte, just off Fifth Avenue on East 54th Street, is the kind of shop that a tourist would be unlikely to find by herself. An adjunct of Staron, Inc., it sells Staron fabrics by the yard as well as shoes, handbags, and “fantasies” (such as paisley pillows and blouses made of French pheasant feathers) of exclusive design. Coffee was served here and Mrs. Partyka tried on a pair of knee-high, red lace boots. “But where would I wear them in Cleveland?” she wondered.

On West 57th Street, the women filed into a small, self-service elevator and ascended to the gilt and crystal salon of Mr. John, the milliner. They examined his miniature hat collection and the signatures of Marlene Dietrich and countless other renowned customers whom he has hatted. Peter Brandon Ammann, Mr. John’s associate, lectured them on the milliner’s fashion philosophy until John P. John himself appeared. He looked on while Mrs. Kolo and Elaine tried on some of his hats (which, they decided, were fantastically becoming).

The tour moved on to Jacomo, across the street from the Colony Restaurant on East 61st Street. It is in this doll-sized shop, owned by James Kaplan and Heidener Laurenz, that such accessory trends as the alligator handbag with jeweled frame for evening were spawned. Jacomo made a green crocodile evening pouch to match Elizabeth Taylor’s emerald engagement ring as well as a black crocodile, gem-studded carry-all shaped like a Bible for Mrs. Wyatt Cooper (née Gloria Vanderbilt). The visitors looked at handbags made of kangaroo, sueded snakeskin, shrunken lamb, and African anteater, and a shopping bag made of elephant hide.

The tour concluded with another ascent in a tiny elevator in a former mansion across the street to the third floor quarters of Ellen Herbert. While music played softly in the background, the tourists sipped coffee again and browsed among Mrs. Herbert’s inimitable collection of clothes, luggage, candies, toys, and bibelots from here and abroad.

The limousine then deposited the women at their hotel where they resolved to return in a month for another tour and, now that they feel self-confident, to make some fashion investments.

Fashion Tours, Ltd. will tailor a tour to suit a group or will offer its own fashion smorgasbords for women who have no requirements but just want a three-hour saturation in luxury. Among the places Mmes. Farley and McDonald have up their sleeves are Lilly Daché, the milliner whose building includes a beauty salon and a boutique for apparel and accessories, and Sally Victor, another modiste favored by the wives of presidents (both corporate and governmental) and who once gave the economy of Ecuador a shot in the arm by reviving Panama hats.

The tour directors have noticed that out-of-towners prefer to visit name designers and shops while suburbanites are eager to be led off the beaten track. The latter like Adele Ross, whose boyish designer, Flynn II, is responsible for many of the stunning costumes worn by socialites to theater and art gallery openings, and Vivienne Colle who makes needlepoint skirts, paisley coats, and appliquéd sweaters that are not easily imitated at any price.

Jolie Gabor’s jewelry shop on Madison Avenue is fascinating for its wares as well as for its ebullient proprietress, who is the mother of Eva and Zsa Zsa. D/R International, on East 57th Street, appeals to devotees of modern and Scandinavian design. This shop is a branch of the Radcliffe College girl’s mecca in Cambridge and, like the original, sells Marimekko dresses from Finland, mohair throws and pillows, furniture, china, glass-ware, and toys.

The three-hour tours accommodate two to six persons. Six-hour tours, including lunch at a restaurant where fashionable women are bound to congregate, start at $35. Inquiries can be addressed to: Fashion Tours, Ltd., 510 Madison Avenue, New York 10022. Telephone: EL 5-5633.

In April, while on a Travel Fellowship to use the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College’s Special Collections, I went through the papers of journalist (and Smith College alum) Marilyn Bender. After getting her start at Hearst’s New York Journal American, working first on the women’s pages (beauty, fashion, interiors, etc.), then taking on a more investigative role, Bender joined the New York Times in 1959. For the next eleven years, her beat was fashion, and she took her front-row seat to the Youthquake of the 1960s, writing the definitive book of that era, in my opinion, The Beautiful People, in 1967. It’s the jet set, it’s Jackie, it’s Jane Holzer. It’s the designers who dressed them and the discotheques they frequented. In 1970, Bender was transferred to the business pages, where Times editors thought she might be able to bring more pizazz to often boring subjects. She was so successful at this that her profiles of industry leaders were reworked and collected for her next book, At the Top (1975).

I had hoped to go through Bender’s papers and find notes related to her fashion reporting and The Beautiful People. Among the ten boxes, there was actually very little from the 1960s; in relation to The Beautiful People, there were two pages of her earliest plans for the book, book contracts, a large folder of congratulatory notes following its publication, and some ideas for turning it into a movie (sadly never achieved!), but none of the research and interviews that went into its creation.

Other periods of Bender’s life and career were better represented in the archive. What I found most personally intriguing were typewritten, loose-leaf diary pages, mostly from the late 1970s into the 1980s, but some going back to the 1950s. As they were all single pages, not in notebooks, it is impossible to know if these were the totality of diary entries, though it feels likely that there were once more. Since the whole 1960s is missing, it feels safe to assume she either lost them or chose to omit them when prepping her files for donation, though it is possible she simply did not have the time to journal that decade between a hectic job, writing a book, and taking care of her family (Bender married in 1959 and gave birth to a son in 1960, seemingly with little maternal leave).

Many of the entries are from a period when Bender felt she had lost herself. She “left” the New York Times at the end of 1977—mostly so that she could devote herself to writing a book with her husband (an aviation executive) on Pan Am’s Juan Trippe, but also because she was exhausted by the constant misogyny and belittling she dealt with from the Times’ “Old Boys Club.” A sex discrimination case had been brought against the paper in 1974 by seven female employees, and, while Bender was not one of the plaintiffs, she was deposed and fiercely supported the suit as it ballooned to a class action covering more than 560 women. Writing this new book appeared like a good opportunity to escape that environment—one where she was paid significantly less than her predecessor as assistant financial editor and one where her male subordinates were often given more power than her (as she wrote in one memo to managing editor A.M. Rosenthal in April 1977, “I have been given a job and a title but not the compensation and the status for the job and the title. I have been presented to the staff and to the outside world as an editor of one of the Sunday sections of the newspaper when, in fact, I am treated as something less”)—that was until she no longer had her own dependable income and found she missed working in a fast-paced pressure cooker where she was always needed. With her son off at boarding school, anxious about money (though her husband kept telling her they were fine, Bender missed her independence), going through menopause, and finding the Trippe book difficult to write, Bender took to her loose-leaf diary. Her anxieties about work spool out across the page alongside descriptions of funerals, announcements of friends’ cancer diagnoses, and updates on the latest nefarious behaviors by male Times editors, even after the paper settled out of court.

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You can also see many, many more images from all stages of Shamask’s career on the Sighs and Whispers Podcast website—I highly recommend going through all the various slideshows, from his early fashion illustration days to his first fashion collections and museum retrospectives devoted to his work.

Within fashion and fashion history, when you speak or write of “architectural fashion,” Shamask’s designs stand right at the top. In fact, after he debuted his first fashion collection in 1979, the clothes displayed such architectural form that many journalists assumed he had received architectural training. Instead, Dutch-born Shamask taught himself everything—with no formal studies in fashion or architecture, and no training as an artist.

