Dress Doctors

**This transcript comes from a previous broadcast. There may be small changes between the audio you hear above and the text.**

ED: We’re going to dial the clock back now a few decades, to earlier in the 20th century, to 1918. When a dress, design, and sewing prodigy named Mary Brooks Pickens was approached by a female physicians.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Who came to her and said, I do not understand clothes, I never will but I know I have a problem.

ED: This is historian Linda Przybyszewski. She says that the physician that approached Mary Brooks Picken had a professional wardrobe issue. Her peers and clients didn’t take her seriously, because of what she wore, and so she asked Mary.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Would you look over my wardrobe and give me a diagnose and prescribe me a new wardrobe? And Picken did that, and the doctor reported that people who had never bothered to consult with her, now did. That the other doctors she worked with, treated her with more respect and so did the nurses who worked with her, and she was cured. So that’s where I get the idea, the term the dress doctors.

ED: The women Linda refers to as the dress doctors taught home economics, retail, an art at land-grant universities in the early decades of the 20th century. And central to their teaching about wardrobe were rules about harmony, that govern what shapes, and textures, and colors a woman could wear. There were also rules about rhythm, balance, proportion, and emphasis, Big hats, for example we’re good, because they emphasized the face, and that encourage people to pay attention to what women had to say. Loud patterns, on the other hand, were a problem, because, they could be distracting in what they called unbalanced. And the dress doctors waged a decades long war against high heels, because shoes that constricted feet made a fluid, natural walking rhythm, nearly impossible. A lot of these rules originated with a pair of sisters who taught at the University of Minnesota, Harriet and Vetta Goldstein. I sat down with Przybyszewski to talk about the principles embedded in the Goldstein sisters enormously influential textbook, Art In Everyday Life.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: The idea was that art is something spiritual, it’s something uplifting, it’s an expression of God’s creation, and it shouldn’t just be for rich people.

ED: Right.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: It should be for everyone, and one of the ways you can bring it into your life is through how you decorate your home, how you lay out your garden, and what you wear.

ED: How would they embody the lessons they were trying to convey?

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Well, there are descriptions of what they wore. One of them always we’re navy, the other one always wore maroon. They wore sensible Oxford shoes. Usually they had a little pin at the throat, and they wore big black hats that were too big for them. So I don’t think you would have thought of them as fashion plates at all, but obviously each had chose navy or maroon because they thought that one played the best off their complexions.

ED: So i have to admit that sounds as if the navy and maroon and the big black hats might not have been that inspiring, but it’s my understanding that they Goldstein sisters were actually influential even beyond the University of Minnesota.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Oh yes. The first edition of their book, Art in Everyday Life came out in 1925, it would have four more editions. And you can see their ideas in every single dress textbook written after their book comes out.

ED: Wow.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: And they managed to spread their story and their principles literally to millions of girls and women because, these lessons were taught in home economics courses for girls a junior high school. And by the 1930s 90% of girls in junior high school were required to take home economics courses. So it’s literally generations of girls who are being taught these principles over time. Which is why you can see them in action in most of the dress design you see in the early 20th century.

ED: Were they arguing against any prevailing styles? Were they trying to reform what people were turning to as fashion?

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: I think the dress doctors were always acting as a kind of counterweight against fads– which stands for “for a day”.

ED: Oh really.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Yeah. If you follow these principles, they argued, you will possess something beautiful, that you will want to wear not just for a day, but for a long time. Until you just wear it out.

ED: So I’m hearing mixed signals here. On one handed, they sound very instrumental, very utilitarian. On the other hand they’re celebrating these values of art. How would they have reconciled those?

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Well, if you think of them as drawing upon the arts and crafts movement, those two things are not at odds. Those two things were actually, within the arts and crafts movement, completely integrated.

ED: Right.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Something cannot be beautiful if it’s not useful.

ED: Form and function.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Right. Form and function. They have to work together. They have to support one another. So I like to say if a vase has a hole in the bottom you can’t really put flowers in it, because you can’t put water in it. Well shoes that keep a woman from walking naturally, and gracefully, with strength, those are bad shoes. They maybe as decorated as you like, they may have a fabulously interesting looked to them, but if she can’t walk in them, they were by definition, not beautiful.

ED: As I look at the illustrations in your book, and I think about the movies I’ve seen from the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, it seems that there is a kind of style that adheres to the principles of these women. That they do really care about sort of form in harmony and proportion all this. And then having lived through it, I happen to know, that this kind of unravels in the 1960s. How would you explain that and what we make of that?

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: Well it does unravel and for a couple of reasons and you can see the logic of it. In the 1960s, we have several social movements that are questioning some really fundamental ways in which American society was organized. The civil rights movement, and then the women’s movement, right. There used to be a lot of rules about how blacks should behave, how women should behave.

ED: Right.

LINDA PRZYBYSZEWSKI: So a lot of rules then got questioned, including rules about dress, and were really seen as oppressive. Now, I don’t think all of them were, but there was this period in the early ’70s, it’s really clear when, feminist groups, women’s liberation groups, were approached and sort of asked, can we interview you about fashion. And there would have been a lot to say, right. Getting rid of the girdle the miniskirt being so undignified, the choice of pants for women, which used to be only for informal or sportswear, and then became part of mainstream fashion. And they didn’t want to talk about it, but actually they would have had a lot of ideas in a lot of things to think and talk about. And I think, unfortunately, we got this sort of message, that it doesn’t matter, or it shouldn’t matter, but obviously it does, I mean we’re not blind. We see what people look like, we get impressions from what they’re wearing, and it can have an effect on your life, on your career. So is there a smart way to think about it? And I do think the dress doctors laid out a lot of important information that is still useful.

ED: Linda Przybszewski is a professor of history at Notre Dame. You can read more about the Goldstein sisters in her new book The Lost Art of Dress.

[MUSIC – The Kinks, “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”] His clothes are loud, but never square. It will make or break him so he’s got to buy the best cause he’s a dedicated follower of fashion–