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Show Milady's Easter Finery $ 1 t A CENTURY OF MILADY'S EASTER FINERY Upper left: A walking dress of the Thirties (From Godey's Lady's Book, 1835) ; Lower left: In the era of the hoopskirt (From Godey's Lady's Book, 1865) ; Upper right: When every lady was a devotee of the style called the "Grecian bend" and wore a bustle (From a fashion book of the early eighties); Lower right: A "Gibson girl" of the early 1900's. Center: An Easter frock, 1938 model. (Courtesy Style Creators, Chicago.) By ELMO SCOTT WATSON Western Newspaper Union. TO THE children, Easter may be a synonym for rabbits, rab-bits, Easter eggs, hot cross buns and other such delights de-lights mostly gastronomical. But to nine out of every -ten women it means new clothes. And, of course, to most men it's a reminder that they're going to have to pay their proportional share of the $1,500,000,000 to $2,000,000,000 bill for Milady s Easter hnery! But, after all, they shouldn't complain. They're mainly responsible for this annual Easter parade of new frocks, new hats, new gloves, new stockings and new shoes. For, do you suppose for a moment, that Milady would go to all the trouble of getting get-ting an entirely new outfit for Easter if she didn't want ' "'to delight the eye of Mr. Mere Man? (Do we hear a voice saying: "Sure she would . . . just to show off before be-fore the other women!"? Is it a masculine or a feminine voice?) Anyway, men have always had a great deal to do with making women "fashion-conscious" and two men, perhaps more than any others, have been instrumental in helping American women satisfy the desire which the men helped create to "keep in style." One of them was Mr. Louis Antoine Godey and the other was Mr. Ebe-nezer Ebe-nezer Butterick. Godey was born in New York city June 6, 1804, educated there and there during his earlier years operated a bookstore and circulating cir-culating library. From this occupation oc-cupation it was a natural step to the publishing business. In 1830 he moved to Philadelphia where he established Godey's Lady's Book, the first periodical of its kind in America. In a few years this magazine had attained an enormous prestige and circulation. cir-culation. Despite high postal rates, the delays and uncertainties uncertain-ties of the mails and the expen- sive and cumbersome methods of printing in those days, the Lady's Book had the unprecedented unprece-dented circulation of 150,000 copies annually proof of a popularity popu-larity which Godey, with his native na-tive genius for advertising, never allowed his readers to forget. Part of its success, of course, was due to the woman whom Godey secured for its editor in 1837 the famous Sara Josepha Hale. Curiously enough, she was not primarily responsible for the Lady's Book becoming a textbook in fashions. That was the work of Mr. Godey himself and, according ac-cording to Richardson Wright in his "Forgotten Ladies," Godey's "greatest stroke of publishing genius was the use of colored fashion plates. . In those issues of the thirties one plate sufficed. Mrs. Hale writes in defense of them that they cost $3,000 a year to hand-color and that they gave constant employment to twenty women." Continuing his account of this stroke of genius, Wright says: "His enterprise pushed this fashion fash-ion news idea to its furthest limits. He sent fashion artists to Paris and had society reporters re-porters attending social functions func-tions to jot down notes on the dresses ... By 1863 the issues were running two fashion plates in color, fourteen pages in black and white and nine others with descriptive text ... At this time Mr. Godey told his, readers that in one year he had spent over $100,000 to produce Godey's Lady's Book." But if Godey spent money in promoting fashions, he also made money. In 1877 he sold his magazine maga-zine to a stock company. When he died on Noveber 29, 1878, he left a fortune of more than $1,000,000, acquired entirely from his publications and the greater part of that fortune was made by his Lady's Book. Ebenezer Butterick, the other man who had so much to do with promoting women's fashions in this country, was a native of Massachusetts. He was 22 years Godey's junior, having been born at Sterling, in Worcester county, May 29, 1826. After receiving his education in the common schools of Sterling and in the Leicester academy, young Ebenezer was apprenticed to a tailor in Worcester. Later he established a business of his own as a merchant tailor in Sterling, Leominster and finally in Fitchburg. While conducting his business Butterick was much annoyed by the waste of time in cutting children's chil-dren's garments and he conceived con-ceived the idea of a set of graded grad-ed patterns which would be a great convenience to him and other oth-er tailors and especially to mothers moth-ers making clothes for their own children. After a series of experiments, ex-periments, he produced his first salable patterns on June 16, 1863, a date which marked the beginning of a great enterprise that has flourished for three quarters of a century. At first Butterick's efforts were directed to boys' and men's clothing, cloth-ing, but in the spring of 1867 the first patterns for women's garments gar-ments were cut. These first patterns pat-terns were folded by members of Butterick's family and were put up in packages of 100 patterns. The success of the idea was almost al-most immediate and by the follow ing September Butterick had to rent rooms in a house nearby and engage five women and girls to help with the folding. In the spring of 1864 the business busi-ness was transferred to the old Academy building in Fitchburg and during that season Butterick issued his first fashion plate, a small one, showing designs for children's clothing. Later in the year he began publishing men's fashion plates. These were accompanied ac-companied by cut patterns which did away