A successful writer, labor organizer, and WWII-era worker, the Ridgewood native designed transcendent clothing that has been preserved by the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection, now part of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He was a maverick in the fashion world, says Bettina Berch, who wrote Hawes’ 1988 biography Radical by design.
However, Hawes’ work was crucial. It never went mainstream. “It was tragic that she never got the satisfaction in her life and the credit she deserved from the rest of the world,” Berch said.
Born in 1903, Hawes grew up like a big fish in a small pond, says Berch. His family was decidedly upper-middle class. Her mother, Henrietta Hawes, shaped Ridgewood through tremendous social influence. When Hawes attended Ridgewood High School, her mother became the first woman elected to the city board. The council later named a South Ridgewood Elementary School in her honor.
“His mother was a difficult act to follow,” Berch said. “She was both well educated and progressive.”
Young Hawes, however, took a few steps further with progressive beliefs that went beyond the constructs of her Depression-era society. An advocate of sexual fluidity, “she was just as interested in the liberation of men as she was in the liberation of women,” Berch said.
Uncommon for the time, it emphasized comfort and utility in clothing, even if that meant nudity or disguise. Fashion should be free on multiple levels, Hawes wrote. Basically, Hawes advised never to buy a garment without “going through all the movements you will use when you actually wear it”.
“The things we accept today as OK were hard for the people of his time to take seriously,” Berch said. “She never cared much about approval. Instead, he lived according to an internal compass ”.
From an early age, Hawes made an exception to fashion and gender norms. He gave more value to style and self-expression. In his most famous book, 1938’s Fashion is spinach, Hawes wrote that she was “very disgusted that she was forced to wear long-legged underwear to dance school.” Already as a child, wool leggings “deeply offended [her] sense of elegance. “
Afterward, Hawes’ sensitivity intensified. The mere sight of an ugly dress prompted a visceral response. “My spine tightens and I vomit mentally,” he wrote.
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After high school, Hawes followed in his mother’s footsteps and attended Vassar College in New York. She graduated in economics, designed costumes for school plays and was an apprentice in New York at Bergdorf Goodman. After graduating in 1925, he moved to Paris. There, in a clandestine tailor’s shop, Hawes made imitations of Chanel as a stylist by carefully copying the originals.
It also showed its characteristic versatility. He sketched the originals, used his Parisian intuition to write the cables for The New Yorker as a mysterious reporter nicknamed the “Parisite”, he worked as a buyer for an American department store and served as the US commissioner for trade in Rome.
After his first foray into Europe, Hawes returned to New York in 1928 to launch the Hawes-Harden fashion house. The label has produced dresses and decorative pieces with famous collaborators such as Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi.
Unfittingly, the fashion store did not withstand the Depression. Hawes took her clothes to Paris and then to Russia in 1935 with director Joseph Losey. Hawes and Losey married in 1937 and had a son, Gavrik Losey, the following year, when Fashion is Spinach it was published.
The Fashion Point of View was his most famous work, but Hawes has written several other books on social norms: Men can bear it, anything but love; A comprehensive summary of the rules for female behavior from birth to death And Why do women cry / girls with keys?, among others. He has published nine books in total and has written dozens of columns for the New York City afternoon newspaper afternoon.
Berch first learned about Hawes while teaching economics at Barnard College in Manhattan. In an effort to learn more about women in the workplace, Berch found Hawes’ book girls with wrenches in a second-hand bookshop. The book details Hawes’ experience of working at Wright Aeronautical Corp. Plant 7 in Wood-Ridge and the casual sexism women would have to endure.
Hawes attended the concert at the huge Wood-Ridge Airplane Factory to learn about the condition of the workers firsthand. Unlike other World War II-era business journals, Hawes’s sounded genuine, says Berch. It was pleasantly different.
“He talked about real things that were going on, like the racial riots on the bus going to work and what to do about childcare,” Berch says. “These weren’t things written by the Office of War Information.”
When the war ended, Hawes became a union organizer for United Auto Workers. She considered herself a feminist and a socialist. However, she was accused of being a communist and a troublemaker.
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Hawes’ FBI file identified her as both a Fifth Avenue socialite and a high-ranking radical linked to a Communist cell in Tennessee, Berch says. She was just the first. There was another Elizabeth Hawes. For a while, the two shared an FBI name and file, Berch says.
Hawes and Losey divorced in November 1944. He spent time in the Caribbean before returning to New York to open a new clothing store in 1948. The Madison Avenue boutique republished the designs it had recreated in-house after extracting the originals from its collection at the Brooklyn Museum.
Hawes took fashion and its culture, ethics and economics seriously. She believed that being perfectly dressed “contributed directly to that personal peace that religion should ultimately bestow” and that the collusion of the catwalk that determined what was produced, when and for whom led to horrific trends.
While style may be timeless, fashion is rooted in its profitable seasons. Fashion, as Hawes wrote, is “that hideous little man with an evil eye who tells you that your latest winter coat may be in perfect physical condition, but you can’t wear it.”
After leaving New York City, Hawes moved to St. Croix and then to California. He returned to Manhattan, where in 1967 the Fashion Institute of Technology organized a retrospective in which he exhibited his work. Even then, the applause was fleeting. He died four years later of liver cirrhosis at the city’s Chelsea Hotel. He was 67 years old.
David Zimmer is a local reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news in your local community, sign up or activate your digital account today.
