Paris to New York – Fashion Piracy from the Early Twentieth Century

SPARC is excited to bring you a guest post from fashion scholar Cora Harrington. Cora has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and Anthropology from Agnes Scott College. In her former career, she was an intimate apparel expert and author of In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie. Cora was regularly featured in publications such as The New York Times, Bloomberg, WWD, Vogue, Business of Fashion, and The Wall Street Journal. Her writing credits include Allure, Elle, and Teen Vogue. In 2022, she retired to begin her studies at FIT in 2023. Cora’s most recent research, “What is a Worth Worth?: Developing a Methodology of Historical to Modern Day Price Conversions for Dress” was presented in Fashion Studies Network’s “Unraveling Fashion Narratives” symposium at Parsons in June 2024. She is currently interning as a researcher for the FIT Library’s Special Collections and College Archives collection. As a curatorial major in the Fashion and Textile Studies graduate program at FIT, her primary research interests include a history of fairy tales through the lens of textiles and developing curriculum on the history of lingerie.

The FIT Library’s Special Collections and College Archives house collections with thousands of early twentieth century fashion sketches from firms that are not heard about much in today’s fashion scene. In the early twentieth century, André Fashion Studios, DuBarry, Berley Studios, Swansdown, Davidow, and many more New York firms provided invaluable Paris fashion design subscription services to department stores both large and small. These designs would have otherwise been inaccessible to many customers of the time.

The findings and connections presented below barely scratch the surface of what these collections offer. Research applications of theses sketch collections include showing a thread of continuity from runway look to runway sketch to ready-to-wear production, documenting a practice written about by fashion historians and memoirists like Elizabeth Hawes.

In her memoir, Fashion is Spinach, the American clothing designer Elizabeth Hawes relates her early career experience working as a couture runway sketch artist during the Paris Fashion Weeks in the mid-1920s. Hawes’ job was to visit the chicest and most famous Parisian couturiers – names like Patou, Vionnet, Callot Souers, Lanvin, Lelong, and Chanel – on behalf of the American manufacturer employing her. She also attended the showings of lesser-known couturiers, for about twenty designer viewings in total. 

Immediately after each show, Hawes and other artists like her would retreat to a park bench, café, or even their own apartment to sketch each look accurately from memory. The average number of sketches she drew was fifteen per day, she says, or 300 per season, which she’d pass on to the manufacturer before beginning the process anew.

Once a sketcher became known, other buyers would leave orders of a hundred sketches at a time for shows they couldn’t personally attend. Hawes made $500-$1000 per season from her sketches (the 2009 equivalent of US $29,700 to $59,300 according to Pouillard). Months later, the results of her work would be seen in “knock-offs” at American department stores. This practice of sketching was a well-known business model and satisfied the constant stateside demand for French fashion.

However, this process of sketching designs wasn’t just done by young freelancers traveling from America. Established New York firms, such as André Fashion Studios, a coat and suit brand run by Pearl Alexander, practiced the same. According to the New York Public Library, “André Fashion Studios…made drawings and sketches of the latest runway fashions in Europe by major designers and then sold books of these sketches on a subscription basis to clothing manufacturers in the United States and Canada. The clothing manufacturers would create similar looks from the sketches of the runway fashions to sell at a more affordable price point through a local department store.” André Fashion Studios could produce up to 20 sketches per week for most of the year. An annual subscription to these sketches could cost $200-$300 according to a New York Public Library research document.

While Pearl Alexander’s brand sketches for André Fashion Studios are hand-colored, the sketches she made that are direct copies of runway looks are in black and white. Pearl Alexander’s sketches also contain a numeric code that, using keys located in various archival collections would allow researchers to match specific Pearl Alexander sketches with their respective runway looks and seasons. One such key from the Paris fashion season of Spring/Summer 1939-1940 is held by the New York Public Library can be viewed on their website, but there are other examples.

A contemporary of Pearl Alexander’s coat and suit firm was DuBarry, which was run by Helen Haas and also specialized in runway sketches, albeit not as luxurious as André Fashion Studios. However, both brands sold their sketches to department stores, coat manufacturers, and wholesalers like Morris W. Haft and Brothers, which owned high-end coat brands like Swansdown. All three brands – André Fashion Studios, DuBarry, and Swansdown – were most active in the mid-twentieth century. 

As they are centered around the needs of a manufacturer, the Swansdown notebooks contain sketches from both André Fashion Studios and DuBarry. When these three sketch archives are taken together, researchers can not only see the volume and variety of sketches André Fashion Studios and DuBarry individually produced, but also which ones were sold to Swansdown as suitable for production and thus reflective of what American consumers may have had access to in stores. 

In the 1970s, Pearl Alexander sold André Studios to Creators Studios. When Creators Studios closed, its founder and final owner Walter Teitelbaum donated sketches and other ephemera to the archives of at least four New York City institutions: Parsons, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

These sketchbooks are primary sources, not just for mid-twentieth century coat and suit styles, but also the origins of knock-off or fashion copy culture, a design process that allowed runway looks to be made affordably for middle class, American consumers. Future research directions include matching sketches with runway images and magazine, trade journal, or catalog images of what was made for sale and available to consumers in stores. This as-yet underutilized resource is perfect for the scholar wanting to create new and original fashion research!