Ronaldus Shamask was born in Amsterdam in late 1945, a city savaged by World War II. He grew up in the Netherlands before emigrating with his family to Australia at the age of 12. Shamask began working in a department store in Melbourne at 15, eventually working his way up to window dresser. He moved to London in the late 1960s, where he began working as a fashion illustrator. His completely self-taught style was perfectly in keeping with the psychedelic aesthetic of that moment, and he created illustrations for publications like The Times and The Observer, as well as for brands like Bata Shoes. In 1971, a close friend brought him to Buffalo, New York, where he became a theatrical designer for her avant-garde performance group, The Company of Man.

With each new role, Shamask acquired new skills and gained more confidence, all of which led to his entry into the fashion industry. After moving to New York City and taking on some interior design commissions, fashion seemed like the correct next step. With a marked minimalism and simplicity, Shamask eliminated all extraneous details, concentrating on the precision of cut, meticulous construction, and high-quality fabric to shape garments, where the only decoration came from the seams or zipper closures. His 1979 debut collection was described as “intellectually austere.” A profile from the November 1979 issue of GQ described his work thus:

Shamask designed his earlier works using blueprints and techniques he picked up in set design. With the help of master patternmakers, he developed new construction methods unlike those used by most fashion designers and manufacturers, including a Spiral Jacket cut from a single piece of fabric and featuring a continuously curving seam that mimics a lemon peel. Ron’s designs naturally appealed, and still appeal, to intellectual women, who flocked to the Upper East Side all-white boutique he opened with his first business partner, Murray Moss (scroll down to the bottom see a bunch of images). Though he entered the fashion industry as an outsider, Shamask soon found himself among its most celebrated. His designs became common features in the top fashion magazines, with the line wholesaled to the nation’s top stores. He added menswear to his oeuvre in the mid-1980s, which proved equally successful.

In 1989, Murray Moss and Shamask ended their business relationship. While Shamask went on to sign several licensing agreements the following year, for much of the 1990s, he stepped back from the outward aspects of fashion, like runway shows and ad campaigns, before returning to NYFW in 1998. Throughout, he continued to produce beautiful clothes for his clients, whether creating made-to-order designs, producing small wholesale collections, or designing lines for Barneys New York, while also maintaining a sideline collaborating with some of the top choreographers of the age, costuming the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lucinda Childs. Marriage and a daughter provided a grounding counterpoint to the ups and downs of the fashion industry.

Whenever Shamask the brand has publicly reemerged, at New York Fashion Week in 2011 or a retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2012, there has been much fanfare, with everyone in the fashion industry gleeful at the return of a true master of artful minimalism. His designs are both highly collectible and very wearable, seeming to exist outside of trends or a particular fashion moment.

I first reached out to Ron in 2021, though I had been interested in speaking with him for at least a decade prior. It was so wonderful to finally meet with him and learn so much about his career and life. Our conversation covers all of this and more: his design approach and philosophy, his influences and collaborators, his other projects, and memories of the fashion world in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Some photographs and press clippings from Ronaldus Shamask’s fashion career:

Some images of Moss, the all-white, gallery-like store that Murray Moss opened to showcase Shamask’s designs:

Considering my long-running interest in the Bicentennial, I am interested in contrasting the experiences and commercialism surrounding 1976 and today, so I thought I would share with you some photos from the various celebrations that took over New York City around July 4th, 1976, from “Operation Sail” where more than 200 tall ships promenaded up the Hudson River to various parades showing off the multicultural, melting pot of America. All of these photos are by Nick DeWolf, from the miraculous, huge archive of his images uploaded to Flickr.

Also this month I was interviewed by the Costume Society of America for its “Dialogues on Dress” series.

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

reading

Suitable

If you are looking to read some fascinating history this holiday weekend, pick up a copy of Chloe Chapin’s Suitable: the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026). You can read my interview with her first to get a sense of why the history of how men started all wearing dark suits is so important and how much those suits have had an impact on all of us.

Help Your Child to Wonder

Through another newsletter, I found this PDF of a 1956 essay by famed conservationist Rachel Carson where she lays out a way of interacting with the natural world as an adult that helps your child to feel emotions, particularly wonder and awe. Even if you don’t have any children you spend time with, I think it’s a pretty good plan for anyone to follow to recapture wonder and sensory experiencing.

Road tripping across 1970s America

73 Trip West — In 1973, Larry Racioppo set out from Brooklyn to California, armed with a medium format camera. For the first time in over half a century, roadside photographs from his trip have been unearthed.

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As they tried out new ideas around equality, both American men and women during the Revolutionary War years rejected the bright colours, expensive imported fabrics, and constantly changing fashions that arrived by boat on Parisian fashion plates (“Peacocks”), instead turning to simply cut garments in dark, locally produced fabrics (“Penguins”). When later, in the early 1800s, women’s dress began to change again—finding its way back to the perpetual shifts of fashion—men’s clothing did not. As Chapin explains, this marked a key change in the meaning of fashion: whereas before fashion was used to mark class, now it marked gender.

Suitable is a fascinating and eye-opening look at an era, between 1775 and 1850, that is often exhaustively studied in school in terms of politics, but never from this angle. All of us have walked by many walls of portraits of white men in identical dark suits—whether American presidents from the early 1800s or corporate presidents from the 1990s—but until now no one has asked why and how black suits became the only thing men wear in professional environments.

Though Chloe and I have a lot of overlap in our studies (we attended FIT’s MFA Fashion and Textiles program a year apart) and friends, we didn’t meet until last year when we were in a fashion history writing group together. As we discuss below, she began her career in art and the theatre, finding her way to fashion history through costume design. This grounding in the body and in making clearly informs her approach to research and in the way she has written this book—providing a much richer, more embodied understanding of economic, technological, and political history she covers. After getting her second master’s at FIT (her first was an MFA in Design from Yale School of Drama), she went on get her PhD in American Studies at Harvard. Chapin now works at Harvard as Assistant Director for Course Development at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning. Below is my conversation with Chloe about all things suits, fashion history, and more.

Suitable is now available on Bookshop, Amazon, and wherever books are sold.

We spoke for over two hours so this interview has been rather heavily edited for length and clarity.

Laura McLaws Helms: Can you tell me a bit about your background? I know you started as a costume designer.

Chloe Chapin: I would say even before being a costume designer, I just was a maker. I was always a theater kid. I acted in stuff, did summer theater, stuff like that. My dad was a wood and metal shop teacher, and so I had just grown up around tools. I loved working backstage, so I worked as a dresser for a long time at my local Shakespeare company. Ran the board, the sound board, the lighting. I just loved the lifestyle. Then, I went to college and given the weird tiny little art school that I went to, I just happened into this track of the illustrators and the design program, which was a really substantive training program. It was all life drawing, so that was a good fit for thinking about costumes in a new way too.

Then, I went to grad school, and then I moved to New York. New York is hard when you don’t have other sources of income. I just was hustling for 10 years. Anything that I could do to pay the rent. Sometimes that was doing Broadway musicals, where I got paid a lot of money, but all that money went straight out the door, because that job is so hard, that I would buy every meal, and run out of laundry, and had to go buy new underwear, because I didn’t have time to go to the laundromat. It just was like all the money that was coming in was going out, because the life was so hard. A lot of it was designing my own stuff more off-Broadway and just cobbling other stuff together. I did crafts for Victoria’s Secret shows, and worked with friends who were doing window displays, and just whatever I could get my hands on, including starting to teach.

