We’ll Send A Link To You: The Bowery Boys: New York City History
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There was heightened and excited attention to ‘ofthemoment’ fashion trends, while there was no dedicated ‘fashion week’ one hundred years ago.
The role of women in wartime, plenty of thought, was to simply look their best.
This should seem to be antithetical to wartime thinking when lifestyles were often pared back but these larger gowns were touted as practical fashion and thus ‘patriotic’ in their intent. Furthermore, although not very practical and onlyas part of bold ‘vamp’ styling of its time, in an imagined fashion show in 1915, you may have seen a slight hint of it here or there. Grey was not worn by women of gaiety and glamour. It was strictly the hue of mourning throughout the Gilded Age and rarely made an appearance in actual evening wear.
One taste that didn’t wander far was the love of hats. In 1915, two major forces in women’s beauty opened salons on Fifth Avenue Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein.Both heavily influenced by the Parisian fashion aesthetic, elite New York City women flocked to their shops. Practicalities of life soon led to its unpopularity, while some women should continue tosubject themselves to the corset. In 1914, Carisse Crosby, a well connected society heiress from New Rochelle, received the patent for a revolutionary new sort of support the modern bra. It will take another decade and the influence ofCoco Chanel to bring the grey dress into fashionable prominence. As a result, perhaps the boldest fashion transition in the 1910s was the subtle shift from curvaceous, hour glass forms to a straight, shapeless silhouette.
Competing styles leaned towards sleekness, while the war crinoline still required a narrow waist for a certain amount its dramatics.
