Make America Stylish Again

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Make America Stylish Again Stephanie M. Amerian (bio) Linda Przybyszewski. The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish. New York: Basic Books, 2014. vii + 347 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $18.99. A New York Times bestseller, The Lost Art of Dress is Linda Przybyszewski's energetic effort to make history accessible, useful, and one might even say, fun, to the fashion-minded reading public. It is backward-looking nostalgia coupled with prescriptions for today's shabbily dressed Americans, specifically short-skirted, ripped jeans-wearing young women. As a book for a general audience, Przybyszewski uses a conversational writing style, so that readers see both themselves and her in the text. She is an experienced dressmaker, and it shows in the piece, especially when she explains, for example, the process of learning to sew, the issues of working with different fabrics, or of specific design elements on garments. Since a good portion of the book is recommendations for how to dress, this unorthodox narrative choice makes sense and keeps the reader engaged. Although she is a well-established member of the so-called "ivory tower," Przybyszewski is working to bridge the often-cavernous gap between history for academics and history for everyone else. It is an everyday fashion history for every woman, meant to resurrect universal wisdom that's been forgotten for fifty years. To uncover "the lost art of dress," Przybyszewski mined little-used sources, most notably 4-H club pamphlets, dressing how-to books, and home economics textbooks by women she terms the "Dress Doctors." She also uses pattern books from Vogue, Butterick, and McCall's among others. From this bevy (over seven hundred sources) she draws out the Five Art Principles that the Dress Doctors preached: harmony, rhythm, balance, proportion, and emphasis. Przybyszewski credits two federal laws from the 1910s for providing the Dress Doctors with the resources they needed to expand home economics programs. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 instructed the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to expand rural education programs, while the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act of 1917 greatly expanded funding for home economics programs (p. 2). The Dress Doctors held sway into the mid-twentieth century, but Przybyszewski argues that they lost influence in the 1960s thanks [End Page 640] to the countercultural movements that questioned all forms of authority, most importantly the women's liberation movement, which saw fashion as oppressive. In addition to these powerful cultural forces, Przybyszewski also cites the political and financial pressures of the Cold War in the Dress Doctors' downfall. In the 1950s, college and university administrators saw the "hard sciences" as the only appropriate venue for limited resources, and thus Home Economics programs began to shrink and fade out of existence from lack of funding and interested students. This would then lead to new generations of American women who were never taught how to sew, and in turn, how to dress. Ironically, American women's fashionable and affordable dress, termed the American Look at the time, had been a key weapon in the cultural Cold War, and was prominently deployed in the American contributions at the various World's Fairs in the 1950s and the famed American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.1 For historians, the most interesting material may be the chapter on "Thrift," a key Dress Doctor value that Przybyszewski believes has been lost in our mass consumption, throw-away society. Circumstances of two World Wars and the Great Depression forced women to make do with what they had and to be resourceful. An important point that should be further developed is the role of New Deal programs in expanding women's clothing education and providing women with wage work. Przybyszewski notes that the Works Progress Administration oversaw over 10,000 sewing rooms that were the "largest WPA projects outside of construction work." (p. 150). We quickly turn, however, to other topics twenty years prior without further development. Another area for more research is the Woman's Institute for Domestic Arts and Sciences in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which had 3,000–5,000 monthly students in the 1920s. Przybyszewski cites a magazine editor who went so far...