I started teaching at FIT, a couple of fashion design courses. It was through that, that I just really started thinking more about how much I love doing research, and I love the history part of things. When you freelance, there’s so much flexibility, but the trade-off is, you often don’t feel like you have a whole lot of agency where I could say, “No”, to stuff, except that I couldn’t afford to saying, “No”, to stuff. I started thinking about PhD programs, which I had no idea what that meant. I had only ever been to art school. I did not know what the discipline was.

I already had a master’s degree, but I could do the FIT program for free, because I was teaching there, which was amazing. I thought, “I’ll do it for a semester. If I decide that footnotes are stupid, then I’ll just be an artist forever.” If I like it, then it would prepare me to have a writing sample to apply for a regular PhD program, which I didn’t have anything like that. I never had to write anything in my life. I had no idea what academia was. I only learned in hindsight. I didn’t even know how little I knew. I was looking at some of the more fashiony PhD places like Courtauld and Bard in art history and decorative arts kind of programs. For some reason, that just didn’t feel right to me.

I thought about history, but then I was like, “You could go anywhere. How would I choose?” That first year that I started at FIT, all the books I read that just lit my brain on fire. I loved reading trade nonfiction books. They were all written by people who taught at Harvard. I didn’t see it like a sign from the universe or anything; I just thought like, “Oh, this is interesting.” I reached out to a couple of them in the history department. They both said, “Well, you probably won’t get into the history department, because you don’t already have a degree in history, but you should look at the American Studies program.” I took the train up to Boston on a day off from theater and met with the person who was the chair at the time, which was a rotating position. It was an art historian, who was very interested in makers. She ended up becoming my dissertation advisor. It all felt like stumbling around in the dark. This was never a trajectory that I had in mind.

Laura: That’s amazing. Now, you’re a fashion doctor. In your preface, you talked about how this project originated with one question. Can you talk to me a little bit about that question, and how that question basically reshaped your life?

Chloe: I’ll say that there’s really two moments that got me interested in thinking about this. The first one was a conversation I had with Daniel Radcliffe on the opening night party of Equus, which was the show I designed on Broadway. He was naked in the show, but he did wear jeans, and I think a gray polo shirt or something. Also, he was one of the early celebrities that figured out that, if he wore the same thing every day, then the paparazzi wasn’t as interested, because they couldn’t sell the photos, because it all looked like the same day. I just was used to this. He was 19 at the time. He was a kid, and at the height of his fame. Seeing him all decked out in this midnight blue tuxedo at the opening night party was so exciting. We were just chatting about it. He was the one who told me about the aristocratic English history, where the Prince of Wales started wearing midnight blue tuxedos, because he was the first widely photographed royal. He was a flashy dresser, and he liked his suits. He found that blue photographed better. Then, it became this aristocratic sort of in thing of knowing how to spot the midnight blue.

I did a couple of projects about suits. In the FIT program, in the exhibition class, we had to choose something to do an exhibition on, so I did mine on James Bond and tuxedos. I made a couple of videos where I linked, cut together all the different instances of James Bond wearing a white dinner jacket. Then, a couple of years later, I was doing research for this production, which I wasn’t the designer for, so that meant that I could spend more time doing research. It was the opera La Traviata, where the first act is a big party, and the question was, what should the male chorus be wearing? Is this standard white tie, or are there some sort of variations? Really, the question at the time was, are we going to have to build stuff? Because it’s always a budget question first more than anything else.

As a costume designer, certainly, probably also as a historian, you develop this mental database of images. I was scrolling back in time and thinking, “Did they all wear white ties and white vests at that point, or were they wearing black vests and black ties?” I couldn’t really figure that out in my mind. I also couldn’t really, in my mind, differentiate between the difference between a daytime suit and an evening suit before tuxedos. There was this gap. I think that’s pretty common in fashion history, that everybody is so familiar with the Regency period, because of Jane Austen and now Bridgerton, and so familiar with the second half of the 19th century, and this whole Victorian world. There’s this hole between 1820 and 1850, which I certainly didn’t really know about. Then, I realized, if I went back in time to the 18th century, nobody was wearing black and white. Then, that made it even weirder: Why did, all of a sudden, in this short time period, men start wearing black and white, and then they never changed it? The shift happened so quickly and stayed for so long.

Laura: How did you approach researching and writing this? It specifically covers 75 years (1775-1850) but also covers earlier centuries of dress.

Chloe: One of the reasons why I wanted to go to a place like FIT, or a place like Harvard, and to be in American Studies, and not in a Fashion Studies program, is that I just had this idea that, collections always have bias to them. I had been in the fashion collections for years. I couldn’t get any answers to my questions there. I didn’t know if that was because I had an unanswerable question, or because of the limitations of those archives.

The problems that I was looking at, is that they were all the same. There’s a different kind of analysis. When I first started doing research in the “real history archives,” it was hard. I just didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. Two, I think at the beginning of every research project, especially when you’re doing archival research, you have specific questions that none of your sources are answering. Then, you come up with other things that the sources might tell you about that weren’t your questions. Figuring out how those things relate to each other is always, I think, hard. Also, because at the time, I was still trying to research evening dress. That is particularly hard, because it doesn’t have a name, and therefore, is not keyword searchable. I didn’t have characters either. That was really hard in the writing process, because reading history, it’s much more interesting to read stories about people than just about garments. Then, the pandemic hit. It was just like one pile-on after another in terms of the challenges of the research part.

Laura: At what point did you realize how connected the adoption of these suits was with the creation of American democracy? At what point did you realize that this was a political story versus just a fashion one?

Chloe: It was very late, actually. People often ask me, “As a historian, how did you discover suits?” I’m always like, “No, I was a suit person first, and I just discovered history.” The connection with the principles of the founding of the nation was probably one of the last things that came together in this project. It was not an “aha” moment at the beginning.

The first way that, that started changing was, I was a fellow at the Smithsonian, which sounds amazing, but it was during the pandemic, and so all of the federal archives were closed to everyone. I was just desperate for sources to analyze and had to look online. I found the Founding Fathers Online databases. At the time, I was still looking, again, at 1820 to 1850, and specifically evening dress. I didn’t think it was going to be relevant at all. I thought, “Well, tomorrow, I’ll spend two hours looking at it, and see what I find, and then that’ll be enough.” Then, in the first 15 or 20 minutes, I found this whole series of letters that George Washington had written to his tailor complaining about how his pants never fit. For 10 years, George Washington’s pants didn’t fit. He had a wedgie for 10 years. That’s such a relatable story.

One of the things that’s also really frustrating about doing archival work on menswear, I think, is that men are much less likely to write about their clothes than women are. Here was this amazing evidence about feeling awkward in your clothes. I just knew I had to include it. It also just being able to have characters, which had been so hard for me to find was so great. The Founding Fathers just presented themselves to me.

Laura: They’re also the most famous characters in American history. You can’t really get better in a way, I don’t think.

Chloe: I think one of the things that I was resistant to at the time was, this was 2020 to 2022. It was the height of not just the pandemic, but the George Floyd protests, and the Me Too movement. The archives were closed, but the galleries were open. I would go to the National Portrait Gallery, and there would always be these groups of teenagers running through going, “Slaveholders.” I was like, “Does anyone care about George Washington anymore?” I don’t think they do. The sources just kept pointing me on that direction.

The dissertation is much more American Studies. It’s more politically oriented, and more interested in the feminist, decolonial, anti-racist take on things, which was also certainly the culture of American Studies at the time. Then, when the book sold to Oxford, they wanted to put it on the list for the 4th of July for the America 250. I knew that that was going to be a connection in the marketing. It was interesting to think through that lens. It also is clear that Americans are really thinking a lot about what it means to be an American these days, not just because of the anniversary.