with the labor of tracing trac-ing and cutting out patterns from diagrams, as had been necessary previous to that time. Within a year Butterick's business busi-ness had grown to such proportions propor-tions that he decided to embark into wider fields. He went to New York and rented a room on Broadway for his workshop. By 1867 Butterick's patterns had become so popular with American women, who were learning from them how to make their own clothes, that he was able to hire a general agent, one Jones Warren Wilder, and a secretary, sec-retary, Abner W. Pollard, who were associated with him in the firm of E. Butterick and Company. Com-pany. In 1881 the Butterick Publishing Pub-lishing Company, Ltd., was organized or-ganized and the active management manage-ment of the business placed in the hands of Wilder and Pollard, with Butterick exercising a nominal nom-inal supervision over the manufacturing manu-facturing department. Butterick finally retired from the business in 1899 and went to his native town to spend his last years. He died in Brooklyn, N. Y., March 31, 1903. By this time his company was selling more than 50,000,000 patterns every year and one of the most familiar scenes in American homes of that period was the sight of mother and her daughter, or daughters, bending over the kitchen table on which was spread out a length of cloth. To it they were pinning pieces of tissue paper of various shapes, around the edges of which they would cut the cloth carefully. A new dress was in the process of being made in an American home, thanks to the ingenuity of a Yankee tailor named Ebenezer Butterick. Although women's styles, as exemplified in the annual Easter parade, have always afforded Mr. Mere Man an opportunity for whrt he considers some of his wittiest remarks, they have also been a subject for serious study by the historians. An example of this is the book "Recurring Cycles of Fashion. 1760-1937" written by Agnes Brooks Young and published by Harper and Brothers last year. This book, based upon extensive exten-sive research in the style magazines maga-zines of the world published during dur-ing the last 178 years, develops the thesis that fashions repeat themselves in fixed cycles which may be as definitely charted as cycles in governmental changes, depressions, wars and the like. However, these fashion cycles, according to its author, occur irrespective ir-respective of governmental changes, depressions or wars. They come approximately three to a century and their keynote is the contour of Milady's skirt. There are three fundamental skirt contours back-fullness, tubular tu-bular and the bell. This conclusion was based upon a study of the first fashion magazines, mag-azines, which began publication late in the Eighteenth century, and comparing the illustrations in them with those in famous American, English and French women's magazines since that time. After studying 50 yearly illustrations from which to choose an average annual style, these average styles were studied for type conformity. They revealed that, whatever the waist or sleeve differences, there was a skirt similarity sim-ilarity which ran through each time cycle. From such evidence the author of this work arrived at the three-to-a-century cycle as follows: Back - fullness, from 1760, through 1795, or 36 years. Tubular, from 17.96 through 1829, or 34 years. Bell, from 1830 through 1867, or 38 years. Back - fullness, from 1868 through 1899, or 32 years.- Tubular, from 1900 through 1937, or 38 years. A glance at the illustrations which accompany this article will demonstrate how the styles shown there fit into this time cycle. cy-cle. The two illustrations from Godey's Lady's Book the 1835 style shown in the upper left-hand corner and the 1865 hoop-skirt model in the lower left-hand corner cor-ner come within the 1830-1867 period pe-riod and are both bell styles. The lady with the bustle, (upper (up-per right-hand corner), exemplifying exem-plifying the style of the early eighties, comes within the 1868-1899 1868-1899 period. Certainly her dress exemplifies back-fullness! The Gibson girl in the lower right-hand corner, dressed in thfe prevailing style of the early 1900s, exemplifies the tubular, as does trim Miss 1938 shown in the center. cen-ter. In ,so far as the tubular era has now run for 38 years as long as the bell period of 1830-1867 1830-1867 before this year is out we may see the bell style back again. It may not come before time for next year's Easter parade for, according to the author of this book, these mysterious fashion changes are not abrupt but grad- mm mm ual. But it is pretty certain that when it does arrive it will be a bell fashion, for a tubular cycle is never followed by a back-fullness cycle any more than a back-fullness back-fullness is followed by a bell. One reason for this, according to the author, is psychological women are likely to consider as comic any fashion which they remember re-member as having been previously previ-ously worn in their own lifetime. Since a great many American women today can remember the back-fullness of the bustle era, they subconsciously consider it comic and would not think of going go-ing back to it. The bell era, however, how-ever, is a bit too remote for them, so it will be easy for them to hail a style from that cycle as "new." Lest the men think that they are not such "slaves to fashion" as are the women, let it be added that their styles, while going through a slower change than the women's, conform, nevertheless, to the cycle in which the women's fashions are moving. For example, exam-ple, in 1780 there was a backward cut of men's coats and a fullness added below the waist which echoed the back-fullness of the women's frocks in that year. Then, too, in the present tubular era men have discarded the short sack coat and substituted the long sack coat, just as the longer skirt has replaced the very short skirt of several years back. |