Chicago's Fashion History

Chicago's Fashion History PDF Author: Mary Beth Klatt
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738584324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the ashes of the Chicago Fire of 1871 came the birth of the city's fashion scene as entrepreneurs built new storefronts virtually overnight. Aided by the Windy City's incredible network of railroads, these fledgling enterprises in turn created millionaires who wanted to wear the latest clothes from Europe. Marshall Fields and Potter Palmer were among the local elites who regularly boarded ships to France and returned with exquisite suits, coats, hats, gowns, fabrics, and other accessories, which designers sought to re-create with cheaper fabrics and labor. Chicago's reputation as a trendsetting metropolis was only sealed by the city's film industry. Charlie Chaplin and his cast of stylish starlets had women north and south of Madison Street copying every hairdo and dress. Even after moviemaking moved to Los Angeles, actors and actresses traveling to New York City regularly dropped in when they switched trains downtown. By World War II, Chicago, the "City of Big Shoulders," became the place to start a career as a fashion designer.

Chicago's Fashion History

Chicago's Fashion History PDF Author: Mary Beth Klatt
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738584324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the ashes of the Chicago Fire of 1871 came the birth of the city's fashion scene as entrepreneurs built new storefronts virtually overnight. Aided by the Windy City's incredible network of railroads, these fledgling enterprises in turn created millionaires who wanted to wear the latest clothes from Europe. Marshall Fields and Potter Palmer were among the local elites who regularly boarded ships to France and returned with exquisite suits, coats, hats, gowns, fabrics, and other accessories, which designers sought to re-create with cheaper fabrics and labor. Chicago's reputation as a trendsetting metropolis was only sealed by the city's film industry. Charlie Chaplin and his cast of stylish starlets had women north and south of Madison Street copying every hairdo and dress. Even after moviemaking moved to Los Angeles, actors and actresses traveling to New York City regularly dropped in when they switched trains downtown. By World War II, Chicago, the "City of Big Shoulders," became the place to start a career as a fashion designer.

Ready-Made Democracy

Ready-Made Democracy PDF Author: Michael Zakim
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226977951
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ready-Made Democracy explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of American life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War. Michael Zakim demonstrates how clothing initially attained a significant place in the American political imagination on the eve of Independence. At a time when household production was a popular expression of civic virtue, homespun clothing was widely regarded as a reflection of America's most cherished republican values: simplicity, industriousness, frugality, and independence. By the early nineteenth century, homespun began to disappear from the American material landscape. Exhortations of industry and modesty, however, remained a common fixture of public life. In fact, they found expression in the form of the business suit. Here, Zakim traces the evolution of homespun clothing into its ostensible opposite—the woolen coats, vests, and pantaloons that were "ready-made" for sale and wear across the country. In doing so, he demonstrates how traditional notions of work and property actually helped give birth to the modern industrial order. For Zakim, the history of men's dress in America mirrored this transformation of the nation's social and material landscape: profit-seeking in newly expanded markets, organizing a waged labor system in the city, shopping at "single-prices," and standardizing a business persona. In illuminating the critical links between politics, economics, and fashion in antebellum America, Ready-Made Democracy will prove essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and in the creation of modern culture in general.

Inspiring Beauty

Inspiring Beauty PDF Author: Chicago History Museum
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780913820377
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Ebony Fashion Fair began in 1958, and over the next 50 years the traveling fashion show blossomed into an American institution that raised millions for charity and helped Johnson Publishing Company reach audiences. Show organizers overcame racial prejudice to bring the pinnacle of Europe's premier fashion to communities that were eager to see, in real time and space, a new vision of black America that was the hallmark of Ebony and Jet magazines. Eunice Johnson took over as producer and director in 1963, and under her direction, the traveling show took on new heights as she expanded her cachet and power within fashion circles. Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair recreates the experience of the Ebony Fashion Fair through the story of Mrs. Johnson and more than 60 garments from icons of the fashion industry such as Yves St. Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, Christian Lacroix, and Patrick Kelly among others.