One of the things that was really important to me in the book, translating it from the dissertation, was to really make it as appealing as possible to straight white men, to the history bro audience, because I think a lot of them are very interested in clothes, but have either been taught, or convinced that, that’s gay, or feminine, or fussy, all equally unmanly. When approached with something that is in their wheelhouse, their rhetoric, their personal experience, that they are actually very interested in it. I wanted to make sure that I was appealing to that audience also. The Founding Fathers and this political story, the founding of America, felt like a really good way to talk to that audience.

Laura: Obviously, as you mentioned, you looked at garments, you looked at archival material like papers, and you’ve brought in various forms of history, from economics to politics. How did you sort all the different methodologies and research types into a cohesive narrative?

Chloe: I did a lot of mapping. There was a lot of spreadsheets involved, a lot of Google Docs, slides where I would say, “What if I put these images in this chapter, and these images in this chapter? What if I moved this image to this chapter?” There was a lot of moving stuff around. It was not, again, an easy decision.

In terms of pulling on different types of analysis, that part was a little bit easier, and happened organically. It was just that, as an outsider in academia, I hadn’t read any of the books, none of them. I couldn’t read all of them all at once. I had to parse it out. Essentially, I just was like, “I’ll read all the art history books together and write something. Then, I’ll save the political history stuff until the end.” It wasn’t really intentional in terms of a method. My method was, “How do I do this?”

What was so interesting was discovering afterwards, rewriting a method into that, was that… the difference between clothing, fashion, apparel, style, uniform, costume… map onto academic disciplines in a strange way. That writing about textiles, you’re going to be writing about economic history. Writing about fashion, you’re going to be reading art history. It’s going to be about the aesthetic purpose. Now, I talk about it as a cohesive clothing methodology, which is, here are different registers to think about clothes, and those map onto those chapters. Those are visual, material, embodied, performed, and institutional. I learned it in hindsight from writing the book.

One of the challenges is so much fashion analysis was written for the dress of couture clothes for women. It generally just wasn’t very helpful for thinking about other forms of dressing, especially ones that don’t consider themselves to be fashion, like the suit. I needed a method of system of analysis, and couldn’t find one, so I had to make one. I’m hoping that is going to be a framework that other people feel like they can borrow. I’ve started using that in talks for the public, [and] I have found people really enjoy it. It gives people who have no grounding in fashion studies, a way to think about how to look at a painting, essentially.

Laura: This book concentrates on how the American revolution and American democracy affected men’s dress, but how did this play out in other countries? When I think of Britain and most of Europe, there was also this taking on of suits at around the same time.

Chloe: That was one of the big challenges from the beginning, as I couldn’t say Americans invented suits. It’s just not true. They were also being taken up in these other countries. I think, initially, a lot of my analysis was much more focused on the French Revolution, Anglomania story, because that’s so prevalent in all fashion histories. That’s the story of this period. It was really hard to let that go, because that just was how I learned this period.

There are a couple of things I’m like, “Oh, this has sparked a really good research project that I’m not going to do, but I hope somebody does.” One of them would be looking more at the influence that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had on French ideas of dressing. The story is so Anglomania, it’s all about England, but they were there, and they were so famous and fashionable.

Laura: I found your book a really an interesting perspective on the whole time period, and especially the early part of your 75 years, which we learn so much about in school, but it can feel rather one note.

Chloe: I also was really interested in pushing back against the British-centric fashion analysis. I think so much of fashion history just calls itself fashion history, and it doesn’t locate itself in a culture. I think that’s really problematic. I think it’s fine that it happened initially. That’s how all fields are born. I think that we need to do a better job as fashion historians of being clear about what’s unique to the fashion, locating yourself in a place, because place has culture, but also sumptuary laws and embargoes, and natural products and all of those kinds of things.

To show how there was cultural borrowing, certainly. I think so much of British fashion history was written as fashion history that didn’t identify itself as English fashion history, but then other English language historians started taking that on, and didn’t identify it as British fashion history, but just called it fashion history. I think it led to America not really having much of a fashion identity. Certainly, Americans were borrowing and buying from England and France and China and India, and other places, and didn’t produce almost any fashion media until the 1830s. That is a hard way to tell the story.

Laura: Having studied in England, yes, I would say that there’s an in-built belief in the superiority of Britain in all ways. That continues in their studies, and in even still in the way that they think about America, and in academia.

Chloe: Yes, I agree. One of the things that helped me see the possibility for this book was when you teach a fashion history course—which I did for 10 years, so it is baked into my understanding of fashion—you have 15 weeks to get through caveman times through 1900. When you’re teaching the history of fashion, you are really teaching not just the history of rich people, but the history of the richest people. You’re always having a different location. This is one of the other reasons why I’m annoyed by the lack of specificity of place, because I did it, I am part of the problem. It’s like ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, and then you do England, France, England, France, Spain, Holland, England, France, England, France, Hollywood. You only get to America when it’s the West Coast in the Hollywood Golden Age. Even if all you’re doing is tracing golden ages, the richest people in the Western world at any given time, they are always driving the fashion conversation.

Laura: What kind of feedback have you been getting? I know you’ve been doing a lot of public talks. How has everything been now that this is out in the world?

Chloe: Well, I’ll say before it came out in the world, the feedback that I was getting from peer reviewers that I found really interesting was, they all said, “This book could only have been written by a costume designer.” I just really loved that. I can’t see it, because I just know what I know. That was one of the things that was so great about my dissertation advisor, is she was so good at telling me what was missing. She was always telling me, “You know more than you’re writing down. You’ve got to tell us what you see, because we can’t see it.” It’s rewarding that people who are not designers, or even art historians are seeing that.

Laura: I think you did a really good job of explaining things like the specifics of the cloths, garments, and technologies, both to someone who hadn’t thought about them in a while and also for someone who’s coming in and is more just a history person.

Chloe: If I had a party, the idea would be that it would be people who would be historians of the Revolution, who don’t know anything about clothes or textiles. Then, fashion people who don’t know anything about political history, or the 18th century.

One of the things that I thought was interesting was… [how] looking at different types of sources led me to make different arguments in really confusing ways. It was only by triangulating different types of sources together that I could finally find my way forward. I got a fellowship at the Huntington in LA, which has this amazing collection of those big tailor’s plates that have all the figures on them. I looked at a hundred of those, and I had a panic attack. I was like, “There’s no black suits. Why are there no black suits? Were they not really wearing black suits? Oh my God, my whole argument is destroyed.” Then, I went back to the paintings, and if you look at the paintings, they’re only black suits. That’s a really weird disconnect there. Depending on which thing you look at, there’s a different story happening. Then, the story has to become about the stories that are being told.

One of the things that was helpful was miniature paintings are actually quite different than the full-size paintings. That was another thing I think that I got out of being stuck inside, and not being able to go to museums as much during the pandemic, because if you go to a museum, generally, the miniatures aren’t out on display, or I look over them because they’re tiny, and I’m busy looking at the pictures up on the wall. Online, they’re all the same size. They have the same visual importance. I did all these databases for myself about like, “Here’s all this guy’s paintings. Oh, no, wait, these are miniatures. Oh, wait, what if I do different slides? This one is all full-size paintings, and this one’s miniatures. Whoa, there’s an interesting story here, where all the big ones are black, all black suits. Then, the miniature is like, that’s where the fashiony stuff is happening.” That’s interesting.

