Bonnie Cashin: Chic Is Where You Find It by Rizzoli International Publications

INTRODUCTION

1. Bonnie Cashin in her studio, 1975. 2. Cashin’s studio and archive, 2000. Photos by Stephanie Lake.

The only time that I tried to conduct a formal interview with Bonnie Cashin, my “for the record” questions met with some canned answers and a glazed look from my subject. A disaster. Bonnie put a stop to it by leaning over, patting me on my knee, and saying “I’m just your big sister.” When we met, we had that sort of closeness almost immediately, as if we somehow already knew each other. I had discovered her work, and also the utter lack of documentation about her, while conducting research for vintage couture auctions at Sotheby’s fashion department. I was a graduate student at Manhattan’s Bard Graduate Center, eager for a thesis topic, and when my Dean pulled me into a meeting with Dorothy Globus, the then-director at the Museum at FIT, I told them of my hopes of examining Bonnie’s career. Dorothy mentioned this to June Weir, the former Associate Publisher of W and WWD and Fashion News Director at Vogue, who gave me Bonnie’s phone number. When I called Bonne and explained my plan to redress historical neglect of her career, she invited me to tea at her U.N. Plaza apartment. We saw each other almost every week until she died three years later. I had been cautioned that she was intensely private and rather difficult, but through a wonderful mystery of chemistry, or fate, we “clicked” and she let me in to her life. “You have years of work ahead of you,” she both cautioned and chuckled. I became the first person that she allowed to look through her archive, housed in its entirety in a separate U. N. apartment, with the stipulation that I put everything back exactly where I found it. She would greet me at her door (You-hoo, you-hoo, Stephanie . . .), give me a peck on the cheek, and hand me the keys (see you later, kiddo). By the time I tried to “officially” inaugurate an oral history project for the ages, we knew each other too well. Every day in her archive was a treasure hunt. In baskets, file cabinets and kitchen drawers, pinned to the walls and stacked in portfolios, was Bonnie’s near-century of costume and clothing design: hundreds of childhood costume and fashion illustrations from the 1920s, stacks of press photographs of 1930s chorus girls in her costumes, watercolor and ink renderings of 1940s clothes for Hollywood stars, over 8,000 ready-to-wear sketches and press photographs. Unwieldy press books held thousands of editorial clippings, and they were piled underneath a floor to ceiling collage of knits and yarns. Her clothing archive hung in closets painted acid-candy colors; she felt “the insides of things are very important. Closets, dresses, people.”

5. A sketch from her days at Twentieth Century-Fox, ca. 1945. 6. Cape illustration, a version of which was worn by Princess Grace of Monaco for Harper’s Bazaar in their August 1975 issue.

7. Cashin in her U. N. Plaza dining room in 1970, wearing two of her favorite designs: a Ballantyne Cashmere funnelneck sweater, and her Coach harness leather “Mail Sac,” introduced in 1967.

It was the end of one chapter and I moved to Los Angles, commuting back to New York for work and living in one of Bonnie’s apartments when I was in town. It took years to settle her estate. I was given the contents of her two apartments, save for furniture and art that went to auction and her professional papers, donated to the Department of Special Collections at UCLA at my behest, where I spent three years archiving and digitizing the collection that I knew by heart. Talk of a Cashin book began before I was born. In 1967, Liebes commanded Bonnie to share her “very picturesque and romantic story,” adding “it is terribly important to put in the things that made you! . . . For heaven’s sake, get thyself to a dictating machine!” Left with her wishes, her clothing collection, her incredible personal archive, and the objects of her daily life, I have written thousands of pages on her life and curated a series of exhibitions that no one else could. I provide access to who she was as much as what she accomplished, so much so that people still slip up and call me Bonnie. I know the dates, places and running commentary of her life better than I know my own. It is astonishing that Bonnie succeeded in becoming one of the most significant designers in ready-to-wear fashion, as she refused to do virtually anything that was seemingly required of becoming a “name” in the field. She was never anyone’s employee, she never had investors, she never licensed her name. She refused to enter into any arrangement that would hamper her creativity, alter her original concept, or diminish the quality of her work. Of her insistence on superb craftsmanship and fine materials, she commented that her prices must “fall where they may.” She helmed a design firm of one (without any design assistants or public relations staff ) and worked alone from her “secret laboratories,” a series of home-based studios, pulling together a ready-to-wear wardrobe from head to almost toe, manufactured by unrelated companies that she expected to share dyes, materials, and delivery times, and follow her every instruction to a T. By ignoring or repudiating fashion industry conventions, she opted not to become one of its wealthiest and most famous designers. She could have been exactly that, but she did not want it. She did, however, become one of its most influential. She is referred to as the mother of American sportswear, credited with developing leather and mohair as fashion media, introducing “hardware” Introduction

Cashin in her U. N. Plaza dining room in 1970, wearing two of her favorite designs: a Ballantyne Cashmere funnelneck sweater, and her Coach harness leather “Mail Sac,” introduced in 1967.

