Hawes, Elizabeth

HAWES, ELIZABETH (1903–1971). One of the few fashion designers to involve herself with politics, Elizabeth Hawes not only believed the two were necessarily interconnected, but spent most of her working life trying to show how. A progressive political program, she argued, had to include the right to things that pleased the eye and heart, and not just the stomach.

Born to a well-respected Ridgewood, New Jersey, family, Hawes graduated from Vassar College in 1925, when she left for Paris to train as a traditional couturiere. It was a demystifying experience, which she detailed in reports to the New Yorker magazine in 1927 and 1928 under the pen name “Parisite.” Ultimately, disgust with the French fashion scene moved her to return to the United States in 1928.

Hawes opened her own couture business in New York just as the Great Depression was wiping out many of her potential customers. Throughout the 1930s, she supplemented her income by doing design commissions for mass-market manufacturers. In 1935 she was the first foreign dress designer invited to show her work in the Soviet Union, where she traveled with the man who would become her husband in 1937, the stage (and later film) director, Joseph Losey.

In her first book, the 1938 best-seller Fashion Is Spinach, Hawes stripped the fashion business naked, revealing both its corrupt practices and its essential indifference to the needs of consumers. Men Can Take it—Hawes’s argument against the oppression of men—followed in 1939, in it she suggested that men try skirts and bright colors. In January 1940, Hawes closed her business, restructuring it as a collective, and joined the founding board of the newspaper PM. As editor of the “News for Living” section, Hawes transformed the traditional women’s page into a kind of populist guide to better living, focusing on education and consumer rights, as well as affordable entertainment and clothing. In this period Hawes also worked for the Committee for the Care of Young Children in Wartime.

Realizing her need for some firsthand experience of ordinary working life, Hawes took a night-shift job as a grinder at the Wright Aeronautical plant in Paterson, New Jersey, an experience that formed the basis of Why Women Cry, or Wenches with Wrenches (1943). Here, in one of the rare “war plant diaries” to rise above propaganda, Hawes laid out a “bread and roses” platform of radical proportions.

In 1944, Hawes was hired by the education department of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in Detroit as a troubleshooter for women workers in UAW locals across the country. At the same time, she wrote a hard-hitting weekly column for the Detroit Free Press. By mid-1945, Hawes was Red-baited out of the UAW and her job at the Detroit Free Press. She returned to New York, where she wrote of these experiences in Hurry Up Please It’s Time (1946).

Ever since her PM days, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been collecting a file on Hawes’s activities, a file that seemed doubly dangerous since they had confused Hawes with another radical woman of the same name. While Hawes herself was not aware of the file, some of her business associates were, and she found difficulties returning to her former fashion work.

As the Cold War climate in America became unbearable, Hawes looked for alternatives. Her choice was Saint Croix, the Virgin Islands, where she taught herself to live as a self-styled bohemian. Anything but Love (1948) was a sarcastic exposé of the new mythology of contented postwar womanhood.

Life in the Caribbean also opened her eyes to the fact of American imperialism, which she discussed in But Say It Politely (1951). Uncomfortable with the contradictions of her position as a “Continental,” Hawes moved to California in the early fifties, where she became the inspiration for younger designers such as Rudi Gernreich. But it was not until her 1967 retrospective at the Fashion Institute of Technology that the depth and consistency of Hawes’s design work was finally recognized. Her more central vision—of the necessary unity of art and politics—remains to be appreciated.

Berch, Bettina. Radical by Design: The Life and Style of Elizabeth Hawes. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988.

Gregory, Alice. “The Most Brilliant American Fashion Designer.” New York Times Magazine. June 12, 1914.