As far as the tailor’s plates are concerned, I finally was like, “Oh, it’s because they’re advertising.” They basically are sellers of cloth as much, as they’re sellers of making your clothes. They don’t need to advertise black suits because everybody knows what black wool looks like, but they’re always trying to push that new.

Laura: You already have a black suit, so let’s try and get you to buy something else.

Chloe: Exactly. Also, that period, I know the whole reason why all those plates were collected by the collector, is because they’re lithographs. That’s what he was interested in is the technology of lithography. They’re all hand painted. When you arere hand painting stuff, the opacity of different colors is really different. Black paint is so opaque; you can’t see through it. When you’re advertising suits, what you want to show are the style, the seam lines, and so it makes less sense to show them.

I think fashion is really challenging to study for a variety of reasons…. The sources are so unstable. A painting, you’ll say, “Oh, well, maybe they weren’t wearing that. Maybe the painter made it up.” The fashion plate, it’s like, “Well, that’s a fashion plate. You don’t know that everybody was actually wearing that.” In a pre-photography world, how do you trust your sources? Other fields have to verify their sources too. There’s this, I think, devaluing of fashion research because other fields will claim that fashion sources are unreliable. Being unstable and unreliable, I think are two different things. It doesn’t mean that you can’t use those sources. You just have to be careful about what the sources are telling you.

Laura: Did researching and writing this book change your ideas about suits?

Chloe: I say a little bit about that in the book, that my goal isn’t that we should get rid of suits. I love suits. One of the things that I find really interesting is the challenge of holding intention that it was such a cool idea that they had: The idea of this plain uniform being a symbol of American values and democracy. Women were doing the same thing [in terms of simplifying dress around the time of the American Revolution]. They just didn’t have any voting rights. Then their fashion changed 8,000 times after that, so we don’t see it in the same way. I don’t think we should get mad at anybody about that. We can still hold slaveholders accountable and say that they should have made voting accessible to women from the very beginning.

Also, it seems to have had some really gargantuan consequences in terms of, if you believe my argument that when men adopted suits, that fashion was extra devalued and associated with femininity and frivolity. Then, when suits are taken up around the globe as a symbol of democracy, which helped erase a lot of male traditional dress practices, which make much more sense for the climates where they’re actually living in, [this] also helped to make more extreme the difference between men and women in non-Western contexts when men adopted suits and women did not.

I feel like holding those two things in tension, in a way, is very similar to the kind of tension that political historians are asking us to hold too, that the Founding Fathers’ ideas of equality were really important and really world-building in terms of what they were reacting to. It’s hard, I think, sometimes to see that because we have really different ideas about what equality means to us, and they had a different definition of equality. Maybe that’s one of the things that this book can do, is give people just maybe a little bit more of a material way of grasping the challenge of holding those two truths at the same time.

Laura: There’s always so much more nuance than the flattened view that the media wants us to give us. What do you think we can learn from this Sartorial Revolution?

Chloe: For me, the first thing is just to be able to see suits. I don’t think we’ve been able to see them. I think they were cleverly invisibilized through their design. Whether or not that was intentional from the beginning or an accident, or the reason why it lasted for so long, I think there’s a couple of different reasons why that’s valuable, one of which is just on a social level, and the other is a little bit more academic of the ability to see.

One of the things that helped me come up with these ideas is thinking about all of those museum collections that are full of paintings of white men in black suits, and yet art history has no analysis of them as a genre. It’s just the suit is considered so natural. It’s just the state of being a modern man. Plainness is not neutral. It’s a choice. It’s always a choice to keep choosing. It is clear to me that adornment is the norm. Humans have been adorning themselves since humans were humans. The suit is a weird outlier. The people today who wear suits have disproportionately more money and power than everybody else does. There’s even more of a reason why we should be able to see it and point to it.

Laura: I’ve been working on a project for someone these last few weeks that has made me look through thousands of candid photographs taken around America in the 1970s. A lot of them are Wall Street and Midtown, and while reading your book, it made me think about this weird pocket of time that doesn’t fit within the rest of it, because the men in the suits, they’re not wearing dark suits; they’re plaid and have all of these things going on. It’s this weird moment where the “peacocks to penguins” went back to peacocks.

Chloe: They call it the Peacock Revolution for a reason. That is one of the pushbacks I often get is like, “What about the ‘70s?” My two responses to that are usually, look to the politicians. Also, the suit keeps winning. It just keeps coming back to it, even if we deviate from it in certain time periods or in certain ways.

I think even on an individual level, that happens, this idea that the sartorial glow up that a man should always have a suit in his closet so that at any moment he can take on the raiment of respectability and authority, whether that’s being the boss or going to a funeral or going to the opera, whatever it is. Anytime you want to be in charge or fancy or dependable, reliable, that the suit is always available to you to do that.

Laura: For your next projects, are you still planning to write about menswear or suits?

Chloe: This whole project started off as a history of tuxedos. That is a book that doesn’t exist and it really should. I have most of the research for it. It’s tricky. I’m ready to move on to other things. I want to find other big arguments like this book. I also really want to write that tuxedo book too. I don’t want to get pigeon-holed as just the suits person.

I’ve been writing these personal stories about being a dresser and a costume designer, and thinking about the performative nature of clothing and what it feels like to wear it and to put it on people. I feel like that’s a really under told part of the story. I’ve been thinking about it more in terms of theatrical costumes and the nature of celebrity, more through a theater perspective. The one that I really want to write eventually is a philosophy book, that goes back and rewrites fashion into different philosophers. We can’t be beings in the world without being dressed beings in the world.

Laura: I really enjoyed how your book, even though it’s about clothing, it’s about clothing through this historical lens, and through these economic and political and all these other lenses, which makes it feel a little more robust in a way than a lot of theory-based fashion scholarship.

Chloe: I had an interview with The Harvard Gazette. One of the things that she said, which I was so happy to hear, was that she really got the argument that fashion studies has been overlooked and undervalued, and it’s because of gender and it’s because of suits. I know I don’t have to make that argument to fashion people. Being able to make it to someone who has never really thought about fashion before, and to have them have a kind of a-ha moment. I think a lot of people, that’s the main comment is like, “Oh, I just never even thought of that before.” I was really gratified to hear that, that it is an argument that will be of interest to people beyond fashion scholars.

I then went on a tear, buying and reading the series of trashy novels she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s, which all drew on the real-life knowledge she accumulated in her roles as beauty editor, tycoon’s wife, Helena Rubinstein executive, and tabloid favourite (Graydon Carter famously described her as “bosomy dirty book writer Shirley Lord” in his pseudonymous column in Spy Magazine). Heavily upholstered in Scaasi originals, Lord was seemingly out on the town every night of the 1980s and 1990s, with Abe Rosenthal at her side, making her the ideal person to capture that world of glamour, intrigue, and social-climbers. I tracked her down and sent her a letter, after which she invited me to her lovely East 60s duplex for a podcast interview in June 2021.

Below is the introduction to Lord I wrote for the Sighs and Whispers Podcast website, which provides a good overview on her rather novelesque life. The best is in my interview with her, which even the New York Times obituary quotes, so if you have a chance, take a listen—and then pull up your eBay account and order one of her wonderfully trashy novels for your next pool or beach vacation.

Listen to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Soundcloud.