Color

Cashin’s talents, and her parents’ disagreements about her future, were such that Eunice left her husband around 1920. She moved her children into a cramped Hollywood apartment where Cashin prided herself on preparing the family meals on one dollar a day. Though she credited her father with her artistic, and often demanding, nature, she also never really knew him. He was shot and killed at a gas station where he worked. By her adolescence, Cashin, her mother and brother lived in a spare house in Sherman, today West Hollywood, where Eunice set up shop in the up-and-coming area of Beverly Hills, named it after her only daughter, and enlisted her as an unofficial apprentice. As would be the case throughout her life, Cashin was given enormous responsibility and worked at a quick pace straight away. She spent her time outside of school spying on fittings, pulling out bastings, picking up pins, running errands, buying thread, negotiating outside work, sampling colors, selecting buttons and belts, and buying feathers as well as pressing, fitting, and finishing custom garments. Eunice stressed the pursuit of quality in all aspects of garment making and material purchasing, including suede and leather, later a Cashin specialty. She sometimes accompanied her mother to tanning houses to choose skins for her own dresses. It was the only time in her life that Cashin would be an assistant, but awareness of the highest dressmaking standards, and participation in every detail that contributed to the final effect, was central to her 10

approach to ready-to-wear. Moreover, Eunice would go on to work without pay as her daughter’s “première” (a term used in couture fashion to designate an atelier’s chief seamstress) until her death, making Cashin’s samples and training staff in techniques needed to create garments according to her daughter’s designs. Though Cashin never had a design assistant, she did rely heavily on her mother to translate her design ideas into finished garments. They lived and worked together until her death in 1963. Cashin’s taste was shaped within contemporary high fashion but she viewed much of the era’s embellishment as “torturing” materials, a term she would use throughout her life to describe complicated garments. She was “haunted” by watching twins leave her mother’s shop in new, matching outfits with beaded trees appliquéd on their backs. Her tastes ran to the more starkly modern: in 1924, she designed a new dress for herself that Eunice made in bright yellow flannel, on which Cashin added an oilcloth zigzag in black and white. She later recalled, “I must have been a startling sight at school. I must have been influenced by Sonia Delaunay.” In a contemporary self-portrait, perhaps wearing the Delaunay-inspired dress, Cashin depicted herself bent over a drawing board with a pile of sketches and books beneath her feet. Even as a girl she preferred long stretches of solitude, her “dream periods,” above anything else, and spent hours each day designing. Her mother’s pride was such that she kept nearly 700 of her earliest illustrations dating

23 – 30. For her designs for Fanchon and Marco chorus girls from 1924 to 1933, Cashin’s illustrations often included lists of materials, and always depicted detailed makeup and hairstyles and her “professional” signature. While still a high school student, she worked with and oversaw the construction of her costumes by shoppers, cutters, fitters, milliners, and about thirty seamstresses. Production

Cashin in her U. N. Plaza dining room in 1970, wearing two of her favorite designs: a Ballantyne Cashmere funnelneck sweater, and her Coach harness leather “Mail Sac,” introduced in 1967.

back to 1923, when Cashin’s “clients” were herself and her friends. Her first advertisement was a bright pink, hand-made, scalloped folder with a studio photograph of Cashin with friends, captioned “Fashin by Cashin.” Cashin attended Hollywood High School from 1923 to 1925. Located at the intersection of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards, it provided singular access to burgeoning film culture. Film studios donated costumes and sets to the school’s plays, productions were promoted by an in-house publicity department, and talent scouts attended shows. When Cashin and her friends visited the lavish sets for the 1924 swashbuckler Thief of Bagdad, she wrote in her journal how perfectly beautiful the lot looked and noted “We got acquainted with Mr. Jacobs, the camera man who showed us around. He was awfully nice to us. Why did you say? Oh, hush!” A self-aware sophistication permeated Cashin’s teen years. Home

Cashin belonged to clubs for drama, debate, and public speaking, she was elected to run the school’s Art Club, and she won several design contests, including one sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. In addition to work in her mother’s shop, she was a published graphic artist and writer, illustrating and providing fashion advice in Modes of the Moment, a column in a trade newspaper. That she envisioned herself as a designer was evident not only in her many after-school illustrations but also in a high-style cartoon captioned “What picture actresses did Bonnie Cashin design these models for?” with answers including Clara Bow and Greta Garbo. An inscription in her senior yearbook summed up, “To a kid with the spark—may you set the world afire.” Cashin’s first big break came when she attended a 1924 dance audition for Fanchon and Marco, producers of live prologues for major movie theaters. Whether the barely five foot tall sixteen

1950’s

Cashin in her U. N. Plaza dining room in 1970, wearing two of her favorite designs: a Ballantyne Cashmere funnelneck sweater, and her Coach harness leather “Mail Sac,” introduced in 1967. One-off stuffed animals, with quilted mohair and leather details, crafted from scraps in the Sills workrooms in the mid-1960s.

1950’s

21. Cashinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artistic talents and wit were evident from an early age, as seen in this umbrella illustration, painted by her in the mid-1920s.

Introduction

Cashin’s artistic talents and wit were evident from an early age, as seen in this umbrella illustration, painted by her in the mid-1920s.

1950’s

Cashin’s artistic talents and wit were evident from an early age, as seen in this umbrella illustration, painted by her in the mid-1920s.

Carriables

1950’s

1960’s

Cashin’s artistic talents and wit were evident from an early age, as seen in this umbrella illustration, painted by her in the mid-1920s.

1960’s

1970’s

Introduction

Cashinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artistic talents and wit were evident from an early age, as seen in this umbrella illustration, painted by her in the mid-1920s.