Fashion and Its Social Agendas

Fashion and Its Social Agendas PDF Author: Diana Crane
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226924831
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
It has long been said that clothes make the man (or woman), but is it still true today? If so, how has the information clothes convey changed over the years? Using a wide range of historical and contemporary materials, Diana Crane demonstrates how the social significance of clothing has been transformed. Crane compares nineteenth-century societies—France and the United States—where social class was the most salient aspect of social identity signified in clothing with late twentieth-century America, where lifestyle, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity are more meaningful to individuals in constructing their wardrobes. Today, clothes worn at work signify social class, but leisure clothes convey meanings ranging from trite to political. In today's multicode societies, clothes inhibit as well as facilitate communication between highly fragmented social groups. Crane extends her comparison by showing how nineteenth-century French designers created fashions that suited lifestyles of Paris elites but that were also widely adopted outside France. By contrast, today's designers operate in a global marketplace, shaped by television, film, and popular music. No longer confined to elites, trendsetters are drawn from many social groups, and most trends have short trajectories. To assess the impact of fashion on women, Crane uses voices of college-aged and middle-aged women who took part in focus groups. These discussions yield fascinating information about women's perceptions of female identity and sexuality in the fashion industry. An absorbing work, Fashion and Its Social Agendas stands out as a critical study of gender, fashion, and consumer culture. "Why do people dress the way they do? How does clothing contribute to a person's identity as a man or woman, as a white-collar professional or blue-collar worker, as a preppie, yuppie, or nerd? How is it that dress no longer denotes social class so much as lifestyle? . . . Intelligent and informative, [this] book proposes thoughtful answers to some of these questions."-Library Journal

L.A. Chic

L.A. Chic PDF Author: Susan V. Ingram
Publisher: Urban Chic
ISBN: 9781783209347
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable, pedestrian friendly, ecologically healthy, and global urban hotspot of fashion and style, while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces, and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums, and designers and readings of contemporary film, literature and new media, L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires, and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles. Throughout the book, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city's cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global, multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written, highly visual, and featuring numerous photographs throughout, L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles, its cultural history, and modern urban style.

Salaula

Salaula PDF Author: Karen Tranberg Hansen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226315805
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
When we donate our unwanted clothes to charity, we rarely think about what will happen to them: who will sort and sell them, and finally, who will revive and wear them. In this fascinating look at the multibillion dollar secondhand clothing business, Karen Tranberg Hansen takes us around the world from the West, where clothing is donated, through the salvage houses in North America and Europe, where it is sorted and compressed, to Africa, in this case, Zambia. There it enters the dynamic world of Salaula, a Bemba term that means "to rummage through a pile." Essential for the African economy, the secondhand clothing business is wildly popular, to the point of threatening the indigenous textile industry. But, Hansen shows, wearing secondhand clothes is about much more than imitating Western styles. It is about taking a garment and altering it to something entirely local, something that adheres to current cultural norms of etiquette. By unraveling how these garments becomes entangled in the economic, political, and cultural processes of contemporary Zambia, Hansen also raises provocative questions about environmentalism, charity, recycling, and thrift.

Shoddy

Shoddy PDF Author: Hanna Rose Shell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022669822X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A remarkable story that moves from nineteenth-century England to today’s global ecological concerns around fast fashion.” —Times Literary Supplement Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as “the devil” and then reused. Usually undisclosed, shoddy—also known as reworked wool—became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue. Hanna Rose Shell takes us on a journey from Haiti to the “shoddy towns” of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. The narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art, and bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world. Shell exposes an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering, and shows how, over the past century, the shredding “devil” has moved from wool to synthetics such as nylon stockings and Kevlar. The use of the term “virgin” wool emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy’s appeal: to make shoddy seem . . . well, shoddy. Over time, the word would become a synonym for “inferior” and describe a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. And yet, there was always, within shoddy, the alluring concept of regeneration—of what we today think of as conscious clothing, eco-fashion, or sustainable textiles. “In a brilliantly quixotic, scholarly rich, fabulously illustrated trek, Shell guides readers through the history of the reprocessing of used clothing and textiles, reflecting on human ornament, fears of contagion (think of the associations of ‘shoddy’ versus ‘virgin’ wool), and the evolution of a vast industry.” —Harvard Magazine “The fascinating story of how a respectable textile product became synonymous with all things inferior . . . . a fun ride.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

Chicago History for Kids

Chicago History for Kids PDF Author: Owen Hurd
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613740409
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Native Americans who lived in the Chicago area for thousands of years, to the first European explorers Marquette and Jolliet, to the 2005 Chicago White Sox World Series win, parents, teachers, and kids will love this comprehensive and exciting history of how Chicago became the third largest city in the U.S. Chicago's spectacular and impressive history comes alive through activities such as building a model of the original Ferris Wheel, taking architectural walking tours of the first skyscrapers and Chicago's oldest landmarks, and making a Chicago-style hotdog. Serving as both a guide to kids and their parents and an engaging tool for teachers, this book details the first Chicagoan Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Fort Dearborn Massacre, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the building of the world's first skyscraper, and the hosting of two World's Fairs. In addition to uncovering Windy City treasures such as the birth of the vibrant jazz era of Louis Armstrong and the work of Chicago poets, novelists, and songwriters, kids will also learn about Chicago's triumphant and tortured sports history.

Historical Style

Historical Style PDF Author: Timothy Campbell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248325
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Historical Style, Timothy Campbell argues that the eighteenth-century fashion press shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past and a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood.

The Third Coast

The Third Coast PDF Author: Thomas L. Dyja
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.