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Shirley Lord (1932 - 2026)

When I look back on my interviews for this podcast, it is apparent that many of my interview subjects are wholly self-created—that they decided on the life they wanted and went after it with total commitment and drive. This week’s subject encapsulates this self-creation with grace and poise that belies the work it took to achieve her dreams. Shirley Lord rose from Cockney lass to one of the most influential people in the beauty industry through grit, good humor, and a passion for journalism. In June I visited her in her very elegant East 60s home where the 89-year-old opened up to me about all aspects of her life, career and five marriages.

Though she doesn’t talk much about it in this interview, Shirley Stringer was born into a working class family in the East End of London (first Leyton, then Walthamstow) and from a very early age aspired to be an author and journalist. With a single-minded commitment she focused all of her attention and work towards this goal. Getting a job straight out of school as a sixteen-year-old typist with a newspaper’s readers’ services, Shirley then took every opportunity she could to move up and get her writing in front of editors. Moving from publication to publication, she jumped to secretary then to assistant editor before becoming fiction editor of Home Notes at 19. By 21 she was a feature writer for Good Taste magazine, interviewing famous film stars and musicians, and at 24 she was features editor of Woman and Beauty—thereby stepping into the life she knew was right for her. Caught between the small world of her East End life and the glamorous, cosmopolitan West End media world, Shirley entered into a loveless marriage in her early 20s with a long-time local sweetheart, had a son and settled down in a suburban home—having to take the train into London every day for her job, truly split between two identities.

When Cyril Lord, the famous British carpet magnate, fell in love with her during an interview, she soon found herself at the center of two controversial divorces all over the newspaper front pages. They married in January 1960, when Shirley was 27. She found herself moving in the upper echelons of society, she describes it in her 1968 memoir, Small Beer at Claridges: “Now I was meeting interview ‘material’ on their own level”—quite a change from the working class world she grew up in. Standing firm, Shirley continued to work while married—in this interview you’ll hear her chart the various newspapers and magazines she wrote for and her path to British Harper’s Bazaar and the Evening Standard (under Charles Wintour, Anna’s father) in London.

When Cyril wanted to escape high British taxes, Shirley found herself in the early 1970s in Barbados with a husband she didn’t love, far from her work and in love with their architect, the prominent Caribbean real estate developer David Anderson. As she describes it, she “ran away”—alighting in New York through the help of British Harper’s Bazaar. What was meant to be a brief stay became a permanent move, of now over 40s years. Shirley worked at American Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue, contributing to the field of beauty writing at a time when the industry was undergoing a seismic shift from a magazine and commercial backwater to the multi-billion dollar behemoth it is now—as she says several times, the beauty industry and their ad dollars “saved magazines.” Marriage to her architect love followed in 1974, along with a job in the private sector—by this time she was such a respected visionary in the beauty world that she was brought in by Helena Rubinstein to be their vice president (scroll down to read an article about the “beauty breakfasts” she mentions in the podcast). Shirley spoke with me of the many things she learned while on the business-side of the industry and her happiness to return to journalism and Vogue after five years.

A major player in the New York social scene throughout this time, in the mid-80s Shirley was introduced to Abe Rosenthal, the legendary editor of the New York Times. The pair married in 1987 and settled into a hectic social life of galas and literary dinners, which was heavily profiled in the press. They spent their weekends in Bellport, Long Island, where Shirley wrote novels. Drawing on her deep knowledge of the beauty and fashion industries, they are in the vein of Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins—wildly enjoyable reads that are perfect for whenever you need a true escape. Shirley stayed at Vogue until the end of the 1990s when Samuel Waksal persuaded her to join the early dot-com beauty website, ibeauty.com. After it failed she returned to Vogue as a contributing beauty editor. Rosenthal passed away in 2006; since then Shirley has continued with her charitable endeavors, occasional writing, and also found love again with the artist Peter Heywood—they married last year in the midst of the pandemic.

We cover all of this and more in a very chatty and fun interview. Shirley is sharp and funny—her decades as a renowned hostess are obvious, as is the ambition that helped her rise to such success at such a young age. For more information on the early years of her career, seek out a copy of Small Beer at Claridges. Both this interview and that book put forward a clear case for actively pushing for your dreams and believing in yourself, no matter your background or what stands in your way—there is a lot of inspiration to be found in the way that Shirley lived her life, the goals she achieved and the happiness she found.

And from a piece I wrote in 2022 on some of my favourite trashy novels (perfect for your summer vacation!):

Faces (1989) Shirley Lord

When I spoke with Lord, she said that she started writing novels when she saw her friend Eugenia Sheppard do so—she realized that she was quite as capable, so began devoting her weekends to creating. Shirley has written five trashy novels—the first, Golden Hill, came out in 1982 and is based on her time living in the tropics with her carpet magnate second husband. All deal with beauty, fashion and the jet-set—i.e. the world Lord has lived in since the 1950s. My personal favourite is Faces, a novel about plastic surgery gone wrong. Through her work as beauty director at Vogue, Lord became knowledgeable about all aspects of the beauty industry—and was also exposed to the lengths women would go to beautify themselves. I wouldn’t recommend reading it while recovering from a surgery, and if you are debating whether to get a fox lift or an acid peel this will likely make your stomach turn—but at its base, Faces shows just how little we’ve advanced in wider beauty standards in thirty years.

An article on the “beauty breakfasts” Shirley developed while at Helena Rubinstein, from the Los Angeles Times, September 9th, 1977, by previous podcast guest Marylou Luther:

I wasn’t alive, but my perception—based on ephemera, news reports, oral histories, and having spent hundreds of hours going page by page through many, many newspapers, over the years—is that the Bicentennial had a sort of outsize influence on what was going on in America at that moment. It was a true monoculture. It’s very difficult now, with everything being so fractured, to have that kind of unified mass-event, but the Bicentennial was a true monocultural moment. That’s not to say that there wasn’t backlash; following so soon after Vietnam and the cultural tumult of the 1970s, there were plenty of people who were not feeling patriotic and saw little to celebrate—feminist Lettie Cottin Pogrebin (listen to my interview with her here) wrote in the New York Times, “Maybe women should use 1976 to challenge the American dream, not celebrate it.” Others found the incessant patriotic zeal hokey and annoying. When speaking of the programs of “musical Americana” every symphony and theatre was devoting its season to, the composer Martin Bernheimer wrote, “It is probably more heinous than hating apple pie, the Flag and mother. It probably makes disapproval of the Star-Spangled Banner at concerts seem like a quaint and harmless aberration. It probably brands me as a Dangerous Pinko and automatically places my name on all manner of secret lists in dark Washington files… But I confess. It is true. I hate the Bicentennial.” With every performance, event, store window, restaurant special, newspaper advertisement, and product now Bicentennial-themed—awash in red-white-and-blue and quasi-Colonial motifs—there was really no escape. Even Vogue took a dig at the “onslaught of such Bicentennial schlock as red-white-and-blue coffins,” which sold out there 400 unit run in weeks.

All of that likely makes it unsurprising that seemingly almost every high school yearbook committee chose a Bicentennial theme for 1976. A historically and culturally relevant theme with clear codes and motifs, it was likely an easy decision (same for the Y2K yearbook I have hidden deep in storage)—the staff just had to assemble enough Liberty Bell, bald eagle, Founding Father, and flag photos to fill the pages, and a place to print the Declaration of Independence, and it was designed. There is a repetitiveness to looking through them, one after another, that likely mimics the banality of the overall Bicentennial hoopla.

That said, after collecting pages from over fifty different yearbooks that have a Bicentennial theme, I decided to focus on sharing images from only one school, Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Texas. All I’m going to say is that if Richard Linklater hadn’t already made Dazed and Confused about a high school in Texas in 1976, you could go through this yearbook and write the same film with the same sets and costumes—the photos are that good and that informative. They are a treasure trove.

But first, for all of you who love trend stories, here are some of the fads of the 1975-1976 school year. Jaws was it!

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Though our interview was recorded almost nine years ago, it is still a really interesting, engaging listen. As the earliest episodes were recorded under a different podcast name, I took this as an opportunity to finally re-record the intro and to revisit my love for his photographs.

Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

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Duane Michals worked across a number of different genres: art, portraiture, interiors, fashion and advertising. I met him in the fall of 2017 in his Gramercy home, the stage set of many of his most memorable images and sequences, several months after his partner of 57 years passed away. Sitting and talking with Duane was a great honor. A Pennsylvania native, Michals moved to New York City in the mid-1950s. A master storyteller, he pushed the boundaries of the art photography world in the late 1960s and 1970s with his innovative use of “sequences”, which are stories told through a series of photos, as well as his use of handwritten text on photographs.

Across all his work, Duane’s vision and personality is clear. At times melancholy or humorous, his photos are often poignant and speak to greater ideas about love. In person Duane was just like his work: immensely engaging, funny, pensive, serious and loving.

One part of this conversation with Duane Michaels that particularly stood out for me was how he never kowtowed to conventions about how a photographer should act and what their work should look like. Instead, he created his ideal life and produced the work that he was inspired to. For him, this meant no studio and usually only one assistant, just working from home on his personal work and taking on large commercial jobs as a method of experiential learning.

At eighty-five years old at the time of our conversation, he was still producing new work across a range of new media. He continued working on photographs, sculptures, and films up until his death this week at age 94.

Paradise Regained, a sequence from 1968:

A random selection of photos I love by Duane Michals:

In 2011, New York Magazine published a piece on how 1978 was New York’s Greatest Year, when “New York at its most New York”: “The preoccupation with the suburbs had peaked, and people were flowing back into the city—often young, creative, interesting people. It was possible to have entire conversations that did not involve real estate or bedbugs. The fiscal crisis was just past, recreational drugs were easy to get, and everyone was having sex all the time.” It’s in the midst of this that GQ decided to construct an editorial tour of men’s fashion in the city, area by area, for its November 1978 issue. Of course, for the editors of GQ, only Manhattan counted as New York; the outer boroughs don’t even qualify for a mention.

GQ’s New York is a very white New York. Blacks are represented solely as “The Uptown Man” in Harlem, with references to Black religious/cult leaders Father Divine and Sweet Daddy Grace.1 There are eight sections in this article/editorial, seven designated by neighborhood, with “The Latino Man” the sole one by ethnicity; confusingly, from the map, it looks like they’ve sequestered Latinos around the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, areas never known for having a dominant Latino population (why not Spanish Harlem or the Lower East Side?) Using every possible euphemism, “The West Village Man” is out-and-proud without saying so at all; what could “the life many Villagers feel they’ve left behind” be but the closet that GQ has returned them to?

This New York is a much smaller city than it is now. Gentrification has shifted populations and, for better and worse, expanded the boundaries of where certain groups live. Even those first artist explorers into SoHo have long since sold their lofts, leaving behind an area unrecognizable in its wealth and prestige. Yet other areas are much the same as ever, particularly “The East Side Man,” denizen of the unchanging Upper East Side (come autumn, you will definitely find some rich Europeans dressed in these exact outfits outside Sant Ambroeus).

Perhaps what is most fascinating is charting which of the noted retail establishments still exist, almost fifty years later. Most are long gone, with others hanging on as shadows of their former selves, desiccated by private equity and consolidation. The few stores that remain are an odd bunch taken cumulatively: Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf’s, Saks, and Macy’s of the department stores; Gucci for luxury, though in a very different form; J. Press, Paul Stuart, and Brooks Brothers continuing to service the traditional male; Paragon Sporting Goods sticking to what they know best; The Gap, for basics (though this article was truly from a different era, before The Gap did private label and when it was primarily a Levi’s reseller); I. Buss Uniform Co., which GQ describes as carrying military surplus, but now solely supplying uniforms; and Reminiscence, which has moved a few streets but continues to sell vintage clothing. Taken together, this list seemingly points to the longevity of traditional men’s clothing and of department stores, but that disregards all the department and specialty stores lost in the intervening years (and many more we are likely to lose with continued consolidation of nameplates).

Whether or not you are a New Yorker, I hope this is an enjoyable tour through the city and an invitation to think about the shifting populations and “territorial imperatives… that shape the philosophy of entire schools of fashion thinking” of your home.

All text below is from GQ; no editor or writer is credited on this editorial.

“That New York Style”, GQ, November 1978

Photographed by Albert Watson; Styling Consultant Mark Golderman

“If you can make it there, goes the song, “you’ll make it anywhere.” Of course, it’s referring to New York. Simply stated, to make it in the Big Apple, you’ve got to be good. And you have to dress for it. But there are as many ways of making it in the city as there are neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, different groups have settled in various sections of the city, stamping them with their own energy and look. To understand Manhattan’s approach to personal styles of dress, GQ surveyed the territorial imperatives all over town that shape the philosophy of entire schools of fashion thinking. The result covers such familiar turf as Wall Street and Madison Avenue, while it also ventures into some new realities—the offhanded elegance of SoHo and street-smart flash of 14th Street. But they’re New Yorkers all.

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Below I am sharing a short essay that I love by Cecil Beaton on Marilyn Monroe, originally published in Harper’s Bazaar, June 1956. He’s such an evocative writer of fashion and celebrity (how could someone be so talented across so many fields???) that re-reading this piece makes me wish I could clear my schedule and spend the day re-reading one of the greatest fashion books of all time, Beaton’s The Glass of Fashion.

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Little Girl Alias Femme Fatale

by Cecil Beaton

Miss Marilyn Monroe calls to mind the bouquet of a fireworks display, eliciting from her awed spectators an openmouthed chorus of wondrous ohs and ahs. She is as spectacular as the silvery shower of a Vesuvius fountain; she has rocketed from obscurity to become our postwar sex symbol-the pin-up girl of an age. And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight.

Transfigured by the garish marvel of Technicolor and Cinemascope, she walks like an undulating basilisk, scorching everything in her path but the rosemary bushes. Her voice has the sensuality of silk or velvet.

But the real marvel lies in the paradox—somehow we know that this extraordinary performance is pure charade, a little girl’s caricature of Mae West. The puzzling truth is that Miss Monroe is a make-believe siren, unsophisticated as a Rhine maiden, innocent as a sleepwalker. She is an urchin pretending to be grown up, having the time of her life in mother’s moth-eaten finery, tottering about in high-heeled shoes and sipping ginger ale as though it were a champagne cocktail. There is an unworldly, a winsome naiveté about the child’s eyes that, quick as a flash, will screw up into a pair of sexy, smoldering slits and give you a synthetic “come-hither” look. Just as obligingly, the delicate, flexible mouth, half-parted in springtime ecstasy, will burst into a generous grimace, displaying flawless seed-pearl teeth while the surrounding lips quiver nervously and seem almost shocking in their mobile suggestiveness.

Behind this brilliant, pseudo-fatal façade is the real Marilyn Monroe. She might be the latter-day incarnation of a Greuze portrait, the quintessence of partridge-plump prettiness with full, high breasts, eighteenth-century rump and a delicately modeled face eyes felicitously wide apart, chin appealingly small, putty-like nose created expressly for wrinkling up with delight, or for photography (though in profile the urchin is apt to gain the ascendancy).

Passing across these enviable features, like blips on a radar screen, is an incredible display of inspired, narcissistic moods. With the possible exception of a Scotch landscape, there has seldom been such an everchanging subject for the photographer. He may miss recording one mood, but a dozen others will assault him with machine-gun recompense.

In her presence, you are startled, then disarmed, by her lack of inhibition. What might at first seem like exhibitionism is yet counterbalanced by a wistful incertitude beneath the surface. If this star is an abandoned sprite, she touchingly looks to her audience for approval. She is strikingly like an overexcited child asked downstairs after tea. The initial shyness over, excitement has now gotten the better of her. She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps onto the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited, infectiously gay performance. It may end in tears.

Equally impromptu is her general appearance. This canary blond nymph has been so sufficiently endowed by nature as to pay no attention to the way she looks. Her hair, her nails, her make-up, have a makeshift, spontaneous attractiveness. It is all very contemporary: Marilyn Monroe conjures up two straws in a single soda, juke boxes, sheer nylons and drive-in movies for necking (does she not project a hypnotized nymphomania?).

This, then, is the wonder of the age—a dreaming somnambule, a composite of Alice in Wonderland, Trilby and a Minsky artist. Perhaps she was born the postwar day we had need of her. Certainly she has no knowledge of the past. Like Giraudoux’ Ondine, she is only fifteen years old; and she will never die.

I will probably write more on the yearbooks soon, but these are just some pages for fun!

Below are some of the things that fascinated and intrigued me this month:

reading

The Ordinary, Extraordinary To-Do Lists of Keith Haring: “Order canvas.” “Aim toothpaste.” “Call Yoko.”

As this is a pro-ephemera newsletter—and as I am an inveterate to-do list writer—I was captivated by this Curbed piece on Keith Haring’s to-do lists: a mix of the truly mundane, the creative, and the famous. Only eight lists are included in the article, though there are supposedly about 400 in the archive (please someone, make a book).

I found 9 secret diaries of a French teenager who had Mussolini’s photo on his bedroom wall in 1922. His psychology is disturbingly familiar.

From r/ephemera, a French rare book seller writes about the secret diaries of a French teenager kept between 1916 and 1923, documenting this tortured poetic soul, caught between the passions of unrequited love and lust and the moral strictures of Catholicism and his family’s Monarchism, and how without any support for his pains, he falls headfirst into fascism. The OP is a French speaker who used an LLM to organize his analysis in English, so the language is annoyingly AI, but if you can read past that, the journals are incredibly interesting—as are the comments, where others have helped the OP construct what happened to him next in his life.

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Of the New York shows, so far I have made it to Ortuzar’s “Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show,” which recreates the 1986 “Peter Hujar: Recent Photographs” exhibition held at the East Village gallery Gracie Mansion. It was Hujar’s eighth and final solo show, before his death from AIDS-related complications in November 1987. The show features seventy photographs arranged in a long, two-row grid in the exact layout Hujar decided: “Portraits of friends and fellow artists appeared alongside nudes, landscapes, animals, and images of abandoned buildings, with genres and subjects freely intermingled. In honor of its fortieth anniversary, Ortuzar’s exhibition presents a version of the original 1986 layout, offering contemporary viewers a chance to experience Hujar’s work as he conceived it, with its non-hierarchical sequencing encouraging open-ended associations and offering rare insight into how he understood the relationships between his images.”

“Peter Hujar: The Gracie Mansion Show” ends May 30th, so get there today or tomorrow!

Next on my list is “Hujar:Contact” at the Morgan Library & Museum, which features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from across his career—charting his ascent from studio assistant to freelance magazine photographer to artist. “Hujar:Contact” is on until October 25, 2026; the Morgan also has a very interesting looking exhibition on Tarot opening in late June, so its definitely worth a visit to see both this summer!

Among the magazines he freelanced for was GQ. For the March, April, and June 1971 issues, Hujar shot three fashion editorials and two musician portraits (Iggy Pop and Isaac Hayes). I do not know why his freelancing career with them was quite so short; taken from the vantage point of over half a century later, it feels like a travesty that he didn’t do more men’s fashion work for GQ. Last week, on Instagram, I shared one of the editorials: beach fashions from June 1971.

Hujar’s first editorial for GQ (for March 1971) features eight men posing with their parents in what appears to be their family homes. Rather Arbusian in their form and technique, the portraits tell so much through the posing, facial expressions, and carefully organized tchotchkes. As with the Hujar photos in the editorial above, it is particularly interesting to see his use of colour as we so often think of him as solely a black-and-white photographer.

I haven’t seen this series shared online anywhere, so please enjoy!

Mr. and Mrs. William F. Wilson and their son, William, 22. William is wearing a blue campaign-style suit in a twill-effect double-knit (Leisure Ltd., about $70). The unpadded jacket has snap-closure front and flapped patch pockets with metal rings. Skinny ribbed, placket-front pullover by Europe Craft.

Mr. and Mrs. Edward Boehm and their son, Arthur, 25. Arthur is wearing a patchwork suede suit by Chrome-Cuir for Rafael Fashions (about $200). Top is patchwork-trimmed at pockets, cuffs and waist. Pants have trim at waist, back pockets and leg panels. Skinny ribbed top by Robert Bruce.

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Boxer and their son, Michael, 25. Michael is wearing a clay-colored knitted shirt-suit (by Tiger of Sweden, about $120), with diagonal twill-patterned panels. The top is belted, with snap-closure flapped pockets. The pants have an extension waistband and slightly flared leg.

Mr. and Mrs. Duke Marks and their son, Peter, 36. Peter is wearing a belted beige suede safari-style shirt-suit by Bidermann of Paris (about $200). The top features an all-around, stitched-on belt and has cream-colored stitching on its four flapped patch pockets. Wooden neckband by Valerie.

Mr. and Mrs. John H. Jacoby and their son, Eric, 24. Eric is wearing a polyester knit shirt-suit in a gold, mustard, black and beige geometric pattern. The top has a stitched-down chest yoke, two inverted-pleat flapped button-through pockets, and a half-belt in back (Hardy Amies U.S.A., about $80).

Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Shanman and their son, Mack Schlefer. Mack, 25, is wearing a wool knicker-suit in an all-over pattern of gold, beige and black (B. Teller of Vienna, about $95). Jacket has buttoned flap patch pockets and extension-tab waistband. Shirt by Unk Knits. Diamond-pattern socks by Esquire.

Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Henry and their son, Richard, 28. Richard is wearing a black double-knit safari-style suit with an all-around belt and pleated flapped pockets. The pants have an extension-tab waistband and flared leg (Tiger of Sweden, about $120). Skinny ribbed speckled plum turtleneck by Giovannelli.

Mr. and Mrs. John Interlandi and their son, John, 22. John is wearing a denim-look polyester and cotton shirt-suit by Harry Lans for Rafael Fashions (about $90). The safari-style top has metal buttons, stitched-down all-around belt and four scalloped flap pockets. Metal belt by Vacher for Rafael Fashions.